John Dunkley-Smith is a Melbourne-based filmmaker whose work “relates more to those of structural filmmaking in North America and Europe (Frampton, Friedmann, Gidal, Jacobs, LeGrice, Sharits, Snow, Wieland) than to current ‘avant-garde' filmmaking in Australia.... (Dunkley-Smith's) films directly confront problems of structure, meaning, and the position (desire) of the spectator. The practice of the films is intellectual and analytic. Structure is less their subject than it is an object subjected to an investigation, an activity, a deconstruction....
“‘The thing that is of greatest concern to me is the “film"...that is “constructed” by the viewer as he/she apprehends, orders, re-orders the constituent elements of the projection/presentation/performance situation....'(Dunkley-Smith).... It is not...a self, or even a meaning which the films of Dunkley-Smith put forward...not some essence to be found glowing behind the screen (an author, a significance, a feeling), but rather a set of problems to be addressed, worked upon, and transformed....” --Sam Rohdie, Cinema Papers.
Cityscape Series is described by the filmmaker as “an open-ended and evolving series of films (each 10 minutes in length...) which draws motifs from inner sub/urban Melbourne. The series is intended for single-screen presentation in linear sequence or in various permutations of multi-screen format. Infinite extension of the work is (theoretically) possible - producing constantly ‘novel' relations/structures/co-incid-ences.”