Celebrated filmmaker John Smith returns with a new film in the International Competition at Oberhausen, his second short wrestling with the UK Government during the Covid-19 pandemic
by Cathy Brennan
Covid Messages (John Smith, 2020)
Completed in the dying days of 2020, John Smith’s Covid Messages attempts much in a slender twenty-two-minute runtime. The short is comprised of six segments, completed at different points in the pandemic and united by the conceit that the UK Government’s response to COVID is the work of incompetent sorcerers. Smith communicates his point in each vignette via a two-pronged attack: through pointed editing of Downing Street press briefings and on-screen text that contextualises the footage. It is through the latter that Covid Messages reveals its severe limitations.
Smith’s other COVID document, Citadel, is a more artful indictment of the Tory government’s handling of the pandemic, and one that moves beyond mere timeliness to prompt reflection on the nature of power in Britain. In that film, Smith films the view outside his window at various moments during the pandemic. Nearby terraced houses live in the shadow of the big business towers that make up the City of London. Played over edited speeches by Boris Johnson, Smith is able to make a sobering point about the government prioritising economic stability over human lives. Yet the presence of these buildings serves a second function. As monuments to, and machines of, late-stage capitalism, the looming towers imply that they are symptoms of a crisis older than the pandemic.
The fact that Citadel largely communicates through the suggestive power of the image means that the audience must feel their way through its argument. The pleasures of ambiguity found there are greatly diminished in Covid Messages, thanks to an over-reliance on text that talks to the audience in an irritating manner due to its sardonic schtick about magic. It unsuccessfully strains itself at the comic construction of a Marina Hyde column. Before he introduces his main character in Johnson, Smith opens Covid Messages with footage of himself singing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice in the style of a dirge, imbuing the action with the aura of a magic ritual rendered ridiculous by its solemnity. By tying the pandemic to notions of the supernatural, Smith casts suspicion on the sincerity of the government’s promises that they’re following science.
Reinforcing the theme of magic, Smith reduces Johnson to a hypnotic presence through endlessly repeated utterances and gestures. Smith’s reworking of these press briefings is reminiscent of Cassetteboy in that both cut-up footage of public figures to undermine their authority. Whereas Cassetteboy’s work is impish in their undisguised ridicule, the result of Smith’s remixed Johnson is more mysterious. He emphasises the ritualistic nature of these briefings, transforming the Prime Minister into some sort of high priest for a cult known as England, casting his dark arts across the land. It’s sincerely disturbing and doesn’t gel at all with the winking text. Paired together, they diminish the moral vacuity of the Tory government and the lives lost because of that void.
Covid Messages ultimately comes across as confused. Perhaps that is the most natural position for COVID cinema to take as a response to the strange and terrifying reality the Tories have conjured through their unfathomable carelessness, from Eat Out To Help Out to premature school openings.
The 2021 edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen ran from 1 - 10 May
Cathy Brennan is a film writer who has been published by Mubi, Sight & Sound, and TimeOut London. She is a regular contributor to Cinema Year Zero.