The Girl Chewing Gum
1976 · 12m · UK
Directed by John Smith
Genres: comedy, experimental
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, humorous
A narrator appears to direct the actions of pedestrians, cars, and birds on a busy East London street, but the voiceover is actually laid over pre-existing footage — a wryly funny deconstruction of documentary authority and the power of language over image.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A voiceover pretending to direct random street footage until you realize narration is the lie all cinema runs on — that's the kind of single-conceit film I'll always defend. Dry, perfect, English.
Smith's commanding voiceover-over-found-footage is one of the wittiest deconstructions of documentary authority in the medium, and the conceit grows funnier as the directives turn absurd. A small structural-film masterpiece.
Voiceover laid over pre-existing East London street footage that pretends to direct what already happened — Smith deconstructs documentary authority with one perfect conceit. 11:47 per Vimeo, 26.9K views. The illusion does most of the work; the rest is timing.
Reviews
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.
Widely acknowledged as one of the most important avant-garde films of the 20th century.
Festivals
- Academy Film Archive 2019