After enduring many decades of embarrassment and discomfort, the artist finally admits that possessing the most common name in the English-speaking world has had a profound impact on his sense of self. Combining fragments of autobiography with interjections concerning confidence, self-doubt, fame, and the state of the world, Being John Smith takes us on a confessional journey that addresses universal dilemmas as well as personal ones, revealing just how important a name can be.
EN
“It’s an extraordinary work, further proof of Smith’s abilities to wring diverse feeling-tones – like whatever you’d call the combination of certitude and doubt – from the ‘ordinary’, illuminating the depths behind the ostensibly humdrum. The film plays games but is, simultaneously and wrenchingly, done with playing games; and it confirms once again that this man’s name is the only ordinary thing about him and the arc of his creative life. ‘I’ve come to accept’, says the then seventy-one-year-old Smith early in the film, ‘that I might have made my best work before I was seventy.’ Being John Smith begs, in the strongest terms, to differ.”
Martin Herbert1
“Nataliia Serebriakova: You say in the film that the current political situation makes it difficult for you to make art.
John Smith: Sometimes I feel that way. At other times, I actually feel the opposite. When there is something to react against, it can be productive. I think my most productive period as a filmmaker was when Margaret Thatcher was the British prime minister. She led a right-wing government, and it made many of us want to fight back, to resist the damage we felt was being done to society. So it is not entirely true that difficult political situations always make art impossible.”
Nataliia Serebriakova2
