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Archive for the ‘Chris Marker’ Category

'Confronting Ourselves': Ballard and Circular Time

By Simon Sellars • Dec 11th, 2008 •

Category: Andrei Tarkovsky, Chris Marker, Lead Story, WWII, YouTube, alternate worlds, features, film, inner space, memory, science fiction, temporality, time travel

Time-travel, according to Ballard, Marker, Tarkovsky and Godard. Some thoughts on memory retrieval and personal mythology. Ballard and Marker’s ‘fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage … in its unique way a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time’.



Kosmopolis 08: Switching stations

By Simon Sellars • Oct 25th, 2008 •

Category: Australia, Barcelona, Chris Marker, alternate worlds, architecture, body horror, deep time, features, flying, posthumanism, psychopathology

Here are some preliminary thoughts from the city of Barcelona, where I am appearing on a panel to talk about the work of J.G. Ballard as part of the Kosmopolis literary festival.



Unique visual complexities: A review of Grande Anarca

By Jamie Sherry • Aug 19th, 2008 •

Category: Ambit magazine, Chris Marker, David Cronenberg, Italy, Steven Spielberg, Tarkovsky, animation, architecture, film, literature, medical procedure, religion, reviews, short stories, surveillance, urban decay

Jamie Sherry reviews a unique on-screen adaptation of Ballard’s work, now showing on BallardoTube: the Italian animation, Grande Anarca, based on JGB’s 1985 short story, ‘Answers to A Questionnaire’. Can the filmmakers succeed where other, big-name suitors have failed — decanting Ballard’s experimental literary narratives into a more linear cinematic language? Or does Ballard resist classification yet again?



Escaping the gaze: A review of John Foxx's Tiny Colour Movies

By Simon Sellars • Aug 7th, 2008 •

Category: America, CCTV, Chris Marker, Chris Petit, Iain Sinclair, John Foxx, YouTube, alternate worlds, architecture, film, invisible literature, media landscape, music, reviews

This is a review of John Foxx’s Melbourne performance of Tiny Colour Movies, his found-film collection and live soundtrack. For the reviewer, witnessing this may have solved a two-year-old puzzle; certainly, it brought everything full circle back to Ballard.



Chris Marker: Imperfect Memory

By Simon Sellars • Jul 18th, 2008 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Chris Marker, deep time, film, inner space, photography, science fiction

New Marker blog: ‘Quoting mostly, writing little, ever fascinated by and admiring always the oeuvre of Chris Marker, le plus célèbre des cinéastes inconnus.’



Porcine Psychopathology

By Simon Sellars • Feb 12th, 2008 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Chris Marker, Iain Sinclair, architecture, consumerism, photography, urban ruins

infinite thØught takes a Ballard-inspired tour of Bluewater, one of the inspirations for JGB’s Kingdom Come.



La Jetée ciné-roman back in print

By Simon Sellars • Jan 25th, 2008 •

Category: Ballardosphere, Chris Marker, New Worlds, film, inner space, science fiction

I am delighted to report that the book of Chris Marker’s La Jetée is back in print through Zone Books — and in hardcover, too. It will be out in (US) Spring 2008. Thank you, thank you: for years, second-hand copies were changing hands via Amazon and eBay for anything up to $400.
Unable to fork [...]



‘You are Hochhaus!’: Ballard in Berlin

By Dan OHara • Jan 9th, 2008 •

Category: Chris Marker, David Cronenberg, Germany, Steven Spielberg, WWII, architecture, dystopia, entropy, fascism, film, gated communities, interviews, urban decay, urban revolt, urban ruins, utopia

Dan O’Hara interviews the creators of Hochhaus, a German mixed-media radio play based on High-Rise. Transposing the novel to Berlin in 2013, it references Nazism, notably Speer’s social engineering through architecture, on its way to exploring Ballard’s relevance to speculative models of German life.



BallardoTube

By Simon Sellars • Sep 8th, 2007 •

Category: Chris Marker, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, William Burroughs, YouTube, audio, features, film, filmography, music, television

I’ve created a YouTube outpost for this site, divided into six channels: (1) J.G. Ballard Interviews; (2) J.G. Ballard Documentaries; (3) J.G. Ballard Adaptations; (4) J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten Science Fiction Films; (5) Ballardiana; and (6) Ballardian Sound Art/Music.



A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: The John Foxx Interview

By Simon Sellars • Jul 11th, 2006 •

Category: Chris Marker, Chris Petit, Iain Sinclair, Ian Curtis, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, architecture, film, interviews, music, psychogeography, surrealism

by Simon Sellars

an image from John Foxx’s Cathedral Oceans project
John Foxx, the former lead singer of Ultravox, is an undisputed electronic music pioneer. Before Midge Ure came along, the band’s three Foxx-driven albums, Ultravox! (1977), Ha! Ha! Ha! (1978) and Systems of Romance (1978), fused near-future melancholy with icy man-machine interfaces and the remake/remodel aesthetic [...]



"Thirsty Man at the Spigot": An Interview with Jonathan Weiss

By Simon Sellars • May 2nd, 2006 •

Category: America, Australia, Chris Marker, Chris Petit, David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Steven Spielberg, academia, consumerism, dystopia, film, humour, interviews, sexual politics

by Simon Sellars

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition
Ballardian presents an exclusive interview with Jonathan Weiss, director of The Atrocity Exhibition, the film based on the J.G. Ballard collection of ‘condensed novels’.
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NOTE: This is a revised and expanded version of the original interview. The new additions are a reworked introduction, the addition of notes, [...]



Retrospecto: La Jetée

By Simon Sellars • Oct 7th, 2005 •

Category: Chris Marker, New Worlds, Philip K. Dick, deep time, film, photography, reviews, science fiction, suicide

Nothing sorts memories from ordinary moments. They claim remembrance when they show their scars.
Chris Marker. La Jetée.
review by Simon Sellars
The films of Chris Marker are often termed ‘essayist’, participating in a phenomenological play with deep roots in French intellectualism. Working within documentary and pseudo-documentary modes, they mimic the manner in which memory and desire flash [...]