A review of the film Open Unit.
The appearance of a new Smith film from Paul Antick is a source of genuine joy. Throughout all of the Smith films that I have seen (which I think is most of them), I find myself marvelling at the simplicity of their conceit, and the complexity of what thoughts and feelings they induce. I often find myself laughing, or at least wanting to.
What we most often (though not always) see is Smith (played by Antick) walking into the frame of a fixed image that depicts a landscape – most typically a space either between buildings or where concrete meets vegetation – and then walking away from the camera. Industrial estates, urban and near-urban pathways where the city meets the countryside, wryly framed graffiti and/or signs: Smith just keeps on walking, his stride purposeful, almost always dressed in black, with black backpack and cap, his hands by his side (I’ll return to the hands later).
The rhythm varies, but each shot lasts a few seconds, and then another, and another, and another, hypnotically repeating (though not without exceptions) for about 10 minutes (although some of the wider Smith films, particularly those featuring his erstwhile companion Willing, involve quite different footage – like in 2023’s Smith in Malaya, where we see still images from the Antick/Smith family archive, as well as archival photographs and contemporary moving images from Batang Kali, the site of a massacre of 24 Malayan workers by Britain’s Scots Guards in 1948).
I feel like I could watch Smith walking for much longer than the films generally last – and Open Unit (stylised as OPEN UNiT) is no exception. Set around Seinäjoki, a small Finnish town about twice as far north of Helsinki as Tampere, Open Unit sees Smith walk through its quiet, liminal landscapes, passing a huge shopping centre called Ideapark (described on its website as occupying ‘a whopping seven hectares, with over 100 attractive stores of all kinds. In addition to the stores, restaurants and entertainment, Ideapark’s services include a day-care centre, a pharmacy, opticians, a fitness centre, hairdressing and barber salons, and health services’), a set of padel courts called Battle Ground, and the stadium of Veikkausliiga club, SJK (currently managed by Stevie Grieve, a Scot who never was a professional player, but who did do some analysis and scouting for teams like Dundee United and St Johnstone in the late 2010s/early 2020s, and who is, according to Wikipedia, ‘close personal friends with F1 driver Ross Stewart’ [who may or may not be a real person]).
Smith, today, is, or puts himself in the place of, one of those patients, engaging (and inviting us as viewers to engage) in some speculative psychogeography
The promenade of Open Unit is in particular framed by a quotation from the Törnävä Psychiatric Hospital Museum in Seinäjoki, stating that ‘units were categorised as open or closed. In open units patients had the freedom to venture outside.’ We then see Smith (although he is not identified as such in this film) walking away from the camera along paths alongside buildings that seem to match those of the Törnävä site that can be found on Google Images, around the Seinäjoki landmarks identified above, and then back to Törnävä at the end. Although the site was not functional as a mental hospital after 1946, the implication might nonetheless be that Smith, today, is, or puts himself in the place of, one of those patients, engaging (and inviting us as viewers to engage) in some speculative psychogeography as we consider what a balm those 100 attractive stores and the chanting of Stevie Grieve’s name might have been to the troubled minds of Törnävä’s inmates as they took their leave for the day from their psych ward and peers.
The Smith films set in the UK cannot help but evoke, at least for this viewer, a certain sense of the shitness of contemporary Britain, and perhaps modernity in general. As if one had taken the dorsal figure of Caspar David Friedrich’s now-ubiquitous Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), added an element of Baudelairean flânerie, but migrated said figure from fin de siècle Paris and into Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran’s Crap Towns series, via the terroristic walks of the shooters in Alan Clarke’s Elephant (1989). There remains the fascination with detritus and decay that we get in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), but revealing a simultaneously fascinating, hilarious and mildly depressing sense of British tarmac mediocrity. Because the British of course cannot compete with the French for extremity (at least on their own soil), since the sites in which Smith is caught in the UK films have undergone a character bypass to match the kind of bypass (as in ringroad) spaces that Smith wanders. You know, like Patrick Keiller or Iain Sinclair (and Andrew Kötting) on Panadol.
To be clear, I am referring to the sense of space that the Smith films evoke, not to the films or Smith themselves, which, as mentioned, are inspired if not hilarious. And even if Antick is at times borrowing without shame from Keiller, his works are in fact every bit the art form that are the latter’s jaunts with Robinson – and if you ask me, every bit as important.
Now, I’m talking about the British Smith films because while I am happy enough to betray my bourgeois sense of domestic space and to assign a paradoxically crap beauty to where Smith walks, I am less sure that I can say the same of Finland and with any confidence pronounce Seinäjoki a ‘crap town’ (I mean, in addition to Grieve, SJK has also attracted in recent years British players like Lewis Strapp, Jake Jervis and Billy Ions, suggesting maybe at least some affinity between the UK and Finland, but maybe there is more Seine in Seinäjoki than I could ever know).
But not only does Smith’s gallivant around the Finnish town suggest not so much a relief from mental illness as a sense that the spaces of contemporary capitalism (shopping centres, padel courts, football stadia) themselves induce a form of mental illness (capitalism as brain damage). Indeed, if the shopping centre now presents itself, in English, no less (rather than Suomi), as an ‘ideapark,’ then it would suggest that the only legitimate ideas these days are capitalist dreams of commerce and consumption (not just stores, but also ‘restaurants and entertainment… a fitness centre’!). To think any differently – including by walking to the ideapark rather than doing what any sane person does and drive to the carpark that takes up a good number of those seven hectares – is clearly to show that you need to be in Törnävä.
Smith walks with aimless purpose, at one point even heading straight for a brick wall – just as we all are perhaps doing in the contemporary world.
Here we might consider Smith’s gait. When he strides across Britain, he seems most clearly to embody the kind of repressed rage that is the inevitable result of experiencing the specialised bullying that is to exist as a British institutional subject (this is the Alan Clarke element). And yet, in the Finnish context, Smith’s wilful strides seem to convey a more abstract meaning, perhaps because of my unfamiliarity with Seinäjoki, but nonetheless transforming flânerie away from a meander into timelessness and more walking as a means for contemporary masculinity to wrestle with its own (propensity to be a conduit for) fascism. The importance of timekeeping here is key: Open Unit obsessively announces three minutes past the hour, a spectrum-y tic that is matched in the other Smith films, where, with regard to Smith in Malaya, for example, the obsession with time reflects a similar wrangle by a British colonial subject confronted with their own complicity (even if indirect) with a brutal massacre covered up by the British state. That is, the fascistic imposition of the clock is internalised in the body, which walks to escape an asylum that is in fact immanent, filling not only all of space with its capitalist madness/crapness, but also all of time (9:03, 10:03, 16:03, etc). In this sense, not only is Antick’s physical performance virtuosic, but it also embodies a kind of despair that is a long distance from the fashionable forays of Robert Macfarlane and his ilk. Smith walks with aimless purpose, at one point even heading straight for a brick wall – just as we all are perhaps doing in the contemporary world. What is more, he seems on occasion almost to walk through the same frame twice, but maybe just adjusted by a slight angle, or with the camera advanced maybe 10 metres or so, an uncanny amount of difference that does indeed make one wonder for his sanity and the sanity of the world that the film depicts. A montage of fear and trembling.
I know the phenomenon. My family used to organise long distance car rallies, and I found myself once walking in circles around a hotel carpark in I cannot even remember where (I hate myself for saying this, but it was somewhere like Namibia) for a good hour or two as all of the rally’s participants ate and watched me do it from a patio. I must have been gesticulating and talking to myself; my mother told me that everyone was made very uncomfortable by my performance. But my energy was pent up and needed to be expressed somehow. It’s certainly not always via walking, but it was on this occasion, and it was a kind of hurried, head-down walk, exacerbated by the circular route around the carpark and the inescapability of the petropolitical era through its ubiquitous fucking vehicles.
for Smith to be ‘in’ a place suggests that the place closes in upon him.
And so to Antick’s hands. I had not noticed this before, but, at least in this film, he only swings his left arm back and forth, meaning it functions as his metronome, while the right hand rests generally by his side. What his right hand regularly does, however, is a kind of twitch whereby his fingers flip up close to touching his own palm, before then flipping back down to rest at his side. Smith’s tic betrays an Antick disposition, perhaps, as he wanders around suburban hamlets, with his opening and closing hand reflecting his status as a supposed inmate from the open unit discovering that he is in fact inside an even bigger ‘closed unit’ called modernity.
Indeed, many of the Smith films are called ‘Smith in [add place name],’ suggesting a sense of closure, in that for Smith to be ‘in’ a place suggests that the place closes in upon him. Here, however, we have no ‘in,’ but just the Open Unit, with Antick seeming to suggest that it is not a chaotic and disordered outside that threatens our sanity so much as the inability for us now to escape what Brett Anderson once called ‘the asphalt world.’ Smith’s dorsality is here important, too; for vertebrate masculinity is what creates the ‘in,’ a process that involves a rejection and subsequently deep fear of the ‘out,’ which is by association/distinction not only queer, but also, perhaps, invertebrate. Smith may never turn back; but his upright body has to deal with the nostalgia that is imposed upon it by a world that is closing fast.
We might wonder that the plants, as well as the odd wobble that Antick/Smith performs in his walks, would in principle convey a non-linear and unruly world all around Smith. And yet, it is a flora and a gait that are all but conquered, the former retained in particular to remind us (like the restaurant called Nostalgia upon which we linger, one of a few shots without Smith in the film) that it is closed off, defanged of its anti-capitalist potential.
As Smith walks from Britain to Finland and further afield, then, his is an odyssey through the closed spaces of global capital, and his is thus an imaginary that surpasses those of the other filmmaker-artists mentioned above. There can be, as Open Unit suggests at its climax, a blue sky above us that fills the frame, a final (perhaps the only remaining) ‘open’ space – a blue and ‘out’ beyond that may elude closure. It is a space of madness, to have one’s head in the clouds. But not only is to live that way ‘still life’ (to evoke Anderson once again), but it is perhaps the only life worthy of the name. Paul Antick’s Smith films open space up for hope – even as they brilliantly observe and perform (against) the all-enveloping nature of crapitalism. For this they make me richer in ideas than any Ideapark, with its hairdressing and barber salons, could ever hope to be. Open Unit is a wonderful addition to this canon, and I highly recommend that it be published for more people to be able to encounter it.
Image: Screenshot of Open Unit.
