London bearings, lost and found: John Smith’s the black tower

This article addresses an influential short film, The Black Tower (John Smith, 1986), and explores how it visualizes the process of disorientation in a rapidly changing London. Through its politically charged envisioning of demolition and its representational experiments with typology, Smith’s film provokes important questions about the experience of maintaining one’s bearings in relation to a changing built environment. With its compulsive attention to an unspectacular water tower, The Black Tower asks us to consider those structures and features which have little purchase beyond a particular neighbourhood, but which for people in that neighbourhood might serve very important functions, from the affective and psychological to the practical and logistical. The article argues that the ‘undramatic displacement’ we see in The Black Tower is an important and instructive example of how screen representations can evoke the experiential unease generated by urban systems and urban flux – and that late twentieth-century East London provided fertile conditions for such unease.