Short Film Studies - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2012

John Smith's Girl Chewing Gum was made in Hackney, East London and shown at the London Film-Makers' Co-op in 1976. Through its wit and imagination this film extended the forms of British avant-garde experimentation that were pervasive at that moment and mobilized a critique of narrative cinema.

As a short experimental work about the constructedness of the cinematic image, the film expresses anxieties about our inability not only to control filmic representation, but to impose order in our everyday lives. The film further reveals a pressing desire to turn our lives into movies – and a sadness that results from that impossibility.

While this film clearly invites a 'modernist' reading, Jean-François Lyotard's distinction between the modern and the postmodern as having to do with their respective attitudes to the visible and the discursive fields, opens up the possibility of considering the figural activity at work in the film.

When discussing his concept of literary chronotopes and that of the 'encounter', Mikhail Bahktin uses the road as an example where 'the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people intersect'. Using this framework, this article will examine the narrative, aesthetic and thematic concerns of The Girl Chewing Gum.

Witty pocket dictionary of cinematic language that uses two shots, juxtaposition, irony and the unreliable narrator to make us sense the poignancy and unrepeatability of reality.

By foregrounding the formal choices through which it depicts its image of violence, Wind forces us to consider how the image might ethically respond to violence. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, this article argues that Wind positions the viewer to understand time as a force for change.

This article attempts to place Wind into its Hungarian context. With its flat landscape and mobile camera the film is reminiscent of the work of Miklós Jancsó and other Hungarian directors and artists, ambiguously evoking a time and place which is important to the idea of national history and identity.

Wind evokes the ideas present in Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. The film also approaches the sublime in its audio design and its depiction of space, and at the end invites us to consider the relationship between violence and the sacred.

Wind is steeped in an unsettling tension indicating the construction of a precise and vivid worldhood. The climax, instead of being regarded as a plot twist in the service of the story, is read as a manifestation of the worldhood and its power.

In this article, I propose a reading of Wind as the performance of a ritual. The three women and the peasants all stand motionless as if fixed in a preordained system while the 360 degree camera movement reinforces the circularity of ritual enactment. When the ritual is complete, the women leave.

Wind is a multi-faceted work, open to many interpretations while remaining elusive. Much in the film can be seen as relating to various war crime scenarios, but nothing is definite. The film, in its essence, interrogates the problematique of visual material as evidence.