The Girl Chewing Gum || John Smith 1976

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The Girl Chewing Gum 1976 is a 16 mm black and white film with sound by the British artist John Smith. The film consists of two camera shots. The first occupies the major portion of the film and is located at an intersection near a cinema in Hackney, London. People walk through this scene and cars drive past while a voiceover of the artist appears to provide directions for the movements of people, as well as those of pigeons and a clock’s hands. The second, much shorter shot shows a piece of open ground, Letchmore Heath, marked by overhead electrical pylons. At this point the voiceover track reveals that the artist is actually located there, some fifteen miles away from the street scene, and is thus, like the viewer, unable to see what is being directed first hand. The film neither glorifies nor dramatises the street scene; instead it records the everyday actions objectively, from a camera mounted on a tripod.

The Girl Chewing Gum is related to a sequence in the 1973 film La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night) by the French director Francois Truffaut. Truffaut’s film is concerned with the process of making a film, so that in one sequence, shot in fake snow, Truffaut is shown directing the movements of every extra in a crowded street scene. Smith borrowed the conceit of exposing the work of the director as the subject of the film, but instead of showing himself in control of a large set and group of actors, he narrates the comings and goings of the public, first appearing to instruct them, then describing their movements. The film’s title captures this process, by memorialising an ‘extra’ – the girl chewing gum – who only appears on screen for the briefest of moments.

The conjunction of word and image in Smith’s voiceover transforms everyday documentation into something created and artificial. Even when the tone changes and the viewer realises that Smith is retrospectively voicing-over a real-life scene, the narrative drive of the film encourages the viewer to go along with the conceit – even when Smith starts to direct pigeons or the hour hand of a clock. Film critic Nicky Hamlyn has observed how: