Being John Smith: Finding Meaning in Absurd

For nearly five decades, John Smith has been making films that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, the serious and the absurd. From his early breakthrough The Girl Chewing Gum (1975) to recent works like Being John Smith (20224)—presented at the 15th Kaunas Biennial, Life After Life—his practice combines wit, formal experimentation, and philosophical inquiry to prompt viewers to question what they’re watching.

In the following conversation, John Smith reflects on the role of humour in his work, the slipperiness of language, and the importance of doubt in a world that often demands certainty.

Your work has often employed humour to address complex or uncomfortable themes. What draws you to this approach?

Humour is a big part of my everyday life, and it has a serious function. It’s a way of coping with both the bad and the good in life.

Humour comes about naturally in my films because I’m fascinated by ambiguity and the different ways in which we can interpret the world around us. I often use documentary images and create fictions around them. When you explore ambiguity, the result can often be humorous.

Although I don’t necessarily set out to make funny films, humour is important to me because it makes my work more accessible. I’m not interested in making films for elites—I want as many people as possible to understand what they’re looking at.

Have there been moments where humour has backfired or been misunderstood in your work?

In my work, I like to create a sense of discomfort for the viewer. Hopefully, not an unpleasant discomfort, but rather a sense of unease, or disorientation. I want viewers to ask themselves “Should I be laughing at that?” In Being John Smith, I play with this by talking about having had a life-threatening illness while making jokes about it.

I think it’s very important when you’re looking at a film that you don’t get just sucked into it and carried along like you are in most mainstream cinema. Instead of taking you on a smooth journey, I want to have a few car crashes and disrupt the course of things, to take unexpected directions and create surprises.

One of my earliest films that had a humorous aspect was The Girl Chewing Gum, which I made as a student in 1976. Though it’s now one of my best-known works, it wasn’t taken seriously by some people at the time because of its humour. But it actually deals with a very serious topic: how language shapes the way we interpret images. It’s a good example of a serious film that is also funny.

I basically filmed people on the street without their permission and recorded a voice-over that constructed fictional scenarios around them. Some viewers objected to that, but that was before the age of surveillance cameras, before it was normal to have our privacy constantly invaded. What’s always been important to me is that if you’re using real-world footage without consent, it’s vital to make the manipulation obvious. The viewer should know it’s fiction—it’s obvious that the boy in my film hasn’t just robbed the post office; I just said he did.

Back then, very few British artist filmmakers were using humour. Discovering the American avant-garde was a relief—there was quite a lot of serious work (by Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow and others) with a strong sense of humour, playing with language and meaning in ways I hadn’t seen before. It showed me I wasn’t alone in wanting to incorporate humour into serious films.

Speaking of the power of the word, from your earliest films onward, language—and especially its slipperiness, and certain ambiguity—has been central to your practice. What continues to fascinate you about it?

I think there’s an ongoing concern with the fact that we all see the world differently. Verbal language tries to make it seem like we see things the same way, but we can never truly know what someone else is thinking or what they mean by certain things.

I think it’s fundamental, especially in such a fractured and divisive world, to recognise that many different perceptions are possible, even if we disagree with them. To really address someone else’s views, however misguided they seem, you have to try to understand where they’re coming from. Otherwise, we just end up killing each other.

I want my films to reassure people that things aren’t always straightforward, and that it’s perfectly fine to see a face in a crack in the wall or imagine alternative realities.

Would you say ambiguity in your work is an invitation for the viewer to become an active participant of the work?

Absolutely. I see most of my films as a kind of game with the viewer. The films often manipulate the viewer into thinking they’re seeing one thing, only to reveal something else. But it’s important that the viewer recognizes that manipulation and feels part of the game. It’s not about control—it’s about creating space for the viewer.

My films guide the viewer, but they also disorient and surprise them. I also like creating intimacy with individual viewers, especially in films that use voiceover, like the Hotel Diaries videos. Filmed handheld, often in a single take while talking, they’re meant to feel conversational—almost like a personal dialogue with the viewer. The lack of cuts helps sustain the feeling of being present with the filmmaker and going on a journey together.

In gallery settings, I often show these on monitors with headphones to create a one-to-one experience. So, it’s easier to have the impression of actually being with the filmmaker and going on a journey with them around the hotel room or wherever they are. That dialogue aspect of the work is really important.

In Being John Smith (2024), there’s a line that reads: “It’s hard to have much enthusiasm for making art when you know that the human race will soon be extinct.” And yet, you continue to make art. Does art-making still bring you meaning, joy, or perhaps clarity, even in the face of existential despair?

Oh yeah, it’s an essential escape. I feel despondent sometimes but I can’t imagine myself ever stopping making art. What I’m getting at in that line is the absurdity of artists worrying about their archives and legacy, because I really don’t think the human race will be around much longer, though it will probably outlast me. (laughs) But again, I’m making jokes that address serious concerns. That scene ends with the line, “What’s the point in that? Cockroaches can’t read.” It’s tongue in cheek, since cockroaches aren’t prone to nuclear radiation and could survive a nuclear war.

At the moment when things are so desperate, I feel guilty and disempowered, especially with what’s happening in different parts of the world, especially in Gaza. It’s really hard to believe the world is allowing this genocide to take place.Including the ‘Stop the genocide’ statement in the film was important. I knew that by doing so, people would likely bring it up in Q&As, which creates an opportunity to open up the subject and to remind audiences what’s happening to others elsewhere, while we sit comfortably in a cinema.

Do you consider this a purpose as an artist or a responsibility to your audience to address social, environmental, or political issues in today’s unstable world?

I guess so, but it’s not a conscious aim. It’s just that those things are constantly on my mind. Almost all my work comes from personal experience, and over time, the horrific things happening in the world have become more present in one’s daily life. Even if you’re not experiencing them directly, they’re a big part of one’s consciousness. I would find it weird to make work that didn’t address that.

Some of my early films were mainly concerned with aesthetics. One example is Leading Light (1975), which is about the visual pleasure of sunlight moving around my room over the course of a day. I still like the film very much, but I would find it hard to make a film like that now, when so many people don’t even have a room of their own.

What do you hope viewers will take away from Being John Smith?

Although the film is called Being John Smith, it’s not just an autobiography. The film has been quite popular, and I think its popularity comes from the fact that viewers can relate their personal experiences to the things I talk about.

One thing I really hate is putting ‘The Artist’ on a pedestal. All my work, I hope, is about egalitarianism, about our shared value as human beings, whether or not we do something others find exotic or exciting. It’s important to me that people see that you can be highly respected as an artist and still have doubts. That’s just part of the human condition. Hopefully, that sense of uncertainty resonates with others and helps them feel it’s not just them. As with many of my films, what I hope viewers take away is empathy.

I believe people who are completely confident and never doubt themselves have real problems. I don’t want to know people like that—they’ve got to be egomaniacs. I think doubt is a very important thing.

Text by Justė Litinskaitė.