"The Girl Chewing Gum" is an 11.5-minute short film from 1976, so it has its 40th anniversary this year. It is one of the most known works by British filmmaker John Smith today. He is still very much alive and was in his 20s when he shot this film. I cannot say anything positive about this really. First of all, by 1976 it was really unusual to still make black-and-white films. second of all, everybody could have made this movie. He is just out in the street filming strangers and commenting on what they do and what he sees. So yeah, it's a documentary. People say the most interesting films are about random people who aren't famous at all, but this film shows that it can also be the least interesting films about this group of people. I definitely don't recommend the watch. Very boring little film.

Excellent short film. In addition to previous comments, I'd like to add that the The Girl Chewing Gum could be seen as a visual rendering of the ubiquitous and unanswerable question whether "art imitates life" or "life imitates art".

The question this film actually poses, seems to be if reality exists in itself (that is, independent of something like culture, emotion, our actions in it, etc),which implies that we, human beings that we are, can never really touch upon it (that we are mere spectators) - or that reality is the product of man's intervening in it, the product of our relations with it and the actions we make.

In other words: does the girl chew her gum because she is "a girl chewing gum" (existing independently from her on screen appearance),or is she chewing her gum for the sole reason that she is being perceived chewing (by the camera, and by us)?

As the short of jean-luc Godart, "Charlotte et son jules" (1960),or "the big shave" (1967) of scorsese, this short movie won the "famous" Oberhausen festival.

Yes, remember, in 1962, 26 movie-makers rated a proclamation at Oberhausen to make the German movie industry more modern and to say good-bye to the old-german-movie-style...So after that, a sort of "new-wave" appeared (in 68 for instance, Hellmut Costard made sensation with his short where people could see a talking-penis...that's maybe not the more interesting movie that had been maid, but it was a step for the expression freedom...).

And this year, the festival have 50 years old...and revealed a lot of new talent during this period (Zbigniew Rybczinski, the french Michel Gondry, the britain John Smith, the americans Laura Wadddington and Kenneth Anger...and that's in Oberhausen too that the first short of Roman Polanski were projected)

So that's in that environnement that "the girl chewing-gum" was projected in 1976...and, as a lot of movie of this festival, this one have a total liberty of narration. With a funny "british-touch" the director build the movie as he wants it to be (in a strict sense)...a rare curiosity that had to be seen as "the big shave" or so many...