Smith and Willing present a double-bill screening of Smith Commits a Crime and Smith In Malaya, plus a performance of Willing’s a Horse.
Doors: 7pm [screenings will begin at 7.30pm]
Tickets: Pay what you can (£7 suggested donation)
Featuring:
Smith Commits a Crime [25 mins]
With music by Luke Seomore
‘Minimalist, somewhere between Keaton, Kötting and Korine. Concrete. Plants. Fences. The absurdity of space as organised in late capitalism. A real physical performance is always at the heart of the Smith films – with graffiti made amusingly baffling and some smart framing to help us feel the rage… Hilarious, angry-making, profound. Smith and Willing’s flaneur films are a joy to watch.’
- William Brown.
Intermission: Willing’s a Horse [live performance - 20 mins]
Smith in Malaya [56 mins]
Featuring Raymond Waring as Willing.
‘[Smith and Willing’s] extraordinary and visually beautiful film is a highly original essay - closer to a work of art than a documentary - on memory and forgetting. At its centre, but never directly confronted, is the horrific 1948 slaughter by British soldiers of Chinese workers on a Malayan rubber estate: the 'Batang Kali massacre'. (Smith and Willing’s) film proposes that memory consists not just of subjectively edited mental re-runs of a given event. It also includes countless 'irrelevant' sights and experiences which lay around the event itself but have been redacted out of conscious recollection. Glimpses of the massacre site, of a brothel used by British troops, of modern Kuala Lumpur with snapshots from (Smith’s) father's old photograph album showing a young working-class conscript shipped out to the Malayan war... Unanswered questions are felt rather than asked. Why the killing? Why was my father so silent about what he had seen? Why Empire? Why are we here?’
- Neal Ascherson
‘So-so. Bit annoying.’ - Shona Wack
Smith and Willing is a Paul Antick project
smithandwilling.com
Listen here to Paul talking about the project on Resonance FM.