Sensible Shoes

"Sensible Shoes: pictures from television advertising spots, talk shows, pictures from Hollywood films - particularly clichés of the action variety; 'show-downs' - and 'love' (romance) pictures that take Times as the content. All this gives a loose context for the story told by a 'voice over'. More precisely, many short episodes, scurrilous stories with plenty of black humour, artfully woven into a whole. Sensible Shoes, is the art of telling a hundred stories in ten minutes.
The picture always comes first, usually mute, a voice comments - apparently tautologically - on the things shown in the pictures. The there is a deviation, in picture or sound, and you have something new. The idea as such is simple; i.e. it is also possible to tell completely different stories with the existing pictures. For instance this story of the revenge of a deserted lover: (...)." "The Relationship of Picture. Copy & Reality" in Video in the Cinema screenings being shown in The Abaton, written by Lothar Kurzawa, TAZ Hamburg 22nd May 1986. (Source, pdf, site web Rewind)

"I love eidting, I really do. But I can't talk about my work unless I'm drunk. I was in a bar the other night with a woman. I was drunk then. We both were. I was trying to persuade her to do the voice-over for Sensible Shoes. This is what I said. "Well it's about this woman in a room on her own. She's watching the TV and reading the newspaper. ut not really watching. And not really reading. Day-dreaming mostly. Reminiscing about a one-time lover and fantasizing about new acquaintance. He's fantasizing too. In another room. But not about her. He looks a lot like me. In fact he is me. I play the man. H'e's watching TV also. A different program, at a different time maybe. Time is important. Manipulated. And words will come up on the screen. They are important too but in a different way. They will coincide with the voice-over. There are lots of other images too, but a lot of the time the screen will be blank. No, we don't see the woman and sometimes the visuals don't match the voice. And someone else is in another room at the same time. That's me too. But this time it is me. I'll be deciding what happens to the woman and the man. It's going to be Romance and violence. No sex though. it's not that sort of tape. That's it. But there's a surprise ending. And you see it differently the second time around OK. Will you do it? She said, I said 'No, what?". She said, "we don't have to go to those silly meetings". I'd heard it before but I'm really gen,erous. I give my friends all the best lines." (John Adams, description of Sensible Shoes in Recent British Video catalogue, 1983) (Source, pdf, site web Rewind)

"Sensible Shoes is a witty collision of fiction and reality, ironically rendered as a multi-textual pastiche of mass media and personal narratives. Adams' fragmented collage is structured on the stream-of-consciousness monologue of an unseen woman, who collapses fantasy and the everyday as she "zaps" the television dial and skims the newspaper. Seamlessly integrating her daydreams of romance with appropriated images of violence, love and consumerism from popular British TV programs and ads, Adams tells the story of how the mass media dictates the construction of personal narratives. Visuals, voiceover and on-screen words are juxtaposed in a tightly edited assemblage of off-air TV imagery, shrewd wordplay and visual puns. The source of the handwritten text that propels the spoken and image-driven narrative is revealed in an ironic twist at the tape's end. - Electronic Arts Intermix" (Source, cité depuis le site web Rewind)