This comprehensive new monograph on the influential British artist-filmmaker—renown for his playful and formally ingenious subversion of the everyday world—contains essays by Ian Christie, Martin Herbert, Kathrin Meyer, and Ethan de Seife.

Herbert’s text provides an incisive overview of Smith’s work over the past four decades while Christie examines Smith’s oeuvre within the context of English eccentricity. Meyer’s essay discusses Smith’s film The Black Tower in relation to absence and abstraction while de Seife looks at cinematic scale through the prism of Smith’s Gargantuan.

‘You hear it everywhere: Cinema is tipping over – its epic and dramatic forms are spilling over into television, avant-garde and experimental films have fled to the galleries, and all the images that once belonged to it are now available everywhere, anytime. At the Austrian Film Museum, we tend to refrain from such sweeping and simple-minded swan songs. For this very reason, we are honoured to participate in Vertical Cinema – a project committed to taking one step at a time. Instead of trying to tip cinema in its entirety into the digital netherworld, this project is content with just tipping the screen – observing how an artform changes if you respectfully chafe at its edges.’  – Alexander Horwath, Director of the Austrian Film Museum