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Blight
“Blight was made in collaboration with composer Jocelyn Pook. It revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. Until 1994, when our houses were destroyed, both the composer and I lived on the route of this road. The images in the film are a selective record of some of the changes that occurred in the area over a two-year period, from the demolition of houses through to the start of motorway building work. The soundtrack incorporates natural sounds associated with these events together with speech fragments taken from recorded conversations with local people.
Although the film is entirely constructed from records of real events, Blight is not a straightforward documentary. The film constructs stories from unconnected fragments of sound and image, bringing disparate reminiscences and contemporary events together. Like much of my earlier work, Blight exploits the ambiguities of its material to produce new meanings and metaphors, fictionalising reality through framing and editing strategies. The emotive power of music is used in the film to overtly aid this invention, investing mundane images with artificial importance. A specific ‘real’ context for the depicted events only becomes apparent at the end of the film. What is presented is simultaneously fact and fiction.”
Bio John Smith
John Smith (UK, 1952) studied film at the Royal College of Art. Inspired by conceptual art and structural film, but also fascinated by the immersive power of narrative and the spoken word, he has developed a body of work that deftly subverts the boundaries between documentary, fiction, representation, and abstraction. Often rooted in everyday life, his meticulously crafted films, such as The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), Blight (1996), and The Black Tower (1987), playfully explore and expose the language of cinema. Smith’s work has been widely shown in independent cinemas, film festivals, and art galleries around the world and has been awarded many major prizes. (Light Cone)
John Smith’s beautiful elegy for East London homes destroyed to build the M11 Link Road, Blight, 1994-96, interweaves voices of the evicted and demolition footage to a dramatic score by Jocelyn Pook. Masterful editing introduces warning flash frames of red, green and blue to the thud of bricks, which mount to streaks of colour as figurative details of domestic life are subsumed by mechanistic force. Smith lets graffiti on the remnant homes narrate the protest, leaving us haunted by one resident’s voice: ‘It has a living energy of itself. That house has a spirit’. Blight reverberates now as a plangent plea to stop destroying our planet home and to design more earth-centred dialogue between architecture, infrastructure and community, beyond our speed and growth dependency.
Blight evinces a tremendous formal precision while simultaneously foregrounding an urge to embalm time, as Smith acts as a witness to the difficulty of the present, creating an archive of a vanishing community. To the residents’ protest, Smith adds a protest against forgetting. Even if the houses could not be saved, they will at least be spared from oblivion. The film draws out a crucial feature of the experimental atlas of East London that many of Smith’s films together comprise: within the context of a country riven by class hatred and brutally dragged into neoliberalism by Margaret Thatcher, a prime minister who initiated a programme of social cleansing that continues into the present, the artist’s devotion to the textures of ordinary life is a counter-hegemonic gesture of contestation.
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- This film was #44 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025