Shorts: Paradocs

Programme

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  Being John Smith

  Having made his name as a playful and humorous avant-garde artist – with a career spanning half a century and more than 60 films, video works, and installations – John Smith confesses in this autobiographical contemplation that having the most commonplace of all British names “undermines my sense of individuality and self-worth on an almost daily basis.” Search online for “John Smith” and “film” and you’ll find Captain John Smith from Disney’s Pocahontas, he sighs, not him.
  
  Smith uses deadpan humor and his charming voice to take us on a meandering journey into his thoughts about his name, his own mortality, and his legacy as an artist. Onscreen, meanwhile, we see texts that connect these reflections with other preoccupations, such as the desperate state of the world.
  
  Unexpected sounds and other unforeseen and associative connections bear witness to his “idiosyncratic wit and formal inventiveness” – as does the question, which appears on screen, of whether this work lives up to his reputation. A stream of self-consciousness in image and sound by an artist who is always happy when someone asks him whether he is perhaps “the John Smith.”

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  Misty Man

  A young man has been accused of theft. We see him behind barbed wire, falling in slow motion onto the grass. The artist Ansuya Blom alternates this powerful image and others that she shot in Suriname, such as a group of pelicans screeching around a fishing boat in Paramaribo, with 8 mm recordings of a first communion procession from her family archive.
  
  Meanwhile we hear a woman’s voice reading from the 1982 book Disorderly Families by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, a collection of letters from the French Bastille archives. Many of the letters are pleas to the court to lock up a spouse or child to prevent the entire family falling apart. We also hear the battle song of the White Horse Society of the Dakota people in the US.
  
  In these ways, Misty Man offers food for thought about mental as well as physical confinement, while never making a clear-cut statement on the subject. The image of a young boy wearing a communion suit is significant in this context, with a digital zoom effect transforming his face into a pixelated, undulating surface – no matter how far we zoom in, we will never know the stirrings of his soul.

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  Like the Glitch of a Ghost

  Alapadu is a village in the Amazon rainforest in the interior of Suriname, which in the 1950s was a Dutch colony. In a film produced by the Diaconal Institute of the Dutch Reformed Church, which ended up in the archives of the Eye Film Museum, the inhabitants are still referred to as ‘Indians.’
  
  However, the central figure in the film is a young white missionary who works there as a nurse. She dresses wounds, hands out medicine for worm infections, gives advice here and there, and teaches children the basics of Dutch so they can “have some command of the language” if they have go to the capital city, Paramaribo.
  
  She means well, but her attitude and use of language are paternalistic and overtly racist. The indigenous people are portrayed as big children who, according to the voice-over, “live on the verge of the Stone Age.” They are dirty, poor and pitiful, but are fortunately saved by a Florence Nightingale with horn-rimmed glasses and crisp diction.
  
  Paula Albuquerque exposes the intensity of this colonial condescension by introducing a ‘glitch’ in the film that obscures everyone who appears, except for the missionary worker. By removing them from an objectifying gaze, she restores their sovereignty.