In 1969, John Smith, now one of Britain’s most revered artist film-makers, but then a foundation student at North East London Polytechnic, was sitting in a pub transfixed by a Perspex sign. “Suddenly I realised – ah! – ‘toilets’ was an anagram of TS Eliot. I thought: I must make a film about this one day.” Thirty years later, he was in another pub, his local in Leytonstone. “It had such a scummy toilet. I must have thought: this is a real wasteland.” And so he made The Waste Land (1999), an off-kilter adaptation featuring gurgling cisterns, khazi lighting, and a tired, maybe-pissed punter incanting Eliot’s line “the nymphs have departed” as a camera pans across a condom machine. It’s modernism Pete-and-Dud style.
Smith, who was expelled from his Walthamstow high school for wearing his hair too long, has carved out a singular body of work, which is about to be celebrated in a 10-week, 50-film season organised by artist-curator Stanley Schtinter. (It will feature post-screening conversations with ex-students of his; these include the director Carol Morley and Jarvis Cocker, who once asked him to direct a video for Pulp.) As a teenager he was drawn to the found-footage and ex-library educational films he found in a government-surplus camera shop in Hackney. “They had titles like Your Skin or Your Hair and Scalp, and often featured men in white coats doing experiments in laboratories. I only had a silent projector so watched them without a soundtrack. No idea what they were doing! It was quite mysterious. I was fascinated.”
