Lockdown Film ‘CITADEL’ Takes Aim At Tory Policy: REVIEW
Avant-garde filmmaker John Smith’s new short premieres on MUBI, and opens a window of respite in the news flurry.
Avant-garde filmmaker John Smith premieres a new short, ‘Citadel’, on MUBI this week. Shots from the first lockdown of the glass spires and busy cranes of London’s financial district are paired with those of people encased in the urban glass-and-brick sprawl below, alongside excerpts of Boris Johnson’s speeches recorded before and after the pandemic crashed into reality. As it develops, the piece puts forward a clear message about the centrality of the Tories’ business ideology, as positioned before public health.
Described as one of the most famous experimental filmmakers in the world, Smith originally gained notoriety for his illusory, ironic piece ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’:
He understands and plays with the power of language, symbols, evocative rhythms, and the breaking of ‘illusions’. In (what people insist on calling) a ‘post-truth’ world, the public are asked to try to break free from illusion daily; hourly. The illusions upheld by those in power are now expected, ignored, ‘business as usual’. The label ‘post-truth’ is shorthand not for an arguable, postmodern approach to facts, but the breakdown of any reliable system of accountability.
Trump, Johnson, Hancock, or Patel can essentially say whatever they like because not enough of us have the resources to sustain a position from which to argue. Argue we do, but there is so much money and power at their hands and such precarity in ours that even when falsehoods or corruption are exposed, our ability to maintain an effective challenge is limited.
ngst the relentless socio-info-feedscape, 16 minutes of static shots is unlikely to seem ‘short’ to most. But it’s long been within gallery-based or online-hosted short-form that artist filmmakers are able to make work outside of the constraints of what is ‘marketable’. For this reason, short-form lends itself particularly well not only to abstract art but to political critique and satire. This is both.
In the context of a 24-hour-news-and-hot-take-cycle that has in the last 12 months become mandatory to attend to, lest one miss the latest regulatory update or outrage porn, the plainness and slow pace of the work is refreshing. Smith makes a very clear and simple point:
It became obvious very quickly that Johnson’s Tory government was determined to place business interests before public health, initially seeing the spread of COVID-19 primarily as a business opportunity.
The film’s simplicity makes that point no less profound. The skill and patience involved in making something this intuitive, and quietly lyrical, is also evident. In his introductory statement for the film, Smith describes the piece’s development over time:
Many of my films have been recorded over several months or more and Citadel is no exception. The first shots were recorded in January 2020, well before COVID hit the UK, and the last were recorded in early summer, soon after Johnson announced the relaxing of the lockdown that had been in place for many weeks. As is also common with my work, the film was not scripted in advance but allowed to evolve over time, shaped in response to political developments and unexpected events that occurred in front of the camera. […] In order to match framings of the city skyline exactly, my camera remained in a fixed position for several months, securely mounted on a sturdy tripod that was screwed to my bedroom floor.
Smith’s brash, basic aestheticism makes its reality plain and simple, and holds that confident statement, in all its simplicity and playfulness:
Although I had made numerous films in the past that were concerned primarily with the aesthetics of the image, this was something that I could no longer feel comfortable with. I couldn’t look at the buildings of the City of London without thinking about what they represented, and without feeling a need to present them in a critical context.
If you have a MUBI subscription, take a moment today to expunge the chaos of the last year with ‘Citadel’. If you don’t, a short excerpt can be found on Vimeo.