In his new film Being John Smith, premiering alongside Jean-Luc Godard’s for-real-this-time last two films in TIFF’s Wavelengths program, filmmaker John Smith starts with a simple idea, the exceptional commonness of his name, and layers on contradiction after contradiction, accomplishing both deep vulnerability and unusual universality. He begins with a personal history, structured around the childhood nicknames that augmented his indistinct given name. As his height lags behind his peers, “Big John Smith” gives way to the confidence-corroding “Piddly John Smith” before settling at the more amenable “Pid.” At a certain point, an interruption introduces the motif of juxtaposition, as his expression of the concern that a film constructed from “voice-over accompanied by illustrative images” will be too conventional annihilates itself, appearing as a text caption over a black screen. Smith continues with a sort of dialogue between voice and text, advancing a number of themes through similar contradictions.
Most salient are those around the film’s own existence. Smith raises numerous concerns around the activity of creating art as horrors around the world escalate and around the value of art functioning as a personal archive when it seems the world is ending; “cockroaches can’t read,” one caption quips. Though a number of filmworkers in Toronto delivered statements calling for a ceasefire and an end to Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, some more specifically calling on the festival to drop the Royal Bank of Canada as a sponsor, Smith is the only one this critic saw embed such a statement in his film. Perhaps this gesture is no more likely to effect change, but by including his call for a ceasefire in the film, Smith ensures the message will travel anywhere the film does and insists upon, at the very least, a tacit acknowledgement from any institution choosing to program it. There’s some risk in permanently tying himself to a position — though it be clear a righteous one — that has brought substantial pushback from various artistic and academic institutions.
Though Smith’s unease with the world he lives in is potent, in Being John Smith it exists necessarily alongside personal and artistic unease. Throughout the film Smith incorporates several of his more famous works, most memorably allowing the black tower from his film of the same name to pop up intermittently to continue its haunting. Smith’s deadpan narration has been an integral part of a number of his films, and in one of this project’s most bracing moments, he expresses discomfort at recording his voice for the first time since undergoing treatment for cancer, finding it diminished by the physical trauma. Though Smith flirts with immodesty, owning up to the significance of his artistic career in a manner only somewhat tongue-inicheek, he stops short of making explicit the ultimate contradiction of the film: that despite, and in fact because of, feeling the diminishment of his voice, the strain of continued invention, the futility of his project, Being John Smith stands before the audience as a brilliant accomplishment. Instead, Smith ends with a moment he filmed at an open air concert he was invited to last year by a famous friend, explicitly uniting the common with the ecstatic.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 5.
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