What’s in a name? A lot, if you’re called John Smith, and you’ve developed, over the past 70-plus years, a psychological complex about bearing Britain’s most common name. In the very amusing Being John Smith, a recent winner at DOK Leipzig, the viewer is invited inside the mind of the eponymous director to understand what it is like to live with that curse.
Being John Smith begins at the end, director Smith tells Business Doc Europe of his award-winning short doc. In July 2023, he was standing on a gantry at an open-air Pulp concert above an enormous crowd singing ‘Common People’, Jarvis Cocker’s anthem to normality.
“I thought, I’ve just filmed this celebration of being common – everybody ecstatically singing in praise of the masses,” says Smith. “This is perfect. I am the most common person as John Smith…so I had an ending before I started.”
In the film we go back in time to experience Smith’s complicated relationship with his name, accompanied throughout by his laconically-delivered and, at times, hilarious narration (although he worries, at times, that “it may lack the idiosyncratic wit and formal inventiveness of my earlier work.”)
Oddly, his dad was given the relatively exotic-sounding forename of Lyle, partly a result of being born beside the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery in London’s East End, which instilled in son John a lifelong love of golden syrup. (in 2020 London’s Tate Gallery, founded by sugar baron Henry Tate, bought Smith’s experimental short The Girl Chewing Gum for their collection, we are told.)
At art college, Smith toyed with the potential surname of Pledger as it sounded like Pleasure, seriously considering Johnny Pleasure as a future moniker. While his parents, satisfied with their “lower middle-class” status, wanted him to “fit in,” he wanted to “stand out.” When, however, the somewhat romantically-named art critic Malcolm Le Grice told him he would never progress if he were to remain as plain John Smith, obstinacy kicked in and Smith held on to the name he was ascribed at birth.
But the problem remained. “Being called John Smith still undermined my sense of individuality and self-worth on an almost daily basis,” he reminds us drily.
There are 35,000 John Smiths in the UK, Smith reckons, and a Google search throws up 35,000,000 John Smith-related pages (or at least it did when the film was made). But you have to scroll a long time before you get to John Smith, experimental filmmaker.
First up is Captain John Smith, the husband of Pocahontas. And then, of course, there is the Right Honourable John Smith, former leader of the UK Labour Party, who died suddenly in 1994. After a woman working at the art college saw a news headline about the politician’s passing, she burst into tears of relief when she realised that her John Smith (the experimental filmmaker) was alive. It was a sad day for the Labour party but a great one for his self-esteem, the director notes.
So why, after so many years of nomenclative burden, is Smith making such a personal film now, albeit a self-deprecating, at times very tongue-in-cheek, one? “Well, the intention of it is that it’s really quite universal, especially if we’re getting to a certain point in life where you’re thinking, what was it all about? Maybe I’m not going to be around for much longer,” he responds.
“Maybe you do think more about what one’s legacy is going to be,” he adds. “So I’m very pleased that many people have come up to me and said, ‘I know it was ostensibly about you, but it’s about all of us, isn’t it?’ I mean, it’s about us and the kind of things that maybe we don’t necessarily like to admit about ourselves – that we want to be noticed, we want to be well-known in whatever way, we want to be all sorts of things.”
Before the film’s German premiere at DOK Leipzig (where it won the Golden Dove for Short Film) Smith suggested to BDE that name-related dilemmas are exportable across borders. A decade or so ago, some of his artworks were selected for a Biennale-type event in Prague that was curated by a certain Johannes Schmidt. “I remember his [Schmidt’s] name on the wall was bigger than the name of any of the artists,” remembers Smith. “It was like, this is the ‘Johannes Schmidt’ show. I think maybe he also had some issues, quite possibly.”
Being John Smith has been selected across a plethora of other international festivals, including TIFF where it world-premiered. Oddly, it wasn’t selected for London FF. “I submitted it to their experimental strand, which is the context my films are normally shown in. I think maybe if I’d submitted it just as a straightforward documentary, they would’ve shown it,” he reasons. That said, the film will be exhibited in a top Shoreditch gallery from January 2025 onwards.
It was in London that Smith saw the open-air Pulp gig we see at the film’s conclusion. The reason why he had such great viewing access was that he used to teach the band’s illustrious front-man Jarvis Cocker at St Martins in London. They have remained close ever since.
“I asked Jarvis if he minded my using the song and he said, ‘no, on the contrary, I’m honoured that you’ve used it,” Smith signs off, in very common fashion.
