Perhaps any artist’s greatest fear is being generic. Being lugged alongside countless others, without an original thought in your head. Currently, most creative writers I know — at least those with any sense of self-worth — are worried about being compared to Chat-GPT, that resource-draining waste of time that pumps out the most anodyne copy imaginable. No one wants to be just another body in the crowd. No one wants to be a John Smith.
For avant-garde short filmmaker John Smith, reflecting in his early 70s on the legacy of being called John Smith in the dry and witty Being John Smith (John Smith, 2024), being called John Smith has been a cause for consternation throughout his life and career. Turning his perspective inwards, utilising a playful mixture of on-screen text, affectless narration, still images and screenshots from the internet, John Smith reflects on the merits and drawbacks of his name, before slyly turning his pithy observations into a profound meditation on getting old and facing your mortality.
The work starts rather conventionally. Baby pictures, school photos, nicknames at school. We learn one of his classmates shared the name of England’s most famous writer, William Shakespeare, thus suffering not from genericism, but from proximity to greatness. Yet John Smith, as concerned about creating a generic reflection of his life as he has been about his own name, uses on-screen text to undercut the filmmaking at hand, worrying about whether or not he has lost the same talent that animated his best-known works such as The Black Tower (1987) and The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), or even the state of the world at large.
The humour seems to hide deep-seated anger, whether it’s at a lack of wider recognition — hidden underneath millions of similar search results on Google, whether it’s the star of Pocahontas (Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, 1995), the former leader of the Labour party, or a frankly average brand of bitter — or the futility of making art in the face of impending apocalypse. Mixing forms freely throughout a fleet 25-minute runtime in an almost stream-of-consciousness fashion — including a bizarre, potentially fictional run-in with Wings-era Paul McCartney — this typically late-style work (even as it repudiates the merits of a late style) densely layers contrasting ideas on top of each other, turning out like a striking, odd-looking building made from different styles. Through the slow accumulation of seemingly trivial and small details, John Smith deftly finds a way into the realm of the metaphysical. A truly wonderful short gem.
Now, I’ve never had the same problem as John Smith. Google my name, and you’ll immediately see my LinkedIn, my Instagram, my Twitter, my personal website and various other places I have written for, swiftly followed by the best breakfast spots in Redmond, Washington. With my Irish first name, named after either Redmond O’Hanlon the rebel or John Redmond the Nationalist politician, and my British surname, presumably indicating that some ancestor in the Midlands cured pig meat, I have the distinction of owning a truly original name. Yet John Smith is the one releasing this excellent, amusing work of art, which has already played in Toronto and is now in competition at DOK Leipzig, and I am the one merely reviewing it, for free, for my own website. Perhaps distinctive names aren’t all that.
Redmond is the editor-in-chief of Journey Into Cinema.