Four doc

A classic of the low-budget world of 1970s London experimental filmmaking, 'The Girl Chewing Gum' uses humour and formal rigour to question what makes a film dealing with reality into a documentary. The camera studies a run-of-the-mill East End street scene, as a hectoring narrator seems to order, not only the people, cars and moving objects within the screen, but also the architecture itself.In fact it is exactly the moment after the director has ordered the world to move, after instructing a clock's hands to move round once every hour, that we realize what is going on. The next instruction - the first one where we are 'in on Smith's idea' - is to the girl chewing gum: hence the film's titleIn pretending to 'direct' humdrum events like this, Smith draws attention to the way all documentary can be authored and selectively interpreted by a filmmakerAs a tribute to how everyday life is both utterly unremarkable and utterly absorbing, Smith deliberately picks a dispiriting urban location - a traffic-filled junction with a concrete Odeon cinema as its focus. The nasal jobsworth voiceover gives it an idiotic importance, as if each passerby is somehow part of a bigger plan. After the 'girl chewing gum' moment Smith sets out to undercut his 'documentary', inventing increasingly complex characteristics for his unknowing participants and then revealing that he's recording his voiceover in a location that's a very long way from Dalston.But due to Smith's bone-dry sense of humour, the film is much more than a postmodern intellectual exercise. It is fun to watch and, in an age of digital voyeurs and omnipresent cameras, troubling to wonder how many people are imposing their narratives on filmed versions of us today.John Smith has made many other similar semi-documentaries, some of them on tiny budgets. His body of work includes "Blight" - a lashing-out against the destruction of Leyton to make way for the M11. Deeply attached to London, he is fascinated by community, place and small personal stories - not unlike the filmmakers on FourDocshttp://www.channel4.com/fourdocs/archive/chewing_gum.html