Vicky Smith is an artist film maker and academic who has worked in experimental animation and 16mm film for 30 years and has screened work internationally in galleries and at festivals.
Vicky was part of the London Film Makers Co-op, has a PhD in experimental film, is co-founder of artist collective Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF) in Bristol and lectures at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham.
Vicky is available for workshops, talks, screenings, and collaborations.
Contact: vickycbsmith@gmail.com
Peer Reviews….
“In Vicky Smith’s most abstract works to date, the body feels very present, as it does so often in her filmmaking. Her techniques for direct mark-making on the film’s surface are astonishing. Tiny white marks fiercely scratched into the black of the raw film-stock, pinpricks, tears and scratches becoming abrasions and bruises suggest physical vulnerability. Things dribbled onto the filmstrip, things scratched into it – the filmstrip, too, is paramount in Vicky’s films.” – David Curtis
“Having watched you make work live such as, Agitations, for Analogue Ensembles’[i] programme for Whitstable Biennale, performed Bicycle Tyre Track and project Noisy Licking, Dribbling & Spitting I’ve observed your whole body is invested in each step of your process, from making, performing and showing. You may preserve the language of cinema; the frame as unit of cinema, universal projection speeds, the close up and notions of genre as noted in your use of ‘the weepie’ but that’s where the alliance ends. Instead we’re treated to loud, sensitive, aesthetic explosions of raw physical manifestations of emotion, feeling and action but without any of the drama.” – Cathy Rogers
“Smith uses bodily fluids such as spit and tears as the material basis for the film’s imagery, interspersed with animated scratches on the surface of the celluloid. Smith invites an almost clinical engagement with these internal fluids. Enlarged on the screen, they resemble scientific microscopic images that bring us into an uncanny physical proximity with the artist’s body. The choice of material support – clear leader rather than negative stock – bestows on the film an ethereal quality that elicits both fascination and discomfort.” – Blood, sweat, and tears: Bodily inscriptions in contemporary experimental film by Kim Knowles (2013)
Maria Anastassiou
On Vicky Smith’s Shedding (2024) From PhD chapter:
Methodologies: Volatile Temporal Stacks: multiple exposure on 16mm analogue film.
Vicky Smith Shedding (2024)
Volatile Temporal Stacks: multiple exposure on 16mm analogue film.
“It is characteristic of perception that the object never appears except in a series of profiles, of projections. The cube is indeed present to me, I can touch it, see it; but I can never see it except in a certain way, which calls for and excludes at the same time an infinity of other points of view. One must learn objects, which is to say, multiply the possible points of view on them. The object itself is the synthesis of all these appearances. The perception of an object is therefore a phenomenon of an infinity of aspects. What does this signify for us? The necessity of making a tour of objects, of waiting, as Bergson said, until the ‘sugar dissolves’.
(Jean-Paul Sartre The Imaginary 1940, p8)
“Succession is an undeniable fact, even in the material world. Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that their history, past, present, and future, might be instantaneously unfurled like a fan, this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own. If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not that mathematical time which would apply equally well to the entire history of the material world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with
my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I Iike. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.”
(Henri Bergson The Evolution of Life — Mechanism and Teleology 1911, p5 )
In Bergson’s “little fact big with meaning” of “waiting for the sugar to dissolve”, a distinction is drawn between experienced, embodied time, hence duration, versus “mathematical time”, hence an abstract conception of time. The time for the sugar to dissolve, coincides with Bergson’s impatience, and brings him back into his body, staging, just as cinema does, a heightened temporal encounter with the world. Bergson does not directly reference cinema here, but it is impossible not to understand the sugar water as cinema. The sugar water is a domestic scene where “nothing happens” in Akerman’s cinema, the viewer being made aware of “every second passing through [their] body”; it is a 45 minute long zoom-in shot in Michael Snow’s Wavelength; it is a series of ten 10 minute shots of only clouds and sky in James Benning’s 10 Skies. Beyond (what has been called) durational cinema, this heightened temporal encounter with the world, “the seconds passing through your body”, is also staged in abstract, dialogue and narrative-free observational films; in complex, “impenetrable”, structural films accused of alienating and frustrating the viewer. And in the case of films that use multiple exposure, as I argue further on, it is staged in stacks of cinematic temporal fragments precariously piled up onto volatile heaps of superimpositions and palindrome images.
Jean Paul Sartre in his 1940 seminal work “The Imaginary” ensues from the embodied and abstract temporal conceptions explored in Bergson’s sugar water, to establish how perception and imagination are complexly intertwined, and never separate processes, that the idea of an object is total but less real, and the experience of it is incomplete but embodied. On perception Sartre notes that “One must learn objects, which is to say, multiply the possible points of view on them. The object itself is the synthesis of all these appearances. The perception of an object is therefore a phenomenon of an infinity of aspects.” Sartre’s object, “synthesised in an infinity of appearances” is unmistakably aligned with the cubists, where artists were set on disrupting traditional techniques and ideas of classical perspective, by collaging and superimposing multiple facets and contrasting points of view onto a single surface. How can cubism with its invite to an “infinity of aspects” and Sartre’s affirmation to “make a tour of the object” be applied to a cinematic context? I propose that the multiple exposure can is the cinematic successor of the cubist collage. In the following section I argue that the multiple exposure produces spatial-temporal stacks that fragment the visual field and destabilize the concept of time as a linear and progressive continuum. I argue that multiple exposures are an expression of networked rather than singular events, tying them to social and material entanglements that the experimental filmmaker embodies, connections that are increasingly urgent to the politics of contemporary independent filmmaking practices.
In my exploration of these ideas, I analyse a number of experimental and artists’ films that use multiple exposure techniques, an interest that is also echoed in my own practice-based research. My analysis reflects on how artists have employed the possibilities offered specifically by the Bolex camera to explore the limits not only of the frame but also of the visible. Relating to what film theorist Sarah Cooper has called the perceptual imaginary space (Cooper, 2020), what these films achieve is to be absolutely true and faithful depictions of the pro-filmic reality, of that which is perceived, and yet absolutely unreal in that they depart from the reality that formed them, and produce in the viewer unreal or irreal -to use Sartre’s term- images, temporalities and spaces, so that which is imagined.
Building on Cooper’s theory, I propose a schematic understanding of multiple exposure as that of a tentacled, volatile, temporal stack. Onto it are precariously mounted, unstable and sliding off, the “infinity of aspects… the facets of the cube” gathered in the “tour of the object”. The temporal stack however, retains its material fidelity to the profilmic world of the documentary encounter, and makes a fissure into the conception of time as linear and progressive, constructing thus a uniquely cinematic experience.
All films I explore in this section, fully embrace their medium specificity and insist on exploring in depth the very particular functions and conditions of their apparatus, viscerally entangling them with their maker and the world, thus producing experiences that could not have been realised in any other medium. This asserts the importance of what Kim Knowles appeals for in her 2024 work Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, that “in the modern media environment, to ignore media specificity is to abdicate the role of user for the role of used. The continued emphasis of media specificity, is, in fact, a model for living with the media technologies that pervade our lives, and for integrating them into more mindful, progressive and meaningful artistic practices” (Kim Knowles, 2024)
The contemporary media specificity that Knowles calls for in 2024 is even more prescient only a couple of years later as I write this, since the world has become increasingly accustomed to wider and more saturated uses of AI technology in visual and written forms, splintering further the trust and belief in the indexical nature of human expression and cultural production in all their forms, be it in photography, film, music or painting, the written word or communications. A turn towards materialism is not a turn away from the future or the newest of technologies, but rather a re-assertion of technology as a spectrum of choice rather than an inexorable continuum of progress. This view resists late-capitalism narratives of obsoleteness, be it of cameras, projection equipment or even human contingency and creativity itself. The connection to and deep contact with certain materialisms and media specificities is also precisely what drives my own practice in 16mm film, and extends beyond the specific use of the techniques that I describe in this section.
In examining the following works I am considering the possibilities of the artisanal and independent use of 16mm film, and particularly in the use of the Bolex Camera. This section thus acts as a distillation of my own methodological approach in the use of the Bolex camera for the filming of my phd research film and in my wider practice. The possibilities of the medium that transpire through the following works are examples of a very particular technique, as well as being refined expressions of the appeal of the contemporary use of the Bolex Camera; what type of filmic encounters the practice can mobilise, what kinds of relationships to the world this mode of filming engenders for the filmmaker and their subjects, and what relationship to the real and the imaginary it enables for the viewer.
What is Multiple Exposure
The function of in-camera multiple exposure, involves shooting some film and then rewinding the footage to then refilm over the same section again, sometimes multiple times. The most common result from this method, is the production of superimposed images onto the same frame. Other results include effects produced by masking parts of the frame and re-filming different sections (footnote something that for example Maya Derren uses in Meshes to produce images of multiple Mayas” David John Rhodes), or strobe-like imagery through frame by frame filming (in the case of Rose Lowder). What has fascinated me in this research, is how this relatively archaic function which has been available to filmmakers for close to 100 years now, is still being used by artists to yield dramatically wide-ranging effects, which inform the possibilities of the film material and especially of the structuring cinematic time. Despite the wide use of this technique however, I have found very little in the bibliography dedicated exclusively to examining the practice and its effects, even as there are many citations on individual films that employ it, and especially in writing by filmmakers themselves. Hence, I was compelled to produce a comparative analysis of examples in an attempt to propose a theoretical context around the practice, which in turn informs my own filmmaking and methodological approach.
Vicky Smith’s Shedding (2024, 4 min, 16mm, silent)
Bristol based filmmaker Vicky Smith in her 2024 film Shedding explores the possibilities of multiple exposure and superimposition in very different ways, by performing in front of the camera herself, something that resonates with her wider practice and interest in the direct relationship between the filmmaker’s body and the film surface, but radically departs from her previous mostly non-representational work by depicting images of her own body and face, naked and starkly lit before the camera. During the 4 minute self-portrait film, Smith stands in front of a black background, framed in a close-up portrait shot of head and shoulders. Initially she remains still in front of the camera staring intensely into the lens. This is followed by gradual movement which builds up to a dizzying, disorientating experience of multiple exposures of her movements superimposed onto one other.
At first the film appears to employ a simple structure, of performing in front of the camera, and yet it required a complex and precise structure, which the filmmaker achieved over a long period of time, through painstakingly filming and re-exposing up to ten times “50ft of film at a time, processing, modifying and shooting again”. (Anastassiou interview with Vicky Smith September 2025 – Included in Appendix #?)
Smith uses the black background and her contrasting, starkly lit body to re-expose with precision new areas of the frame. With every re-exposure, she re-activates the film surface, across movement and time, and expands the possibilities of collapsing space, bodies and temporalities onto one single surface. Her movements in Shedding express a compression of time whilst being an extension of material and body. Usually repetition unfolds over time, but here repetition very eloquently translates also to vertical layering (if we were to understand conventional filmic time as horizontal, and layering of imagery as vertical). Time and repetition here are thus inscribed as layer and duration.
The illuminated body is as significant in this film as the negative space of the dark, shadowed background, which is what enables the next exposure to register onto the celluloid with precision and definition. Smith re-filmed on the same area of film for up to 10 or 12 times, and every re-exposure is a prompt of the possibilities nestled within the dark surface, reminding us of how photosensitive film actually works. When light hits the silver halide crystals which are suspended in a gelatin emulsion on the film, a latent image is formed through a chemical change within the film. Once developed this latent image is revealed and fixed. Any surface on the film frame however that has not received any or much light, essentially doesn’t have a latent image within it, hence still contains the uninterrupted halide crystals that can then potentially inscribe the next image.
With every re-exposure and movement of her illuminated body, Smith pulls out latent images from the uninterrupted, un-illuminated areas, teasing out the silver halides, and her own likeness out of the shadows. What the filmmaker achieves so masterfully in this film, through the structural collaboration between her, the camera and the film strip, is to articulate something of how light represents finality and the lack of light represents potentiality.
The projection event is important when considering this film as Smith draws our attention to the potentiality of negative space within the making of the image echoed in the specificities of the black and light of its projection. The projection of celluloid film is still the only way to have truly blacked areas, in the sense of the absence of light, whereas in digital projection even in the darkest of shadows the digital projector still beams even an infinitesimal amount of light. This can be tested by obscuring part of the projection (with one’s hand for example) and observing that in analogue projection the dark areas match the shadow produced by the obstruction, unlike in digital projection where the dark areas of the projection still contain some light. For Smith, projecting film prints of her work, is an important aspect of her practice, connected to her commitment to the medium and the importance of experiencing work on its original format.
Self-portraits
When I look in the mirror, I can’t see myself. Perhaps the difficulty I experience is due to the static posture I must assume in front of the glass. If I glance away, I’m gone—like a butterfly escaping the net. I can set up mirrors to view all sides of my head. In profile I look as though I were focused on something else, someone else. Looking at myself from the back, I am surprised by the roundness of my shoulders. But when I see myself obliquely in this way, it isn’t a true encounter: I can’t engage with myself. (Celia Paul – New York Review Article)
As seen from two of the examples in my analysis so far, multiple exposure has been employed in the context of self-portraiture. I believe that there is an interesting correlation with the experimenting nature of multiple exposure practice and the setting of the studio, where artists have often used themselves as the most willing available subjects in a process that involves a high degree of risk, vulnerability and uncertainty.
Celia Paul, a prolific self-portraitist, in her frustrated attempt to stage a “true encounter” with her own image, touches on something that resonates with the practice of multiple exposure, and Sartre’s assertion to “make a tour of the object”. Paul describes the process of looking in the mirror as a fragmented and oblique encounter. In the next lines of her article she describes how once she’s looked in the mirror, she goes away and paints from memory, retaining the imagination of the cubist views in the mirror. Self-portraiture, is a manifestation of the “solitary discipline” (Celia Paul) of painters and artist-filmmakers’ alike, a way of having full control of the subject and the setting, locked in a cycle of absolute interiority and experiment. It is compelling to consider Vicky Smith’s Shedding alongside the painterly practice of self-portraiture, as they so closely share conditions of making: The artist in her studio / the filmmaker in her studio, working entirely on their own, perhaps using a mirror, or working from memory, revisiting the work continuously and obsessively. British artist’s Celia Paul’s prolific self-portraiture is a potent counterpart to Shedding, some of Paul’s most famous compositions even reminiscent of Smith’s choice of framing. In the opening quote Celia Paul demonstrates a similar interest to Smith, in the distortion and fragmentation of her likeness, and the need to capture it in movement and layered angles, rather than in stillness.
Elsewhere Paul adds:
The first self-portrait that looked like me came about when a charcoal image I’d made in a sketchbook printed itself onto the opposite page. The shadowy imprint miraculously suggested a likeness, whereas the initial drawing was wide of the mark. Was it the reversal that made this self-portrait authentic? A mirror image is a reversal, after all.
Of course film is a reversal, a mirror image and an imprint.
Throughout the course of her career Celia Paul has strived to escape external representations of her likeness, made during her time as Lucien Freud’s “muse” and instead to paint her own image, against Freud’s depictions of her as a downcast and coy, objectified young woman. In her self-portraits Paul casts her gaze directly and frontally at the viewer, her intense look a result of “looking in the mirror” and then looking away and painting from memory.
Both Smith’s distorted facial features and Paul’s “shadowy imprints” contest so many art historical and cinematic depictions of women by men, captured through the inherent misogyny of the male gaze, that are “not necessarily wrong, or bad, but notably partial. Misogyny whatever else it might be, is a form of distortion, a way of not seeing, of assuming both too much and too little” Zadie Smith NY Article – By distorting her own features Smith presents herself “obliquely” and challenges whatever expectations might be placed on her, as a woman and as a filmmaker.
Smith’s direct gaze to the camera is moreover a locking into the filmmaker’s own intensely concentrated mode of making, when she must have held all the information needed to master all elements of the production. Smith filmed everything herself, in a pared down studio setting of two 1K lights and a black backdrop. (Anastassiou interview with Smith September 2025) She used a hand-cranked Bolex camera which required her “to move from performer to camera operator with each Bolex wind” an additional, concealed choreography to that of the movements depicted on camera. The seen and unseen choreographies involved in this film, inform one another, as the need to move back and forth, before and behind the camera in order to wind it up every 30 seconds of shooting (which is the maximum time a Bolex camera can film for), actually affected the choices that the filmmaker made, reminding us that “the things that are seen in film rest on a foundation of what is unseen…the set of technical and material conditions for the image onscreen already includes explicitly gendered bodies, before anyone even steps in front of the camera.” (Genevieve YUE Girl Head). Smith initially conceived of shaking her head in order “to mask the changed position. It worked well and I came to the realisation that shedding is not an easy process and that shaking the head was a part of it”. Hence the movements in front of the camera, developed out of a combination of trouble shooting, and a desire to explore the possibilities evoked by the idea of shedding.
Feminist Materialities
The filmmaker’s face is gradually distorted by the multiple exposures, creating a disorientating effect, where parts of the face move in and out of position and definition. This effect creates an aura of features and shapes. The simultaneous, layered self-portraits of the filmmaker compete for demarcation of the overall outward impression of herself. The oscillation from distortion to likeness confronts the viewer with the question of what it is that makes one’s appearance individual and how minute changes in the ratios and graphic details of a face can transform it, and evoke different psychological states and responses. More metaphorically the oscillation between distortion and likeness, suggests the layers of masks or identities one carries and Shedding could be interpreted as a dream-like unselfing and a “blurring of the individual’s outlines and boundaries” (Luce Irrigaray)
Smith has previously been concerned with her own visceral relationship to film, in works such as Noisy Licking , Dribbling & Spitting (2014), and whilst Shedding continues that line of enquiry, it takes it into a new direction. The explicitness of the self-portraiture, the filmmaker representing themselves as both maker and subject makes this a striking work, as empowering as it is immensely vulnerable. The title suggests layers, which resonates with the process of its making: the layering of exposures onto the celluloid film emulsion. Moreover, shedding is a process of disposal, of embodied or psychological shedding: shedding hair or skin or tears. Shedding layers of past experience, of expectations. Furthermore it can be an expression of revelation, as in shedding light. Shedding light onto a subjectivity and interiority that comes across in the starkly confronting image of the filmmaker, performing in their solitary discipline, stacking an “infinity of facets” onto the volatile stack of appearances.
Conclusion: A temporal stack
In multiple exposure cinematic time loses its indexical accuracy and from a singular temporal slice, becomes instead a tentacled, volatile, temporal stack. Onto it are precariously piled, unstable and sliding off, the “infinity of aspects… the facets of the cube” gathered during the “tour of the object”. Dropping none of its material fidelity however, the temporal stack is still connected to the profilmic reality of the world and of the documentary encounter, making an intervention into a conception of time as linear and progressive, and constructing a unique type of cinematic experience.
The idea of the stack uneases both temporal and spatial linear continuums, making multi-exposure an expression of networks rather than singularities. These networks do not refer to narrative cinema constructions or fictional worlds, and by arguing that these films make seen what is normally unseen, it is not that they are “activating imagining in the sense of conjuring mental images of what is not there,
rather the spatial structure is that of both perception and imagination due to the impossible perspectives on the basis of what is seen.” (Cooper) The networks of images express the entanglements that directly rapport to the body of the filmmaker and their own networks of social and material entanglements, which are increasingly urgent to the politics of independent filmmaking practices.
The opening up of the cinematic to the “infinity of aspects” (Sartre) make the experience of multiple exposure contingent and residual, the traces of each temporal inscription, gradient rather than opaque. This makes multiple exposures intimately linked to a lived experience of consciousness of the world as provisional, layered and palindromic. In their palimpsest contingency, and yet continuing fidelity to the real, multiple exposures invite us as Celia Paul does to “look obliquely” in order to use our imagination “to join the world rather than escape it” as philosopher Iris Murdoch compels us to.
Vicky Smith 