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A Film Guide to Virtual Death
Author: Simon Sellars • Apr 24th, 2007 •Category: death of affect, film, invisible literature, media landscape, short stories, television
This is Xander Walker’s excellent no-budget film of Ballard’s dark, scathing short story ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (one of the last shorts JGB ever wrote, unfortunately):
For reasons amply documented elsewhere, intelligent life on Earth became extinct in the closing hours of the 20th Century. Among the clues left to us, the following schedule of a day’s television programmes transmitted to an unnamed city in the northern hemisphere on December 23, 1999, offers its own intriguing insight into the origins of the disaster.”
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J.G. Ballard. ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992).
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Not, perchance, the late film critic Alexander Walker?
Fun stuff, anyway. I like the clips credit at the end.
i wouldn’t think so; he was one of JGB’s mortal enemies…
xander, are you out there? *who* are you?
Ballard spoke quite fondly of him in the ‘Live in London’ interview elsewhere on this site:
“I’ve always respected the Evening Standard’s film critic, Alexander Walker; I think he’s a very liberal man for the most part. But halfway through Crash’s press conference at Cannes, he suddenly got up with a flourish and walked straight out. And when he got back to London, he wrote a piece calling Crash the most depraved film ever made. To me, this represents Total Artistic Success!”
As for the story here, the connection it draws betweeen crappy televisual entertainment and the end of intelligent life probably wouldn’t have been such anathema to the old buffer…
i’ll take your word for it, tim. not being a pom i don’t know much about mr walker!
11:10 A.M. viewing video on ballardian.com sitting in cyber cafe in tangier. cyber punk is dead. long live reality.
2:25 P.M. long live reality and dreams, and the space between the two.
I made this video in the fall of 2004. It was for a high school English seminar titled ‘Apocalypse Now?’. I was saddened by the news of JG Ballard’s death today and decided to check up on this site. Even though I was very flattered to see the video featured here, I removed it from youtube a little while back because I felt that it was really too ‘low budget’. I do not have a copy of the file at my university, but I will try to re-upload it when I get home. I was wondering today if Ballard himself may have seen this video since I read that he knew about this website.
When I read the short story for the class, it struck me that nearly everything described in the guide could be found on television in 2004, while some elements of the guide had moved to levels of depravity unforeseen even by Ballard. One program listed on the guide, a reenactment of the JFK assassination, is actually a playable videogame. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_Reloaded )
In the video, I used clips from television programs and news to show that the guide had become a reality.