Jeremy Reed at the JG Ballard Memorial, 2009. Photo: Rick McGrath.

West End Survival Kit, by Jeremy Reed. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-906742-07-2.

JEREMY REED IS A HUGELY PROLIFIC poet, novelist, biographer and spoken-word musician, the author of 15 novels, 16 poetry collections and 14 works of non-fiction since 1984. Yet despite that phenomenal output, he remains an exile in British letters. According to Reed, ‘People have reacted so nastily to me and tried to airbrush me out of the picture… The establishment never forgave me, because I used to give readings in heavy make-up’. That’s not a working method that was ever going to appeal to Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, who famously dubbed Reed ‘that effete little pseud’. He also sledged him as the ‘David Bowie of the poetry circuit’, an especially backhanded insult, given Reed’s sartorial style and the fact that among his back catalogue are biographies on Lou Reed, Marc Almond and Brian Jones. In fact, the latter provided one very revealing insight into the mind of Jeremy Reed. Once asked what he thought was the defining moment of the 60s, he replied: ‘I’d say it was the first time Brian Jones wore a girl’s polka-dotted blouse. It had never been done before’. In the same interview, he derided ‘the barbiturate poetry of Andrew Motion and those post-Larkin poets. Very grey, very drab’. And so the stage is set.

Following the pattern of this exile, whenever there is talk about the latter-day British writers who enjoyed the friendship, patronage or thematic repertoire of J.G. Ballard, invariably the same names are mentioned: Will Self and Iain Sinclair. Not Reed. Yet Reed and Ballard enjoy a long and very intriguing relationship. Reed’s science-fiction novel Diamond Nebula (1994), set in the 23rd century, even featured a film-director character obsessed by Bowie, Ballard and Warhol:

Her eye was arrested by an open photograph album … David Bowie at the Rainbow Theatre, 1972; at the LA Forum in 1976; Hiroshima, 1973; LA Amphitheatre, 1974; Wembley, 1976: the images seeming to have been chosen for their visual diversity and metamorphoses. Over the page were weirdly angled shots of Ballard getting into his car at Shepperton after the publication of Crash; and then the publicity photographs of him that had appeared on the jackets of High-Rise and Myths of the Near Future, together with a series of solarized images in the manner of Man Ray, in which the writer’s head was superimposed on Brancusi sculptures. Cindy flicked through the obsessive preoccupations: Warhol screened by black glasses on a couch at the Factory, and then seen filming Edie Sedgwick and Gino Persicho in Beauty 2; and a few pages on, isolated, filming Chelsea Girls.

Jeremy Reed, Diamond Nebula.

These aren’t the ordinary images of Ballard (let alone Bowie) that get bandied about. They are cult snapshots, taken by a writer with a fan’s eye for obscure detail surrounding the object of worship. As an alternative biography, then, of its three avant-garde celebrities, Diamond Nebula is a tantalising work, drawing on Reed’s main obsessions: style, flashy pop, mutation (both psychic and physical), cult fame, inner space … and Ballard. In the preface to the book, Reed describes ‘Ballard as the chief proponent of the futuristic novel … seen as the person most receptive to occupying a colony that looks towards the arrival of mutants from another galaxy’. Reed talks of creating an environment in which ‘the external world provides a backdrop to the exploration of inner space, a vanishing-point rather than a structure for continuous reference’, and with further reference to the ‘geography of the unconscious’, it’s easy to realise the superficial similarities with Ballard’s own working methods and obsessions.

Jeremy Reed speaking to Nicky Singer at the ICA.

In interview, too, Reed always pays his dues, recording his writerly debt to Ballard’s ‘visionary present’ – an especial act of linguistic engagement that ‘transform[s] the universe into its imagined equivalent’ and provides an instruction manual in ‘blowing up the social structure’. He sees Ballard’s work as a hotwire to the pure, uncut imaginative spirit that also powers the work of Stephen Barber and Edmund White:

They all have that very charged language. When I began as a writer, Ballard was the writer who had a new language that I was looking for, the way he crystallised the modern world into images. It’s something that he has never lost. Ballard is not part of literature at any level, he’s got no concern about it at all. He’s a rogue gene which is what attracted me to him from the start. And work is all he is, what he writes is so integral to him. That’s all he does all day, write all day and live in Shepperton.

But the admiration cut both ways. According to Rick McGrath, Ballard provided blurbs for 12 of Reed’s books and wrote forewords to two others, more JGB endorsements than for any other writer. One of the forewords was for Reed’s latest collection of poetry, West End Survival Kit (2009), possibly the last writing Ballard had published, in which he enthuses about Reed’s ‘talent … almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance’. For Ballard, Reed is ‘Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautréamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised’. That’s a very dense sentence, pricking imagistic sensors of recognition in almost every one of its 36 words: Bowie, Roeg, symbolism, science fiction, surrealism, film, sadomasochism, inner space…

And so it is with these poems, which are compacted like diamonds, an intent signalled by this excerpt:

firing ideas at me like big hitters
for work we do
shape-shifting architecture into words,

the way 10 million atoms colonize
an inked full stop.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream’, West End Survival Kit.

The back cover gives no real description of the contents, save for general endorsements from a stellar cast: Ballard, David Gascoyne, David Lodge and Seamus Heaney. We are led to believe that this is a collection of free-standing poems, and reading them is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. Reed is obsessed with both surface flash and the hidden layers of meaning inherent in modern urban life, with which we constantly negotiate and are in dialogue with: the meaning of ‘junk DNA’ and the enigma of Michael Jackson, the sigils in corporate signage, the mental cross-chatter engendered by rapid communications technology. His street-level descriptions are often as unfathomable as conspiracy theory, and shot through with a selection of barely glimpsed, constantly rotating characters (including a first-person narrator), invariably described within a mesh of techy jargon:

meditating in front of his mezzanine.
His girlfriend paints her toes
in Howard Hodgkin moods,

reads Holy Anorexia and grooves
at being air
she’s molecules wired to neuronal drive.

He’s into ‘dark matter’, lab neutrinos,
thermonuclear fusion
generating energy in the sun.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Astroparticle Physicist Chills’, West End Survival Kit.

The writing is a rush, a blur. It’s slippery, emphasised by quick-fire, three-line stanzas:

They share headphones on the new R.E.M.:
a shimmering slice of post-modern pop,
impersonal as an airport lounge,

riffy, mid-tempo anomie
for the 21st century.
He wears a Titian red Gucci jacket,

as though it’s cut out of the sun,
and she two dollops of mauve eye shadow
co-ordinating with her top.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Endgames’, West End Survival Kit.

Certain motifs begin to gestate a picture in the mind as you gradually learn through half-remembered, diaphanous glimpses that Mars and the moon have been colonised; dispossessed astronauts wander the Earth; drugs are rampant; and technological virtuality is encoded into the very fabric of everyday life. By the end, you are left with the inkling that the poems are perhaps not free-standing, but part of a continuous (albeit fractured) narrative, illuminated snapshots of a mordant near-future world seen from multiple, cross-linked perspectives. They could be interior hallucinations, or the exterior unspooling vision of CCTV cameras all over the city, but whatever they are, they are engendered by Reed’s very effective trick of repeating a motif, phrase or word from one poem to the next, but never more than two poems in a row. Subliminally, you become aware of a deep, unfolding narrative, even if consciously you assess that you are reading two poems with very different characters:

ten miles above Cape Canaveral.
He journeys back in his neurology
to pink skies over the oxygen plant,

graffiti discovered on a rock face –
RAD51D — the king’s returned —
and gantried higher up a gold statue

Jeremy Reed, ‘Red Planet Blues’, West End Survival Kit.

Someone’s got the dangling hexagonal
molecule RAD51D
under scrutiny for cell death

like a registration number
on a top security Jeep.
She’s paid to disinform. Each day

Jeremy Reed, ‘Drug Giant PA’, West End Survival Kit.

Given all the Ballard associations, it’s tempting to read Ballardian themes into the work (the damaged astronauts fit well) and the densified prose method strives to convey as much meaning as the ‘condensed novels’ in The Atrocity Exhibition. Vaughan from Crash (and Atrocity) even makes an appearance, enmeshed in a shady deal with the clone of Princess Di:

H.R.H. has a contract out
on this blonde afterlife simulacrum:
Di as an endlessly repeatable clone.

Vaughan knows he’s watched. The Jeep outside
has on-board machine guns, a snoop
positioned in it with a cold black eye.

Jeremy Reed, ‘The Reckoning’, West End Survival Kit.

Jeremy Reed – photograph courtesy Waterloo Press.

But in the end, the most obvious reference point seems to be the glistening, cypher-filled, pop-artefact worlds of William Gibson. The characters in West End Survival Kit come on like Case from Neuromancer crashlanding in London (which has merged with Tokyo, as it did in Reed’s 2008 novel The Grid), as if Case was too burnt out to even care about fixing his damaged neurosystem, too jaded to even muster up any more passion for his beloved cyberspace. In her review of The Grid, Bidisha wrote that ‘one wishes Reed would produce a scholarly work about Jacobean theatre instead of an inexpert cyber-romp. His next work should be excellent, but it shouldn’t meddle with the future. Reed’s seriousness and intelligence emerge when he drops his coolness and cleaves to the past’. But this sounds more like the kind of genre snobbery Ballard was forced to endure when he, too, dared to write science fiction. Reed does post-cyberpunk very well: he has a real feel for the imagery, the characters and the worldview, and like both Gibson and Ballard, he is interested in the next 5 minutes rather than the next 500 years. For Reed, too, science fiction is the sociological study of the present. Yet he infuses this with his own ‘extraterrestrial’ brand of theatricality, poetic sensibility and mutant, gender-bending attitude to create a hybrid form. As science-fiction poetry, it recalls the work of Robert Calvert, the late Hawkwind lyricist and lead singer, and another tortured anti-hero whose own life story could easily inhabit the Reed pantheon.

Towards the end of West End Survival Kit, Reed ties it all up with two poems about, of all things, the history of Pink Floyd. And given all of the above, it makes perfect sense. As the poem identifies, the classic-era Floyd, despite being saddled with what people assumed was an intergalactic persona, was always more about inner space than outer (like Ballard’s anomie-infested astronauts), producing a brace of albums that reflected with sensitivity on battered individuals like their founder Syd Barrett, as in Wish You Were Here, and the assorted lunatics in the cast of Dark Side of the Moon. The Floyd poems make a fitting coda to Reed’s painful folio of snapshots from a numb world. They solidify his eulogy to people too disconnected, too exiled in their own minds to ever tread ‘meaningful’ paths through life, but who nonetheless retain a unique sense of self allied to their damaged intelligence:

Barrett’s the rock astronomer
boating the Cam’s lime green spine,
wristing downriver like a water-boatman

listening to voices, his schizophrenia
big in the mix
like invasive radio.
…
Echoing slide. It’s paranoia synthesised –
their moon trip – dark side in reverse.
Barrett’s still running through a corridor

As undertow, a brain damaged psycho.
The music road maps inner space.
It’s like a river knocking at the door.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Brain Damage: a short history of the Pink Floyd’, West End Survival Kit.

It’s out there somewhere, while the London rain

slashes the light-polluted scuzz,
wacks down fried leaves, keeps me inside
this rainy, orange October day,
retrieving the Floyd’s mission to locate
the alien in the psychopath.
Outside my window a wet jay

jabs at a red berry gash.
I go out on their dimension,
beamed by the music’s escalating curve,
back to my youth and Apollo
cargoing human hardware to the moon –

their weighted boots grating on dust,
Pink Floyd the terrestrial soundtrack
to space conquest, a white plateau
opening out to three astronauts
learning by hesitant degrees to trust.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Wish You Were Here’, West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit is not wholly successful (although it’s pretty close). It briefly falls flat, for example, when Reed makes reference to ‘psychogeography’, a loaded concept degraded through cultural overuse that, although undoubtedly inherent within the work, sounds inauthentic when actually named and nudged up against his own dream geographies. Yet mostly, Reed’s innate ability to explore new genres, new forms and new plans of attack in the hope of creating something extreme and unique makes the work well worth reading. As Bidisha implies, it is probably this genre slippage that is the real cause of Reed’s exile, but somehow, given the figures with which he identifies, you get the impression that on some level that’s how he likes it.

‘Video surveillance sights the street. The city leaks pathology…’ We know exactly what Jeremy means, though we may never have thought of our everyday world in these terms. The poet is our extraterrestrial visitor, calmly surveying everything, the highspeed neural networks of his poetic gift assessing the landscape, making only the most important connections, linking the present moment to the most vital possibilities of itself … Use this volume of poems as a guide-book to the present, to the real world of possibility that most of us ignore. It’s the poet’s job to be a seer, to seize us by the shoulders and force us to out-stare the mirage. Reading these poems, I find myself marvelling at their cleverness and brilliance, and saying: ‘…yes, yes, absolutely.’

J.G. Ballard, foreword to West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit can be purchased direct from the publisher.

Jeremy Reed performing with Itchy Ear as The Ginger Light, ‘a progressive poetry act’.

Jeremy Reed – photographer(s) unknown.

Thanks to Shane for help with research for this article.

..:: More information:
+ Jeremy Reed
+ Waterloo Press

REFERENCES
Bidisha (2008). ‘The Grid, by Jeremy Reed’. The Independent, 28 September.
Carter, Randolph (2006). ‘Dreaming with his eyes open’. 3am Magazine.
Lachman, Gary (2006). Jeremy Reed: A supernova in orange and purple ink. The Independent, 30 July.
Reed, Jeremy (1994) Diamond Nebula. London: Peter Owen.
———- (2008). West End Survival Kit. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press.

Margarida Marinho in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 2002).

An interview with Solveig Nordlund follows this review, plus clips from Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude.

In 2002 the Ballardian feature-film universe expanded substantially with the release of Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude, Solveig Nordlund’s artfully rendered riff on JG Ballard’s 1976 short story, ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. Seen mainly at film festivals, this Portuguese-Swedish co-production was a welcome addition to the Ballard filmography.

Ballard’s story receives its power from its fantastic setting (an abandoned Spanish resort in the future), his trio of representative characters – Dr Gould, the iconoclast visionary, Richard Forrester, the horny bureaucrat, and Judith Forrester, the mannequin-like mother – and the dark irony of ignoring Mother Nature. Ballard slowly teases out the plot, revealing that humankind has been systematically killing off its deformed newborn (called ‘Zotes’ in the film) for the past thirty years, seemingly unaware they were slaughtering the first generation of a new variation of homo sapiens. The story’s genius lies in its deft and subtle details and immaculate timing, leading the reader blindly along with Forrester through sex hotels of irony to the oddly optimistic ending, where the culture of one empire again crumbles and the children of the world begin to assume control of their new universe.

Culture’s fear of the unknown and special revulsion toward the sexually deformed is analyzed in psychological and artistic terms in ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. These babies aren’t born with deformities of the limbs, such as the thalidomide babies of the 1960s, but with optic-nerve-exposed eyes and deformed genitals, aberrations guaranteed to register high on the psychological disgust scale. In this otherworld, mothers will kill, not nurture, their abnormal babies. Forrester sees these sexual deformities as ‘grim parodies of human genitalia’, and he cannot go beyond the ‘nervousness and loathing’ they elicit. All is now subject to an irrational norm. Blind but sighted, sexually deviant but innocent, these doomed children offer up a Dorian Gray portrait of civilisation’s obsessions which everyone is only too willing to rip and burn, horrified at seeing their true selves revealed at last.

In the following interview, Nordlund says, ‘I centred the story on the woman, on her fears and longings’. By inverting the masculinity of the short story, the film reclaims the natural bond of mother and baby and corrects the errors of civilisation as Ballard imagines it. As Nordlund explains: ‘When I did the film I thought very much about parents who want to educate their children into copies of themselves and don’t see the beauty of difference.’

LEFT: Solveig Nordlund (photo by Rick McGrath).

The basic plot is still there – the deformed baby is given to Carmen after the epiphany that these newborn aren’t monsters – but pretty well everything else, save the location, is changed to a feminine perspective, a parallel version of Ballard’s original. In Ballard’s story Judith is essentially a baby incubator, reflecting culture’s taboos and fears about abnormality. She immediately forgets all after the child is born and presumed killed, leaving the resort ‘with the amiable and fixed expression of a display-window mannequin’. Nordlund re-creates her as the driving force behind the story, from her desire to have the baby through her troubled pregnancy to her transformative encounters with Carmen and her ultimate ‘correct’ decision. She and Carmen bond to the point where they start looking the same. In a world of generational warfare, this is definitely an act of peace. Gould changes from Ballard’s observant biker hippie pilot into a surrogate mother — thus retaining a slight echo to Ballard’s Gould — and Nordlund is forced to compensate for his philosophic posturings by greatly enlarging the role of Carmen. A black-shawled, hand-signing mongoloid waif in Ballard, found by Gould and herded by silver paint, she’s transformed by Nordlund into a complex mystery, an exotic beauty in slink who wanders the dark halls like a hologram from the future. Forrester’s role is also diminished – he either makes passes at Judite or is combing the deserted grounds, talking with Gould, or stalking Carmen.

Nordlund keeps her eye firmly on the social by replacing Ballard’s Dali references with state-produced posters showing Zotes on the one hand (baby head with dark, wormy areas where the eyes should be, and the menacing ZOTE written underneath) and normal babies on the other (complete with slogans such as “This Is Us” and “I Believe In The Future”). Nordlund has created the same psychological war zone as Ballard, pitting Eros against Thanatos, but she uses a much less psychologically sensitive path, replacing personal “newsreels from Hell” and the attendant disgust with “monsters” one should fear because they’re seen as grotesque throwbacks to an earlier, more primitive time. The sense of disgust, so prevalent in the short story, is not given any kind of deep psychological examination by Nordlund, although flushing a Zote down the toilet is some recognition of the feeling’s psychological roots.

The film is a marvellous treat for eye and ear. Carmen’s psychedelic cave-room, for example, with its watches and fluorescent lighting is amazing. The cinematography of Acácio de Almeida is often breathtaking in its subtle love affair with light, and the music by Johan Zachrisson is evocative and emotional. The special effects are often highly foregrounded to maximise the intimate effect, and art direction is helped immeasurably by the found set, an abandoned seaside resort in Spain. This is a strong, punchy movie that emphasises the flow of the action in carefully crafted edits.

I made contact with Solveig Nordlund during the July opening ceremonies of J.G. Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium exhibition at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Culture, where Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude was (and will be) screening. We met for a chat and coffee on our final day there, but unfortunately circumstances made it impossible to do any kind of formal interview. Fortunately, Solveig graciously agreed to conduct the following email Q&A after we had settled down from the Millennium Autopsy rush.

– Rick McGrath.

Opening 10-minute sequence from Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude. Two further 10-minute extracts are available: Part 2 and Part 3.

RICK McGRATH: Solveig, can you tell us when you first became interested in film, and about the beginnings of your career?

SOLVEIG NORDLUND: I was always interested in film, since I was a child, and I wanted to become a filmmaker. I just didn’t know how. To satisfy my mother I studied at the University of Stockholm and participated in a film made by a theatre group, but I had already met my Portuguese husband and wanted to leave Sweden. My Portuguese husband studied film in London and I followed him there and so it began. I began to work with him and only later did I make proper studies, with the French director Jean Roch in Paris from 1972 to 74.

Do you remember when you first became aware of Ballard?

I read Ballard for the first time in the late 60s in a Portuguese science-fiction collection. I think the first story of his I read was ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’. It must have had a great impact. I began to read all his books and later I made a short film based on this story, called ‘Journey to Orion’. It was totally shot in one of those big ferries between Stockholm and Helsinki. The idea was that the inside of ferryboats and spacecrafts look more or less the same: a closed world with no exit. Made to last for a long time and endure tough weather. After that I obtained the rights to shoot ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’.

When I had the opportunity in 1986 to propose programs about different writers for Swedish television, I proposed Ballard and managed to convince the board. I went to London in order to visit him at his house in Shepperton. I did a series of portraits of my literary favourites, another one was Marguerite Duras. In Sweden the JG interview was called ‘Future Now’ and everybody was impressed with his intensity. JG himself liked it very much. For me it was an opportunity to get to know him and the beginning of a kind of friendship.

What kind of friendship can you have with J.G.? I think I’d always have the feeling he was sizing me up as a potential character. In The Kindness of Women, the family renting the apartment beside the Ballards in Spain are called the Nordlunds. Did you think J.G. was thinking of you?

I feel befriended with Ballard and his universe. That’s the kind of friendship it is. I think he wrote The Kindness of Women at the same time as I made the interview with him. He probably needed a name and took mine.

Was he as you expected?

I expected to meet a tall military-like man and got very surprised when a small, jovial and round man came out of the house. He asked if I had a hat and made me think of Alice in Wonderland. He invited me in and as it was already six in the afternoon he was authorized to begin to drink. We talked and planned the interview for the following day. J.G. Ballard is a fascinating storyteller, also when he is telling his own story.

When you first read ‘Low Flying Aircraft’, did it strike you as filmable?

I think all J.G. Ballard’s stories are filmable and I think I have thought of them all as films. I was on a film festival in Troia, Portugal, the seaside resort that I later used in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude. I think it was in 1987. Troia was a tourist investment that was interrupted by the revolution in 1974, and this abandoned place struck me as the perfect set for a Ballard story. I thought of stories from Vermillion Sands and Low-Flying Aircraft. It took me 15 years to concretise the project.

That’s amazing, that these big lumps of resort would still be vacant after all those years. You must have been amazed. How did you first get in? With permission, or as a trespasser?

It was a tourist project that had begun to be built before the revolution with Brazilian money and that was nationalised after the revolution. Some buildings were used but they never finished the big hotels. They were a kind of unfinished ruins, that you could enter trespassing.

How did Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude come about?

After having done the Swedish television program ‘Future Now’ with Jim, I did ‘Journey to Orion’. After that I obtained the rights to film ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. The film is a Portuguese-Swedish low budget co-production. At the beginning I thought of shooting it in English, with international actors, but the budget didn’t allow it. And as there were threats that they were going to reconstruct the seaside resort Troia, I had to hurry with the film. It was shot in 2002 and one or two years later the towers were imploded.

‘Journey to Orion’ (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 1987). Part 2 is also available.

When did you decide to make the alterations to J.G.’s basic plot?

Ballard’s story is a short story and I had to do a feature film. In Ballard’s story everything is in the head of the husband who is waiting for his wife to come back with the results of the scan. I centred the story on the woman, on her fears and longings. I participated in a workshop directed by the English script doctor Colin Tucker in order to elaborate the script in that sense. It works in the way that a group of people with scripts criticise each other’s works. Colin Tucker directed us.

How did you choose the cast and crew?

The crew was chosen among technicians I normally work with, Acácio de Almeida for example. The cast was chosen among Portuguese actors once it was decided that there was no possibility to have an international cast. I think we shot for eight weeks. And edited for another six weeks. There were some complementary shots and a rather long digital post-production. From the start of shooting till the film finished, it was nine months more or less.

I was slightly surprised by the Orwellian society you use as a backdrop. Where did that idea come from?

I think it comes from Jim Ballard. When I asked him if it was something he thought I should think about when writing the script, he mentioned the laws of genetic cleaning that until very recently were in use for example in Sweden, and the fear of global epidemics, for example, AIDs.

Interesting. Governments are vaguely mentioned in the short story, but in your version they actively seek out and destroy the newborn, which you call Zotes. I like your slogan, too: ‘We Believe In The Future. This is Us.’ Where did that come from?

From nowhere especial. Just sounded right.

How often did you consult with Ballard over the film?

Only in the beginning, when I asked if he had something he wanted to point out in the story.

What do you think is J.G.’s point in the short story? Given the variations in the film, do you feel it still represents Ballard’s vision, or your own?

I think J.G.’s point is to show that humans make everything to transform and dominate nature but that nature always will find new dimensions in order to survive. When I did the film I thought very much about parents who want to educate their children into copies of themselves and don’t see the beauty of difference.

Has J.G. seen it?

Yes, and he liked it very much. He wrote a very enthusiastic letter where he mentioned especially the cinematography and the actress, Margarida Marinho.

She is fantastic. How did you find her?

She is a very well-known and popular Portuguese actress now, but in 2002 she was in the beginning of her career.

The cinematography is truly breathtaking. Aside from the power of the sets, Acácio De Almeida’s lens seems to caress the light in a very Ballardian way. You must have been very happy with the results.

Yes I was. I also was very lucky to have a very good post-production laboratory with very good technicians.

I was also quite taken with the film’s art direction. Mona Teresia Forsén did an amazing job with the film’s overall look. Did you work this out together? Gould’s stylized fluorescent green ‘V’ sign is also compelling.

Mona Teresia Forsén is a very well-known Swedish art director, but there were many hands that collaborated in the creation of the visual aspect. The Zote alphabet, for example, was created by the Portuguese artist Rui Serra.

I thought the sound was foregrounded in an interesting way, and that Johan Zachrisson’s musical score is very evocative. Did you work closely on this with Johan?

Yes. Johan Zachrisson is a collaborator of mine since a long time. He is Swedish but lives and works in Portugal. I think we tried to get a correspondence to the green colour that the doctor paints the world with.

You show Carmen in the film as a sort of futuristic movie starlet, with sexy dark glasses.

Carmen hides her deformed eyes behind dark glasses. She is blind in a conventional way, she sees with other senses, that’s why she moves in such an adulatory way. Don’t forget that her father, the doctor, has made her look like an ordinary Venus client in order to protect her.

Are you influenced by any particular filmmakers?

I admire Alain Resnais’ Muriel and Providence.

Do you think your film has a happy ending?

Yes. Life goes on even if it is not our life.

Will the film ever be available on DVD? Many people are curious to see it.

It is on DVD in Portugal. If somebody is interested in publishing it with English subtitles I would be happy.

Miguel Guilherme and Rui Morrison in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 2002).

Do you have plans to do anything more from the Ballard oeuvre?

I like very much ‘Deep End’, the story about the last fish on Earth. I had plans to do Concrete Island. I think it is an amazing story and so frightening. You can die in the middle of the crowd without anybody seeing you. But the rights JG’s agent demanded were so high that it’s not possible. But who knows, he has many good short stories.

You told me in Barcelona you didn’t think any more JGB stories would be made into films because of the cost of film rights. Can you elaborate?

I think J.G.’s agent has set a Spielberg level for his novels.

I heard £3.5 million — that’s a lot of money. I wonder if JG knows what’s going on? You’d think he’d like to have his stories made into movies, where reality and illusion combine.

I think he knows and agrees.

What appeals to you most about JGB?

J.G.’s stories are often told as thoughts and memories, but those thoughts and memories are very visual. I like to imagine those worlds the main characters see. I think that had the film rights been more accessible, most of his novels would have been made into film. Now, a lot of films inspired by his work have been made instead.

Many people who have visited the Ballard home comment on its quirkiness. Did you find it unusual?

I found it touching, a big man in a small house. Like Alice in Wonderland.

Interview by Rick McGrath, 2008.

Born in Stockholm on June 9, 1943, Solveig Nordlund began working in film while completing her degree in art history from her native Stockholm’s Universitet. Leaving Sweden for Portugal, Nordlund first worked as an assistant and then a film editor on such productions as Sweet Habits (1973) and Doomed Love (1978). In 1976 she co-founded the left-wing film cooperative Grupo Zero, and that year directed her first film, although she received no on-screen credit. In 1978, she directed a pair of medium-length features, but did not direct her first full-length feature until 1980 with Dina e Django. Nordlund then returned to Sweden in 1982 where she founded the Torrom Film Company. In 1986 she directed ‘Journey to Orion’, her take on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, which won a prize at the Bilbao Festival, and also directed a filmed interview with Ballard called Future Now. In 1998, Nordlund’s Swedish-Portuguese-Mozambican co-production Comedia Infantil was nominated for a Tiger Award at that year’s Rotterdam Film Festival. In 1999 she made The Ticket Inspector, which won the RTP/Onda Curta Prize at the Avanca Film Festival, and followed that with Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude in 2002, which won an award at the Coimbra Caminhos do Cinema Portugués, and My Baby in 2003.

..:: MORE INFORMATION:
+ Ambar Filmes: blog for Solveig’s film company.
+ Ambar Filmes’ YouTube channel.

..:: NORDLUND & BALLARD ON YOUTUBE:
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude trailer.
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 1).
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 2).
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 3).
+ Future Now interview (extract).
+ ‘Journey to Orion’, part 1.
+ ‘Journey to Orion’, part 2.

ABOVE: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

[In The Atrocity Exhibition] Traven explores what most people would regard as pretty frightening pornographic imagery; he explores with the kind of eye of a forensic pathologist. He treats sexual desire as if it was something stretched out on an autopsy table; he takes a woman’s body and dismantles it – not literally, but almost literally – and constructs a kit which is literally that. I mean inside of a suitcase, as you show in the film, there is a set of the key elements that we respond to when we become sexually aroused – a pair of latex breasts, nipples, detachable pubic hair…

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).

Peter C. emailed to tell me of his discovery of the work of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, whose ‘Kiss’ series of x-ray photographs involved Delvoye asking friends to ‘paint themselves with small amounts of barium (that liquid used in x-rays for digestion and such like) and then be “photographed” having sex in medical clinics. The resulting images are… striking’ (according to Joseph Brett).

Peter says:

I feel a bit weird submitting this, and you might not find it relevant at all, but I just discovered this “X-Ray Porn” and it, for whatever reason, reminded me of Ballard! It’s rather striking how unpleasant it is!

Actually, it’s very relevant, given Ballard’s medical background and his observation in the introduction to Crash that we live in a time in which ‘Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography.’

Elsewhere, he elaborates, suggesting that we are:

moving ever closer to that junction where science and pornography will eventually meet and fuse. Conceivably, the day will come when science itself is the greatest producer of pornography. The weird perversions of human behaviour triggered by psychologists testing the effects of pain, isolation, anger, etc. will play the same role that the bare breasts of Polynesian islanders performed in the 1940s wildlife documentary films.

JGB, quoted in Linda S. Kaufman, Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture, 1995.

Of Ballard’s books, it’s The Atrocity Exhibition that most clearly makes the case for this fusion, something the RE/Search edition of Atrocity brilliantly enhanced with its anatomical art from Phoebe Gloeckner, art that very much anticipates the spirit of Delvoye’s ‘Kiss’. See for yourself: I’ve interspersed some of Gloeckner’s illustrations with a few of Delvoye’s x-rays, along with the usual allotment of Ballard quotes (although I think the one heading this post says it all, really).

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

A preoccupation with forensic detail characterises [Ballard's] writing: one thinks of the numerous accounts of sex in his extraordinary autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women. “I placed my hands on her hips and began to kiss the small freckles on her abdomen and the spiral scar whose pearly silver curved around the small of her back and ended below her appendix. This marked her kidney operation 10 years earlier, the Anderson-Hinds resection of the renal pelvis.”

Mick Brown, ‘From Here to Dystopia’, Telegraph Magazine, 2 September 2006.

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

Traven sees pornography as a kind of hyper-analytic response to sexuality. Normally, traditional sexual activity involves a sort of warm bath where physical activity and a world of mental affections blur into each other, and give rise of course to a huge number of problems. Traven takes the view ‘What is actually going on?’ — his own body and the body of his wife and of his on-off girlfriend, Karen Novotny, he sees their sexual identity as a mystery that needs to be decoded and dismantled. He sees pornography, which is emotionally neutral — pornography is sex with the emotions deleted — pornography is a useful technique for exploring what exactly is going on when two people copulate, when a penis enters a vagina, when a hand embraces a breast, when fingers explore clefts (which are obviously geometric structures which powerfully cue innate responses laid down in the central nervous system a hundred thousand years ago). Pornography is a way of dismantling all the excrescences that have grown around this sexual activity at its most basic, and finding the actual sort of operating elements.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).

ABOVE: Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner from The Atrocity Exhibition (RE/Search edition, 1990).

BELOW: From the ‘Kiss’ series, by Wim Delvoye.

Science is moving into an area where its obsessions begin to isolate completely its subject under the lens of its microscope, away from its links with the rest of nature. This is always the risk with science as a whole. The pornographic imagination detaches certain parts of the human anatomy from the human being and becomes obsessively focussed on the breast or the genitalia, or what have you. That sort of obsession with what I call quantified functions is what lies at the core of science; there is a shedding of all responsibility by the scientist who is just looking at a particular subject with a tendency to ignore the contingent links.

JGB, quoted in Jeremy Lewis, ‘An Interview with J.G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review, Volume 20 Numbers 1&2, 1991.

PS: Good old Wim, when not tattooing pigs, even turned the ‘Kiss’ series into a stained-glass window…

Wim Delvoye
Euterpe, 2002
steel, x-ray photographs, glass, lead
78 3/4 x 31.5 inches
200 x 80 cm
SW 02299