![]() One might for a moment think that the narrator has been unmasked and now speaks the truth. The account of Letchmore Heath at first seems to offer the viewer a moment of trustworthy description. The burglar alarm and street noise disappear as he begins to describe the scene around him in the field, accompanied by continued images of Dalston. Just past the eight-minute mark, this unreliability is amplified as the viewer learns that the narrator is not present in Dalston at all rather, he is ‘shouting into a microphone on the edge of a field near Letchmore Heath, about fifteen miles from the building you’re looking at’. The so-called dentist Smith shot in Dalston that afternoon might in fact be a barrister on his way to the pub. ![]() But as the film continues, the voice is increasingly overtaken by a drive to fabulation: the viewer is in thrall to an unreliable narrator who weaves stories that, while not incompatible with anything seen onscreen, are not there to be found in the image-track alone. The voice had initially seemed to direct the scene, cueing the action according to a desired choreography. Either this voice possesses a complete knowledge of all aspects of the filmic world, or – more likely – he is simply making it up, with the result that what we are told we are seeing and what we actually see do not coincide. It offers information about the figures onscreen indiscernible from appearance alone, such as the fact that one man is a dentist who is on his way to the bank. The voiceover begins to remark upon details of the scene invisible to the camera, such as the title of the magazine carried under the arm of a man in the distance ( Exchange and Mart). As the film goes on, Smith’s investigation of the manipulability of meaning becomes increasingly elaborate. By the time the camera tilts down and the titular girl walks into the frame, The Girl Chewing Gum has done away with whatever illusionism it cultivated in its earliest moments and has resituated itself firmly as a reflexive interrogation of cinematic conventions. Now, two pigeons fly across and everything comes up again until the girl chewing gum walks across from the left’. The voiceover continues, ‘I want the long hand to move at a rate of one revolution every hour, and I want the short hand to move at the rate of one revolution every twelve hours. The upward tilt rests on a clock, which is then directed ‘to move jerkily towards’ the filmmaker as the camera zooms in. ![]() What might have appeared as an assertion of control becomes legible as a critique of the fantasy of control. If the first two minutes of The Girl Chewing Gum had skirted the possibility that the scene was indeed being directed by the off-screen voice, the description of this camera movement in terms of its pictorial effect rather than its cause signals to the viewer that something is awry. Paradoxically and rather humorously, Smith foregrounds the mediating presence of the camera not by naming its actions (‘Tilt up’), but by acting as if it does not exist – as if the director had a control over the onscreen world so absolute, direct and godlike that buildings sink and elevate according to his whims. This, of course, happens all the time in the cinema, but is usually apprehended as a product of the camera’s mobile gaze rather than the movement of normally stationary buildings. As the camera tilts upward, the world – or rather, the representation of the world produced by the apparatus – sinks. After two minutes of orchestrating the entrances and exits of passers-by, Smith delivers a different and rather curious kind of instruction: ‘I want everything to sink slowly down as the five boys come by’. Invisible behind the camera, this director-narrator continues to rule over the represented scene. As he delivers these commands, the corresponding actions occur in the frame. And I want the little girl to run across – now’. A male voiceover – Smith’s own – begins: ‘Slowly move the trailer to the left. On the soundtrack, a burglar alarm rings over ambient street noises. This take lasts approximately ten minutes, as much film as the magazine of a 16 mm camera can hold. ![]() The film opens with a static long shot of a London street, facing westward across Kingsland Road where it intersects with Tottenham Road and Stamford Road in Dalston. Yet before discussing these elements, some description is in order. John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum (Tate T13237 fig.1) is many things: a twelve-minute 16 mm film consisting of only two shots, a testimony to how complexity can arise out of a sparse economy of means, an allegory of cinema, a critique of documentary naturalism, an interrogation of language-image relations, a record of an East London neighbourhood, a classic avant-garde film, an art world hit some thirty-five years after its debut, and more besides.
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