Blight

From 1994 to 1996, John Smith collaborated with composer Jocelyn Pook to create this rhythmic and musical montage film showing the demolition of their East London neighborhood to make way for the construction of the M11 Link Road. Until the demolition reached his own house, the filmmaker pointed his 16 mm camera, sometimes from his window, at the abandoned homes and orphaned household belongings surrounding him. The montage is driven forward by the music of Pook, best known for her work on Eyes Wide Shut. In her score, cut-ups of interviews with former residents intermingle with the rhythms of demolition: falling bricks, creaking wood, and clouds of dust and grit. Voices, music, sounds and visuals are interwoven as equal forces.

With the emotional force of Pook’s music giving dramatic weight to the everyday scenes and recollections of the residents, Blight is simultaneously fact and fiction. Significantly, the speakers themselves never appear on screen—because all of them are gone. Smith, a member of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, created this montage artwork about loss and forgetting as an elegy for a community that had to make way for speed and growth.