The Girl Chewing Gum

On a busy London Street, video installation artist John Smith directs a scene the exact way that he wants it. As his 'cast' come and go in front of his camera he directs them in a constant narration, telling them exactly what he wants them to do. As he moves his camera around he demands increasing control over his environment and obedience from his subjects – be they people, cars, trucks, birds, clocks or buildings!

For the first few minutes of this short film I did actually think that things were happening in response to Smith's instructions, but then he order the big hand of a clock to move at the rate of one revolution per hour and the smaller hand to move at the rate of one revolution every twelve hours – then he got into birds and trucks and I got the joke (what can I say – I'm slow!). This was actually pretty funny at the start but after a while the joke worn a bit thin as it was basically the same thing over again – it would have been better if the film had been 5/6 minutes long, 10/11 was just too long for such a thin idea.

However the film did work for me as both a funny short and a clever one. I took it to be an expression of the artist John Smith's desire to control everything that he sees through his camera and that his 'direction' here is practically his ideal working situation! He wants everything just as he wants it but, as he shows here, the only way he is going to get that is by narration over film he has already shot. It was a clever and interesting idea and this carried me to the end of the short even if the laughs had worn out – contemplating this was the main goal I suspect and it achieved it and more!

Overall, like another review has snootily observed, very few people has seen this short film and it is a shame because it is sublime in its simplicity. As a comedy, the one-joke approach doesn't have the legs to last 10 minutes but as an expression of Smith's creative frustration that things never go quite how he wants them to, this is great stuff. I started the short laughing here and there but ended it in thought about how it must be hard for directors and artists to ever really put on canvas/film/video the vision that they truly have in their minds' eye. An intelligent and funny short!

As the short of jean-luc Godart, "Charlotte et son jules" (1960), or "the big shave" (1967) of scorsese, this short movie won the "famous" Oberhausen festival.

Yes, remember, in 1962, 26 movie-makers rated a proclamation at Oberhausen to make the German movie industry more modern and to say good-bye to the old-german-movie-style...So after that, a sort of "new-wave" appeared (in 68 for instance, Hellmut Costard made sensation with his short where people could see a talking-penis...that's maybe not the more interesting movie that had been maid, but it was a step for the expression freedom...).

And this year, the festival have 50 years old...and revealed a lot of new talent during this period (Zbigniew Rybczinski, the french Michel Gondry, the britain John Smith, the americans Laura Wadddington and Kenneth Anger...and that's in Oberhausen too that the first short of Roman Polanski were projected)

So that's in that environnement that "the girl chewing-gum" was projected in 1976...and, as a lot of movie of this festival, this one have a total liberty of narration. With a funny "british-touch" the director build the movie as he wants it to be (in a strict sense)...a rare curiosity that had to be seen as "the big shave" or so many...

For a majority of its run time, 'The Girl Chewing Gum' is rather light, funny fun w/some interesting, possibly thought provoking undertones, but by the end it has, in my opinion, become something bizarrely darker than that. The main concept of the film is that its narrator is "directing" every car, character, etc. we see in this single documentary shot of daily life on a street in London, making it seem that every little thing in the shot is planned, despite the case being clearly to the contrary. It gets a little tedious after a few minutes, but eventually becomes more engaging in its latter part when it lets the cryptic overshadow the comic as we are made to question the narrator and some of his more unfocused and simply strange comments. Suddenly the camera is carrying off, and to me a feeling of darkness creeps under the final image's seemingly simplistic ground.

Excellent short film. In addition to previous comments, I'd like to add that the The Girl Chewing Gum could be seen as a visual rendering of the ubiquitous and unanswerable question whether "art imitates life" or "life imitates art".

The question this film actually poses, seems to be if reality exists in itself (that is, independent of something like culture, emotion, our actions in it, etc), which implies that we, human beings that we are, can never really touch upon it (that we are mere spectators) - or that reality is the product of man's intervening in it, the product of our relations with it and the actions we make.

In other words: does the girl chew her gum because she is "a girl chewing gum" (existing independently from her on screen appearance), or is she chewing her gum for the sole reason that she is being perceived chewing (by the camera, and by us)?