The vague blandness of John Smith’s name hides the weirdness, the obscurity, and most importantly when it comes to MMoCA’s “Rooftop Cinema” program tomorrow night, the humor at the heart of his films. The museum kicks off a summer celebrating ten years of screening movies on top of the contemporary art museum with “W.O.R.D. G.A.M.E.S.” and a pair of John Smith films — Associations and Gargantuan — are primed for maximal audience response. Like the rest of the program — Test (Kerry Laitala) and Bleu Shut (Robert Nelson) — the British avant-gardist’s two films toy with the English language, prodding our familiarity with words and comfort with expressions to absurd and absurdly entertaining ends; ff there is a highlight to be found tomorrow night, they are it.
Consider Associations, a canny subversion of the most precious of commodities to a filmmaker: our attention. Employing an austere and mannered voiceover, Smith overlays these somnambulant tones with pictures that relate homophonically to select words, sometimes portions of words. Things begin simply, with the word “association” itself, visualizing sounds in a step-wise fashion. An ass, a “sew”ing machine, a sea, etc. combine a bastardized hieroglyph of “ass-sew-sea-asian.” It’s all cute and clever until Smith begins piling on more. Rather than continuing to listen to the excerpt from Word Associations and Linguistic Theory, we become fixated on the “clang responses” of the image pairings. The end result is a kind of cinematic equivalent of reading without comprehending, and a final punchline confirms as much.
Consider Gargantuan, a slow meditation on a newt in extreme close-up. A sixth the length of Associations, Gargantuan‘s pint-size brevity toys with perspective as its camera slowly zooms out from its subject. “Huge amphibian” Smith intones in a sing-songy style before self-correcting to “big amphibian,” “strapping amphibian,” “medium amphibian” and so forth. When the frame finally widens to reveal Smith lying next to the creature, his diarrhea of the mouth becomes a quirky serenade of sorts and like Associations, with another punchline to boot.
Now, consider The Girl Chewing Gum.
With a Lorrie crossing an intersection or the titular girl chewing gum, everyday casual occurrences gain a significance when Smith overlays voyeuristic footage with a voiceover yet again. Barking direction at passersby, the increasing specificity of the commands becomes so ridiculous that the sheer idea of orchestrating the 11-minute “sequence” becomes impossibly hilarious. A street junction in East London becomes an elaborate facade.
Smith’s 1976 short isn’t featured in MMoCA’s “W.O.R.D. G.A.M.E.S.,” but one of the most well-known exercises in experimental cinema — sandwiched in the middle of Associations the year prior and 1992’s Gargantuan — shares an auteurist kinship with the others. Like Associations, its rapidity and rhythm become an element of humor, starting with simple foundations and building upward — or in The Girl Chewing Gum‘s case outward. And there’s something to be said about the mashing together of texts. Associations tricks us into thinking its diversionary visual aids are supplemental to the narrator’s speech, just as The Girl Chewing Gum wants us to believe an unsuspecting street corner has been immaculately orchestrated with a camera crew.
Gargantuan is preoccupied with perspective, one that’s gradually diminished as the camera slowly zooms away from its subject. What we lose in closeness we gain in context, context that The Girl Chewing Gum duplicitously piles on in layers. In both cases, our relationship with the subjects changes with each word that is uttered whether via adjustment or in The Girl Chewing Gum‘s case, deception.
True to the filmmaker and humorist’s interests, all three of Smith’s films never seem to want us to stress over their ultimate implications. There’s a loose “shrug” each respective exercise has toward itself, undermining their own playful intent to subvert.
- “W.O.R.D. G.A.M.E.S.” kicks off Rooftop Cinema tomorrow night at 9:30p on MMoCA’s Rooftop Sculpture Garden. Admission is FREE for museum members and $7 for the rest of us.