Quote:
A short film in which a director’s voice appears to be directing all the action on a busy London street.
John Smith, 1976, wrote:
I am writing this with a black ‘Tempo’ fibre-tip pen. A few months ago, I bought fifteen of these pens for sixty pence. Unfortunately, because they are so common, other people pick them up, thinking they are theirs. I bought the pens from a market in Kingsland Road in Hackney, about a hundred yards from where the film was shot. The film draws attention to the cinematic codes and illusions it incorporates by denying their existence, treating representation as absolute reality.
A.L. Rees, A Directory of British Film & Video Artists, 1995, wrote:
In The Girl Chewing Gum a commanding voice over appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasised, we realise that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional; he only describes – not prescribes – the events that take place before him. Smith embraced the ‘spectre of narrative’ (suppressed by structural film), to play word against picture and chance against order. Sharp and direct, the film anticipates the more elaborate scenarios to come; witty, many-layered, punning, but also seriously and poetically haunted by drama’s ineradicable ghost.
John Smith - 1976 - The Girl Chewing Gum [DVD-PAL].mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 11 min 46 s
Size: 289 MiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 716x574 ~> 765x574
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 25.000 fps
Bit rate: 3 238 kb/s
BPP: 0.315
Audio
#1: English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Main)
https://nitro.download/view/BD65B398FADABCD/John_Smith_-_1976_-_The_Girl_Chewing_Gum__DVD-PAL_.mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:None