Is this the ulti­mate movie about watch­ing movies?

Con­ceived and exe­cut­ed by Lon­don-based film­mak­er Paul Anton Smith, Have You Seen My Movie? is a cap­ti­vat­ing new film which turns the cam­era back at the audi­ence. Com­prised exclu­sive­ly of footage from oth­er movies, Smith weaves togeth­er sound and nar­ra­tive in such a way that it reveals some­thing unex­pect­ed­ly pro­found about the sim­ple act of going to the movies. ​“We go to the cin­e­ma to engage with a film, the sound and the image in front of us,” he explains, ​“and we’re large­ly unaware of the space that we are in and the strangers around us. I thought it would be inter­est­ing to explore; if you watch this film in a cin­e­ma you’re going to become much more self-con­scious of what goes on inside of a cinema.”

“Hol­ly­wood loves to cel­e­brate itself,” Smith con­tin­ues. ​“These scenes are inter­est­ing to me because ulti­mate­ly you’re talk­ing about this large­ly seden­tary col­lec­tive activ­i­ty, but every­one is also in their own soli­tude. When it’s done in a movie, you still need some sort of action or dra­ma. These peo­ple are act­ing and react­ing to what they’re see­ing on screen. I knew these scenes wouldn’t be just peo­ple gawk­ing at the screen, I knew there would be things going on: mak­ing out, mur­der, peo­ple cry­ing, peo­ple laughing.”

Smith used the tech­niques of main­stream cin­e­ma in order to con­struct a nar­ra­tive of his own from these clips. ​“The way that the film is struc­tured, and the way that I edit­ed it, is very cin­e­mat­ic,” he explains, ​“almost con­ven­tion­al­ly so. I’m delib­er­ate­ly try­ing to fool peo­ple into think­ing that they’re watch­ing an entire­ly orig­i­nal sto­ry, even if I am using exist­ing footage.”

In order to gath­er the required clips, Smith reveals that he turned to the Close-Up Film Cen­tre, one of the last remain­ing col­lec­tions of its type in Lon­don. ​“It was a mat­ter of col­lect­ing this mate­r­i­al, rent­ing the movies, scan­ning them, remem­ber­ing films that I’ve seen that might be rel­e­vant and using IMDb as a source to plot key­words. As I was putting it togeth­er it was a mat­ter of mem­o­ris­ing the footage and let­ting con­nec­tions come to me. There’s a moment when there’s a shootout inside the cin­e­ma, so there were all these dif­fer­ent scenes where there’s some­one with a gun inside the movie the­atre. My job was to try to find a way to put those scenes togeth­er to con­struct a narrative.”

Smith is a long-time col­lab­o­ra­tor of Amer­i­can visu­al artist Chris­t­ian Mar­clay, the pair hav­ing worked togeth­er on the mon­u­men­tal film essay The Clock. Smith applies some of the lan­guage of mon­tage to Have You Seen My Movie?, but his film is intend to be shown in movie the­atres, not exhi­bi­tion spaces. He tells us that he was try­ing to blur the lines between ​“mon­tage art film and con­ven­tion­al cin­e­ma”, which is per­haps the most inter­est­ing aspect of this unique exam­i­na­tion of Hol­ly­wood sto­ry­telling and a love let­ter to the mag­ic of cinema.

Have You Seen My Movie? is cur­rent­ly screen­ing on tour at var­i­ous venues around the UK. Find out more by fol­low­ing @paulantonsmith1 on Twitter.