Inshal Siddiqui
Department: Communication Design
The Girl Chewing Gum The Girl Chewing Gum, John Smith, 1976, Short Film
The Girl Chewing Gum is a 1976 experimental short film by the British filmmaker John Smith. The film runs for around 12 minutes. Most of the film is set in a London street. We see vehicles, birds and people walking by. We can hear a Director’s commanding voice throughout out the film who sounds very authoritative and powerful and for the first few minutes it appears as if he is controlling everything and everyone but after a while he coughs and many people and cars come and go into the frame without his orders and it appears as if he is losing his control …show more content…
We can hear an alarm ringing throughout the film and in the same interview, John mentioned that the alarm was just ringing in that place when he was filming and it frustrated him at first but he decided to use it to his advantage and that is how he made up the story about a guy robbing the post office. Many other artists have made use of chance and improvisation in their work and it gives us a hint of John’s Avant-garde influence.2 John Cage, the influential Avant-garde composer was famously known for his use of chance in composing music. Similarly, Charlie Chaplin greatly improvised his movies without a rigid script. A more recent example would be the great American filmmaker David Lynch. Lynch works without storyboards and at times decides the ending of his movie when he is more than halfway through the shooting of the movie.
3Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night(1973) served as a big inspiration for this film. It was a film about the making of another film where the director orders a dog to piss up a lamppost.
4John shot this film with the camera mostly placed in the same position, which suggests Genealogy in this work to Structural films as many of the Structural films were shot in a fixed
Department: Communication Design
The Girl Chewing Gum The Girl Chewing Gum, John Smith, 1976, Short Film
The Girl Chewing Gum is a 1976 experimental short film by the British filmmaker John Smith. The film runs for around 12 minutes. Most of the film is set in a London street. We see vehicles, birds and people walking by. We can hear a Director’s commanding voice throughout out the film who sounds very authoritative and powerful and for the first few minutes it appears as if he is controlling everything and everyone but after a while he coughs and many people and cars come and go into the frame without his orders and it appears as if he is losing his control …show more content…
We can hear an alarm ringing throughout the film and in the same interview, John mentioned that the alarm was just ringing in that place when he was filming and it frustrated him at first but he decided to use it to his advantage and that is how he made up the story about a guy robbing the post office. Many other artists have made use of chance and improvisation in their work and it gives us a hint of John’s Avant-garde influence.2 John Cage, the influential Avant-garde composer was famously known for his use of chance in composing music. Similarly, Charlie Chaplin greatly improvised his movies without a rigid script. A more recent example would be the great American filmmaker David Lynch. Lynch works without storyboards and at times decides the ending of his movie when he is more than halfway through the shooting of the movie.
3Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night(1973) served as a big inspiration for this film. It was a film about the making of another film where the director orders a dog to piss up a lamppost.
4John shot this film with the camera mostly placed in the same position, which suggests Genealogy in this work to Structural films as many of the Structural films were shot in a fixed