Reception
Smith won Best Director at the 2011 West Australian Screen Awards for Then She Was Gone. In his acceptance speech, he dedicated the award to a Curtin University lecturer, who had told Smith on several occasions that he would never succeed as a director.
Smith has also received a West Australian Screen Award for his 2004 documentary on W.A. truck drivers, Grinding to a Halt. He was nominated for Best Experimental Film for Party For One (2007) and Best Director for Love Like You've Never Been Hurt (2009).
Discussing Mere Oblivion at Tropfest 2007 for Empire magazine, Oscar Hillerstrom wrote "Melange of stylistic influences leads to a black and white story about a man and his grandmother. Not quite funny, with sharp, truthful barbs."
Reviewing Love Like You've Never Been Hurt in The West Australian, film critic Mark Naglazas wrote "Smith skilfully replicates a Woody Allen movie, right down to the black-and-white credits and the old-time jazz-inflected soundtrack, making for a kooky and charming contrast: the sophisticated New York romantic comedy relocated to a daggy Perth setting that climaxes (cringe) in front of the Bell Tower".
Caught Short programmer Katharine Rogers described Then She Was Gone as "Smith’s playful observation of unrequited love and the gross transformations people undertake in order to win affection. Confidently written and uniquely styled, Smith’s film is an original take on a common theme."
Read more about this topic: Burleigh Smith
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)