1st review of experimental media

The girl chewing gum by John Smith was made in 1976 in black and white and has a run time of 9 minutes. a clever piece yet not one that i particularly enjoyed. A film of observation, when first introduced to the film you watch her a man directing people in and out of the scene and at first you think that is just whats happening a director is giving directions for people to enter and exit the scene and they are following that but as the piece progresses and birds fly in and out of shot on command you start to realise this is just clever editing. as the piece progresses the narration becomes more and more creative delving into what the narrator perceives to be the pedestrians personal characteristics and lives. The narrator even goes on to state that he is stood in a field a far few miles away from the scene you are watching in a middle of a field shouting into a microphone or so he says, when in all probability he is more realistically stood in a sound recording studio somewhere talking into a microphone in a recording booth. we then switch to the scene of a field with electricity pylons and cows in the distance but we still retain the sound from the Town, this i think is to demonstrate the element of control that the narrator supposedly has that he can remove different elements and impose them onto other parts of the video. again I'm not really sure what the point is other than to demonstrate that element of control.