The Tower That Looks Back:
John Smith’s The Black Tower and the Grammar of the Everyday
Sarp Sozdinler • 23.11.2025
The Black Tower (1987)
There is a particular Englishness to John Smith’s cinema that has nothing to do with heritage, period rooms, or stately traumas. It is an Englishness of bricks and paint, corner shops and bus routes; a lyricism of condensation on the window rather than the view beyond it. Out of these modest materials Smith builds linguistic, architectural, and/or auditory systems, in which the ordinary is portrayed as though to confess its strangeness. His films are less “about” things than about how things are said, seen, and heard: the way a voice manufactures authority, the way a cut manufactures time, the way a building manufactures a story simply by persisting in the frame.
Within this body of work, The Black Tower (1987) stands like its titular structure: inert, looming, apparently mute, and yet relentlessly talkative. If The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) famously reveals cinematic command as ventriloquism, and Associations (1976) shows language falling apart under the thrall of its own puns, The Black Tower converts a patch of local skyline into a metaphysical machine. A water tower, painted matte black, begins to appear everywhere the narrator goes, to an extent where the distinction between spatial reality and narrative construction begins to deteriorate. Sometimes it is near; sometimes impossibly far; sometimes it seems to have migrated towns, like an omen untethered from the thing it signifies. Along the way, “coincidence” curdles into “plot.” A neighborhood landmark becomes a stalking device. A topographical fact reassigns itself as an imperative mood.
Smith’s method is disarmingly simple. He stages a collision between a deadpan, lucid voiceover and a sequence of precise, painterly views: the tower against sky-fields of blue and red and green; the tower shorn from depth so it almost becomes a graphic sign; the tower half-hidden by terraced rooftops, as if shy of its own symbolism. What results is neither documentary nor fiction but an experiment in how meaning and perception form inside the process of editing. The camera is faithful to surfaces; the sound is faithful to narrative compulsion; and the viewer is perpetually torn between them. We watch a structure and hear a story until, by ordinary cinematic osmosis, the structure seems to produce the story and the story seems to concurrently alter the structure. In Smith’s cinema, this is the primal scene: the everyday as a trap for metaphysics, a hallucinatory vision set against the grain of its own banality. Home Suite (1993–94) inventories a departing flat so patiently that a doorjamb becomes inadvertently epic. Slow Glass (1988–91) uses a glazing shop to refract a city’s memory-work. Blight (1996) lets demolition rubble and displaced voices compose a requiem without ever raising its own voice. Lost Sound (2001, with Graeme Miller) hears the afterlife of the city through feral cassette-tape fragments. And later shorts, Flag Mountain (2010) and Dad’s Stick (2012), show how a single viewpoint or paint-stirrer can summon a life.
Through them all runs a constant procedure: pair an observed surface with a discourse that does not quite fit it, then allow the gap to do the thinking.
A grammar of haunting
What makes The Black Tower singular is the elegance with which Smith weaponizes repetition. The film builds a grammar of the gaze: establish the tower, cut away, return to it in a slightly dislocated relation, and so on, until spatial logic surrenders to a nearly psychic (or if I may, psychogeographic) continuity. This is not simply paranoia illustrated through image; it is paranoia meticulously constructed, a prototype of how attention, once captured, edits the world on the viewer’s behalf. To be “haunted” here is to suffer from a syntax: subject–tower–subject–tower, an alternating structure that comes to feel inevitable.
Color, as an opposing force, works as semiotic pressure. Those bold planes (crimson, viridian, near monochrome surfaces) compress depth into a faux sign language. The tower becomes a glyph, an alphabetic element that travels across shots and time. This is Smith’s quiet joke on structural/materialist cinema: he honors its insistence on the film’s material operations (color fields, duration, serial form) but refuses abstraction’s neutrality. His serial unit is a feeling, a nagging conviction that the world is returning your look with interest.
Coincidence is generally (and probably unfairly) considered a weakness in fiction, but here it is the engine. The tower’s recurrence counts as “evidence” for something innately unverifiable, but only because the film establishes its own measuring procedure. When Smith returns us to nearly the same viewpoint, the difference between frames bears the whole burden of meaning. “Coincidence” in a narrative sense becomes a function of framing in the cinematic realm. This is perhaps the most radical aspect of The Black Tower: its demonstration that editing is a metaphysical act.
The Black Tower (1987)
Negative space and the topographic memory
If Patrick Keiller maps ideologies onto landscape and Chris Marker threads memory through travel, Smith outsources the allegory to the street. He trusts the ordinary to raise its own questions if watched with sufficient stubbornness. In The Black Tower, geography is not a terrain to be excursed but a psychological ordeal: how to walk to the shop when the sky itself seems intent on sending you a message; how to find your footing when perspective collapses. The result is a matter of scale. With no chases, no revelations, no plot points in any conventional sense, the film arrives at suspense by compressing the radius of movement into a claustrophobic loop, until every step feels consequential in a way.
In this sense, one can argue that the black intervals perform a frugal ethics. Negative space protects the object from over-illustration; it grants the tower the dignity of not being constantly gazed at even as it becomes inescapable. The film’s most eloquent statement about belief happens precisely where nothing is shown: in the cut where our wanting consolidates into certainty. Smith’s oeuvre is to make that wanting visible when the image returns so that what we are seeing in the black between the looks is, disarmingly, ourselves.
Yet, the use of ellipsis in The Black Tower is, by nature, not defined by omission but by charge. By withholding an otherwise elemental connective tissue (no establishing map, no transit shots) Smith refuses to broker a rational itinerary between sightings. The gaps become causal in the process: The Kuleshov Effect is inverted; instead of cutting two images to create a third idea, Smith cuts image to absence so that the missing middle breeds the paranoid inference. The black functions like a magnet between shots, pulling noncontiguous places into one psychic territory.
Those brief black intervals do not merely punctuate sequence; they mint the film’s ontology. Each appearance of the tower is bracketed by an absence that functions like negative pressure: the image withdraws, our attention rushes in to fill the vacuum, and when the tower returns it arrives not as a building but as a slightly altered rerun of what we’ve just projected. The film turns black leader into a performative ellipsis, a place where the viewer’s anticipation edits the image ahead of time.
The negative space works three-fold here. First, it is temporal: the black screen dilates time without specifying its measure, so recurrence cannot be charted by clocks or timestamps, only by felt intervals. Secondly, it is spatial: darkness folds the city up; offscreen becomes everywhere-at-once, lending on the tower its impossible ubiquity. Third, it is material: the screen is allowed to be a physical surface again, reminding us that the “black tower” is also the blackness of cinema itself: the shutter; the emulsion’s unexposed state; the void from which images arrive and to which they obediently return.
The Black Tower (1987)
The voice that builds the building
Sound is another relentless tool that sharpens the edge of this void. The voice persists into darkness, an acousmatic guide that continues to build narrative pressure while denying us the reassurance of vision. Ambient hums and tonal beds sometimes slip under the black, sometimes fall away, so the ear is made to measure how empty the emptiness goes. The result is not theatrical suspense but everyday dread: the feeling that significance is waiting just off the visible range, that interpretation is a reflex.
Smith’s lucid yet sometimes almost bored voiceover offsets this effect; it does not “explain” the images so much as produce a set of expectations the images junk at their leisure. He tells us what he saw and when; the pictures second his claim just enough to implicate us in this dubious agreement. It might be tempting to read the tower as an allegory for any number of institutions here, but Smith encourages such readings only to stall them at the threshold of certainty: the scrupulous refusal to let symbol overrun object. The tower is a tower. The tower is not only a tower. Both statements remain true, and the film’s tension lives in keeping them neighbors.
If The Black Tower stages paranoia as a visual event, then Om (1986), made just a year earlier, translates that same tension into pure sound. A monk sits facing the viewer, shaved head gleaming under a halo of window light. We hear a chanted drone, and the association is immediate: meditation, transcendence, the ritual calm of the East. Then Smith cuts to his perilous reveal in the same way he places the tower in the center of his vision: a close-up of a blatantly industrial electric razor shearing what little left of the monk’s hair. The “chant” we’ve been hearing is not a mantra anymore but the buzz of the machine. Reverence collapses into domestic farce, and enlightenment is replaced by humdrum grooming.
This single gag, so swift it is almost elusive, carries within it the entire architecture of Smith’s cinema. The world, he suggests, is built out of misheard frequencies: a sound, a word, a repeated shape; each poised to unravel when its source is exposed. In The Black Tower, this lesson matures from joke into a functioning system. The buzz of traffic and the mechanical murmur of urban life become the background from which the tower’s “presence” emerges. The soundscape is not accompaniment but instigator: a near-subliminal vibration that renders the environment sentient. The tower doesn’t need to move; the air around it does and it’s enough to shake the movement into being.
Between Om and The Black Tower, Smith pranks us into seeing that sound is not an afterthought to image. What we see depends on how we listen; it precedes and often outlives vision. It is the auditory faculties that create the hallucination. Silence, therefore, is never neutral, alas borderline political; when the screen goes black in The Black Tower, the audio continues to breathe, establishing continuity where sight fails, alive with frequencies we misrecognize as emptiness.
Smith’s wry politics: a joke that turns into method
If there is a politics in Smith’s humor, it lies not in satire but in procedure, in his methodology. His jokes are systems, experiments in how authority coagulates under pressure: the bossy voice of The Girl Chewing Gum, the lexical avalanches of Associations, the mock-solemn chant in Om. But the humor here is often not an exit; it is the door in for the viewer to participate. It exists only to reveal how easily our confidence in seeing and saying can be tilted. The Black Tower is the most austere expression of such tilting: a cosmic joke that took the shape of existential dread, told with the straightest face imaginable, in which the punchline is that there is no punchline, only the practical consequences of form. Once the film teaches us how to look, it never relieves us of that training.
Smith’s later work confirms the method’s fertility. Home Suite turns the act of naming (mold, grout, lino) into an archaeological excavation of sorts. Blight discovers within civic disruption a choral prosody of fragments. Dad’s Stick extracts color theory from a father’s tools and then, devastatingly, grief from color theory. Across these films, Smith keeps faith with a principle that The Black Tower articulates with immaculate clarity: meaning is contingent, procedural, and revisable. It is not embedded in objects but negotiated with them, again and again, until the objects themselves begin to look back.
What begins as whimsy ends as critique, because the method exposes how authority—in language, in image, in narration—arises from arrangement rather than truth. The Girl Chewing Gum does not mock the voice of control so much as anatomize it: the narrator’s commands, at first playful, grow tyrannical through repetition, until the act of description becomes indistinguishable from the act of domination. By demonstrating how order is constructed, he restores to the viewer the capacity to doubt it. By converting the joke into method, he gives us a discipline of perception: one that refuses both irony’s detachment and ideology’s certitude. What remains is a fragile equilibrium between doubt and delight, a cinema that models itself as a kind of civic seeing.
Home Suit (1993-94)
The endurance of the silhouette
Why does The Black Tower endure and why does that blunt silhouette still feel inexhaustible long after the viewing? Perhaps it is because the film does not depend on revelation; it assembles the minimal kit for normality and sustains it through repetition and everyday chores. In this way Smith achieves something paradoxically grand: a metaphysical cinema without metaphors or rather, with metaphors so strictly tethered to their surfaces that they cannot drift into rhetoric.
Yet the film’s lingering power comes from something quieter. It endures because it teaches us a new grammar of attention, one in which looking is inseparable from listening, and the ordinary world is never complete until it has been momentarily estranged. The tower’s final reappearance is not resolution but a cognitive release: the realization that obsession and illumination share the same circuitry. What remains is the awareness that perception itself is recursive, that every act of seeing generates its own echo chamber, its own architecture of returning signs.
In this sense The Black Tower becomes a parable of spectatorship: a tacky instruction manual on how meaning enters the frame. Smith reveals that the apparatus of cinema and the apparatus of paranoia are built from the same materials: cuts, repetitions, ambient noise; the juxtaposition between the familiar and the uncanny. To watch his film is to feel the world learning to narrate itself through us, to sense the feedback loop between the material and the mental tighten until the difference collapses.
When the image finally darkens and the voice ceases, what we inherit is not the story of a man and a tower but the afterimage of human perception, a residual hum that insists that nothing is ever fully gone, just lingering on the threshold. The tower survives in this audiovisual economy, reconstituted as a place for both tranquility and peril each time we glance at a skyline, a chimney, a pylon, anything that interrupts our horizon with charge. Its endurance is ours and ours alone: the endurance of curiosity, of looking too long, and in this sense, the tower is a lens turned back upon us. It looks back because we look at it. It follows because we pursue it from shot to shot. With time it grows oppressive because we agree, as viewers, to mistake its recurrence for veiled intention. Smith shows us how easily cinema can prove (and conveniently disapprove) what it invents, and more generously how the smallest patch of its world, attended to with rigor and wit, can thicken into life long after the moment has passed.
