‘”We do not move in one direction, rather do we wander back and forth, turning now this way and now that. We go back on our own tracks…” That thought of Montaigne’s reminds me about something I thought of in connection with flying saucers, humanoids, and the remains of unbelievably advanced technology found in some ancient ruins. They write about aliens, but I think that in these phenomena we are in fact confronting ourselves; that is our future, our descendants who are actually traveling in time.’

Andrei Tarkovsky

[via Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory, a site dedicated to the work of Chris Marker]

If a purely biographical study were undertaken, it could feasibly be argued that Ballard’s work is a variation on the one theme of his wartime experience. To take some examples from his oeuvre: the fake space station in ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, the patch of waste land in Concrete Island, the degraded apartment block in High-Rise, the motorway system in Crash, the abandoned New York in ‘The Ultimate City’, the secessionist house in ‘The Enormous Space’, the ecotopia in Rushing to Paradise, the gated communities in Running Wild and Cocaine Nights, the micronational shopping mall in Kingdom Come – all could reasonably be seen as iterations of the insular and self-contained conditions of Ballard’s Lunghua childhood. But as Roger Luckhurst asserts, therein lies the danger of reductionism, a retrospective, contextual dilution:

Once Ballard published his two ‘autobiographies’, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, they were seized on, in effect, as signed confessions, detached from fictional space but working as decoding machines to render autobiographically readable the body of his work… The logic of this repeated argument is a retrospective rereading of the prior science fiction as encrypted autobiographical performance.

Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls.

Luckhurst aims to recoup Ballard’s standing as a writer of SF rather than ‘downgrad[ing] the “science fiction” texts to drafts of a final “literary” text’, as he sees other commentators doing in the wake of Empire of the Sun. However, during the course of my research it has never been my intention to downgrade these texts by relating them to Ballard’s personal history or to Empire’s fictionalised personal history. Instead, I’m especially interested in tracking a motif that reoccurs across Ballard’s work (including interviews as well as short stories and novels) and to extrapolate what this might mean in the context of memory retrieval and personal myth. As Luckhurst later qualifies, both Empire and The Kindness of Women:

mythologize, which is to say that they take elements of the same compulsively repetitive landscapes, scenarios, and images and recombine them in fictions which yet teasingly and forever undecidably play within the frame of the autobiographical. There is no authenticity here, no revelatory discourse of (in Gusdorf’s insistent phrase) “deeper being”.

For Ballard, his art — his writing — has remodelled the scenario, replaying and recreating a series of parallel worlds that recycle biography and memory as something approaching myth:

Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful. Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

Ballard in interview, ‘Theatre of Cruelty’.

Perhaps we should consider Ballard’s novels and short stories as ‘carefully edited, slow-motion replays’ of the Lunghua camp (and Empire as Ballard’s life seen through the prism of his fiction) — or as virtual-reality projections, in which anything goes in any combination. In The Atrocity Exhibition, T-’s obsessive need to restage, recreate and reinvent scenarios (the ’sex death’ of his mistress; his own initiation into crash culture) is a microcosm of Ballard’s entire career strategy, a fragment of a hologram rose that in its holistic incarnation seems designed to function hypertextually, in the sense that each piece of writing operates as a portal to another. The anti-linear style encourages the reader to follow pathways of her own device. This goal is embedded in Atrocity’s paragraph headings, some of which are named after earlier Ballard short stories such as ‘The Concentration City’, some of which refer to other chapters in the book such as ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, some of which refer to stories yet to be written such as ‘The Sixty Minute Zoom’. The accompanying paragraphs have nothing to do with the stories after which they are (or would be) named; they are parallel universes of the mind that resist integration, challenging the primacy of the ‘text’. They inhabit the non-space of the interstice, the neural interval prised open when two disparate, yet interrelated parts rub together, creating new meanings, new connections, new portals that themselves split into infinite parallel worlds. As Corin Depper identifies, this strategy bears strong resemblance to Deleuze and Guattari’s overarching sense of ‘rhizomatic’ cultural theory:

The ‘rhizome’ … operates against linear and dialectical ideas. This is mirrored in the formal structuring of [Deleuze and Guattari's] books as a series of seemingly unconnected sections, which force the reader to abandon earlier experiences of reading philosophy in favour of a radically decentred process, almost inevitably skipping across sections and creating new pathways of meaning… these … works could easily be seen as companion pieces to … The Atrocity Exhibition, which proffers a similarly unstable ground on which new notions of history and identity are endlessly being constructed and destroyed.

Depper, ‘Death at Work: The Cinematic Imagination of J. G. Ballard’

ABOVE: La Jetée. Apologies for the English narration – it proved difficult to locate an online version in the original French, with English subtitles.

Unsurprisingly, Ballard was an advocate of Chris Marker’s 1962 ‘photo roman’, La Jetée, a film concerned with nothing but the confusion of physical and mental time, and the eternal cycle of revisiting, overwriting and reinhabiting memory. Shot almost entirely in stills, La Jetée depicts an inmate of a prisoner-of-war camp in post-apocalyptic Paris. The man’s captors select him for a time-travel experiment in which he is returned to the pre-war. He is judged to be a suitable candidate for time travel since he has a particular recollection of the peacetime era that won’t leave him, the memory of a woman he briefly glimpsed as a boy on the jetty at Orly Airport, her face creased in horror as they both watch a man inexplicably shot and killed before them. It is thought that this memory will cushion the shock of his awakening in the past:

This man was selected from among a thousand for his obsession with an image from the past. Nothing else, at first, but stripping out the present, and its racks…

On the tenth day, images begin to ooze, like confessions. A peacetime morning. A peacetime bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves.

On the sixteenth day he is on the jetty at Orly. Empty. Sometimes he recaptures a day of happiness, though different. A face of happiness, though different. Ruins.

Chris Marker, La Jetée.

When he is sent back he seeks out the woman, but is never really sure whether he is travelling through time, dreaming, or remembering the past and reinhabiting the memory. The denouement reveals that the man, due to the paradoxes of time travel, had as a child witnessed his own death, blurring past, present and future in profound flux. Time tracks exist simultaneously, recording, reflecting and contaminating each other.

Time is like a circle, which is endlessly described. The declining arc is the past. The inclining arc is the future.

Everything has been said, provided words do not change their meanings, and meanings their words.

Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville.

For Ballard, as it clearly is for Marker, film is a crucial tool for excavating simultaneous time (which of course is also circular time … may the circle never be broken):

I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.

Ballard, Munich Round Up, 1968.

In 1966 Ballard wrote an appreciative review of La Jetée for New Worlds, commenting on its ‘fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage … in its unique way a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time’. For Ballard, Marker’s technique of using almost entirely still frames creates a ’succession of disconnected images … a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter’. Elsewhere, reflecting on the process of repetition and memory retrieval in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard might almost be reviewing La Jetée:

[Atrocity's] mental Polaroids form a large part of our library of affections. Carried around in our heads, they touch our memories like albums of family photographs. Turning their pages, we see what seems to be a ghostly and alternative version of our own past, filled with shadowy figures as formalized as Egyptian tomb-reliefs.

Ballard, annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, RE/Search edition (1990).

Andrzej Gasiorek’s view is that Empire and Kindness are concerned with the imagination’s ‘ambiguous role’ in identity formation: ‘The truth-telling status of both narratives is thereby called into question – both are to be read as versions of the past, not as definitive reconstructions’.

Like La Jetée’s protagonist, then, Ballard has been fixated by a moment he was given to witness as a child — the stasis of Lunghua, interned in suspended time; the atomic flash heralding the post-war era of simulation and planing identity — revisiting it, revising it and re-enacting it in multiple retro-forward scenarios, so that the terms ‘past, present and future’ become inconsequential, irreparably meaningless.

..:: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN:
+ Ballard and the Vicissitudes of Time

Thermonuclear noon at Sydney airport (photo: Simon Sellars).

Further to this….

You cannot claim to be truly versed in international travel until you have taken a flight from Australia to Europe. Flying to Spain took me the better part of 24 hours and shunted me through no less than five airports: Melbourne, Sydney, Singapore, London, Barcelona. I have travelled to Europe before, but never, as far as I can recall, through so many terminals.

It was absurd. Little parts of my brain leaked at every stop. In Sydney I thought I was in Melbourne; in Melbourne I thought I was home. I was reading Irvine Welsh’s Porno
on the flight and I began to think wholly in the flourescent Leith dialect that peppers the book. Welsh manages this narrative technique so well, and combined with the cognitive sponge-wipe that is a 24-hour plane flight, immersion was complete. From Sydney to Singapore I sat next to a guy whose nose was constantly running, and himself constantly sniffling. He just would not blow it. I was so very tired and borderline hallucinating. The noise of his honker was destroying me, some kind of water torture. I dozed off and dreamt that I actually turned to him and screamed, ‘Blow yer f****** nose, ya radge, yis nipping ma heid, so ye are!’ When I awoke, although he still did not blow his nose, he refused to look at me for the rest of the way to Singapore and seemed visibly nervous. Even now, I am just a little paranoid that I may have actually spoken (Irvine) Welsh to this poor man in my sleep.

Ballard has said that his work, Crash in particular, is not meant to evoke specific examples of place (in the case of that book, reacting to reports that it is a ‘London’ work). Instead he says he is interested in an international zone of the type that you find around motorways and airports, areas geographically distant but interchangeable and, essentially, eventless. Thus, the experience of passing through five international terminals in 24 hours — none more Ballardian. I had the sense of progression through a giant airlocked tube connecting every country on the planet, the outside world a geodesic dome perhaps, or as an irradiated landscape sealed off out of harm’s way. Time folded in on itself. I forgot to change the time on my phone with each stop. It didn’t matter. The physiological morning was encased in an environmental night. Stumbling through Singapore Airport’s dutyfree shopping zone, I had the sixth sense that I might bump into a version of myself from one year ago, passing through on the way home from London to Melbourne. Maybe I had always been here. I have lost a serious amount of weight in the space of the past year and to people who have not seen me for a while, there is often considerable surprise expressed at the extent of the transformation. I imagine that I, too, would be shocked to run into this past version of myself, itself casually strolling through Singaporean non-space, perhaps even as shocked as the man at the end of La Jetée confronting his younger self. In these circumstances, in transit, in-between, freefloating in interstitial space, it is just so hard to keep one’s molecules oscillating wildly enough to form a coherent body and therefore avoid complete disintegration, but one does the best one can.

Sydney airport … or so it would seem (photo: Simon Sellars).

From Heathrow, I caught the British Airways redeye special to Barcelona at 7am on Wednesday morning. The jet was suit city; in jeans and a t-shirt, I felt like a zoo exhibit, a savage allowed to sit up the front. Onboard, the papers were all British. I picked one up and began to read of feverish intrigue about businessmen and society elite conspiring on Greek islands about something shadowy and unavailable to the rest of us. The last front-page story I read in the local paper before leaving home was about a sportsman who had lost his pants while drunk. Truly I am out of place as well as time. Almost as soon as the plane touched down at Barcelona, virtually every businessman and woman on the jet reached for their Blackberries and began tapping away furiously. The man next to me, in a slick charcoal grey suit with gleaming black Crackberry dancing to the tune of his fingers, was intent on beaming himself into the future. I cannot sleep much on planes. I was tired, I’m telling you. Jellied, floating crabs danced in my field of vision. They evaporated and I looked up and there was an identical man in the aisle as the one sitting next to me, with exact same hairstyle, suit and Blackberry, similarly tripping on subwire desire. And I mean an exact double, or so it seemed. Once inside the terminal I went to a mirror to check if I, too, had similarly transformed — would Barcelona for me prove to be the final stage in the globally linked Switching Station for the New Man? But no — oozing back at me was still the same doughy, jetlagged face with the same rudimentary stubble and also there was the same shabby t-shirt and jeans.

I have now been in Barcelona for three days. Later, I will write to you about my impressions of Kosmopolis 08, of the city itself, of the virtual reality of the Ballard exhibition and of my encounters with the ghosts of Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. But first, at 5pm today, there is the panel I am appearing on with Jordi Costa, Bruce Sterling and V. Vale. I will wait until after that to record these further thoughts as I would like to spend today prepping myself.

Until later then,
Simon in Barcelona for Kosmopolis 08

Soundtracks to inner space: Roxy Music — ‘Out of the Blue’, ‘Mother of Pearl’, ‘Prairie Rose’; Fleetwood Mac — ‘Big Love’, ‘Landslide’, ‘Tusk’ [USC intro mix], ‘You Make Loving Fun’; Future Engineers — ‘Future Engineered’ mix; Temple Records — ‘Wax Label Showcase’

review by Jamie Sherry

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 1 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Runtime: 18 mins
Voice: Ermanna Montanari
Sound: Davide Sandri
Music: Egle Sommacal
Editor: Benedetto Lanfranco
Photography: Alvise Renzini
Animation: Alvise Renzini
Script: Lucio Apolito (based on the short story ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ by J.G. Ballard)
Director: Alvise Renzini
Producer: Opificio Ciclope

NOTE: An English translation of the voiceover can be found here.

In discussion about his adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Swann in Love (1984), the director Volker Schlöndorff famously remarked that ‘if I make a movie which Proustians celebrate for its fidelity, I will have failed as a director’. Predictably, the film was widely criticised for misrepresenting the source material and for perceived acts of violent reductionism. It was these issues that framed my viewing of the Italian animation Grande Anarca, based on my favourite Ballard short story, ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985). As a devotee of Ballard’s post-60s short stories, I was expecting to be underwhelmed by the film, regardless of my interest in the idea of adapting such an un-cinematic work of prose. The film ended up actually exceeding my expectations, deviating from the demands of a faithful adaptation, yet finding a life of its own amongst the wider architecture of the Ballardian.

The study of literature on film has largely liberated itself from the confines of the ‘fidelity debate’ and aesthetic judgements regarding how close the film is deemed to be to the ’spirit of the book’. Cartmell and Whelehan’s Adaptations (1999), Stam and Raengo’s Literature and Film (2004) and Elliott’s Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), amongst others, have done much to progress the study of adaptation, a field that has privileged the status of literature over film. For too long film adaptations have been viewed as misrepresenting, reducing, despoiling and ultimately failing to capture an essential essence somehow contained in the source text. Film adaptations are judged by what they fail to do, or what they omit, rather than what they achieve, or add. Within an atheistic, post-structuralist view of adaptation, the novel does not contain a ’spirit’, but is rather an intertextual assortment of many precursor texts that make up the bricolage landscape of culture. It is with this more open and democratic approach to adaptation that Grande Anarca should be approached, appreciating the intertextual methodology that has been employed in the adaptation process.

First published in Ambit 100 (Spring 1985), ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ is a fascinating, if unlikely, choice of source material for a film adaptation. Very much an understudied story, it sits alongside ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976) and The Index (1977) as Ballard’s most experimental and playful self-contained short stories, whilst also sharing many of his central themes concerning madness and incarceration. Eventually published together in the compendium War Fever (1990), these stories mischievously subvert classical notions of structure, form and content, unifying Ballard’s playful deployment of paratexts as narrative medium. The French literary theorist Gérard Genette coined the neologism ‘paratext’ to describe subsidiary and secondary material such as prefaces, post-scripts, footnotes and illustrations, which illuminate, but are ultimately subservient to, the principle text. As Ballard himself noted in Paris Review (Winter,1984): ‘lists are fascinating; one could almost do a list novel’.

Ballard sets out to exploit these paratextual narrative devices to self-consciously confront the reader, and include us in an ironic discourse with the text. Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown (not to be confused with the chapter of the same name in The Atrocity Exhibition) commences with a lone 18-word sentence; the rest of the story comprising eighteen footnotes cited from each word, the sentence savagely deconstructed by a mental asylum inmate into its constituent units. The story is reminiscent of, and arguably indebted to, Vladimir Nabokov’s metafictional novel Pale Fire (1962), a narrative famously comprised of a character’s foreword, index and commentary on a murdered poet’s 999-line poem. As Pale Fire progresses, rather than shedding light on the elliptical poem, these fictional paratexts instead begin to illuminate the delusional psychological state of the annotator.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Continuing these techniques, the use of the classical paratext as a vehicle for story is probably best encapsulated in Ballard’s The Index. The narrative is conveyed via the listed index to an imaginary autobiography that, as the short introduction informs us, is missing, or may never have existed at all. Small snippets of information in the index ultimately converge to form narratives that spectacularly reveal Ballardian obsessions with mental breakdown, sexual deviance, murder, psychological spaces and institutional confinement.

It is these themes that also dominate ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, a piece that functions more by exclusion, than inclusion. Employing the metafictional technique of showing only the answers to questions set by an unknown authoritarian presence, a narrative becomes clear that would traditionally far exceed the limitations of a short story. As the answers progress, we learn that the interviewee is a man living surreptitiously in Ballard’s beloved Heathrow Airport:

1) Yes.
2) Male (?)
3) c/o Terminal 3, London Airport, Heathrow.
4) Twenty-seven.
5) Unknown.
6) Dr Barnado’s Primary, Kingston-upon-Thames; HM Borstal, Send, Surrey; Brunel University Computer Sciences Department.

Sometimes the answers are deliberately obtuse, with no obvious allusion to a potential question. At other times the answers are detailed in an ironic way, completely out place with the sequence of narrative events (see answer 14 below). We soon learn about the interviewee, including his criminal history:

10) Manchester Crown Court, 1984.
11) Credit card and computer fraud.
12) Guilty.
13) Two years, HM Prison, Parkhurst.
14) Stockhausen, de Kooning, Jack Kerouac.
15) Whenever possible.
16) Twice a day.
17) NSU, Herpes, gonorrhoea.

It becomes clear that the interviewee believes he befriended the second coming of Jesus within Heathrow Airport, and begins to help him with his project to provide mankind with the power of immortality:

27) I took him to Richmond Ice Rink where he immediately performed six triple salchows. I urged him to take up ice-dancing with an eye to the European Championships and eventual gold at Seoul, but he began to trace out huge double spirals on the ice. I tried to convince him that these did not feature in the compulsory figures, but he told me that the spirals represented a model of synthetic DNA.
35) When he was drunk. He claimed that he brought the gift of eternal life.
61) He stated that synthetic DNA introduced into the human germ plasm would arrest the process of ageing and extend human life almost indefinitely.
81) Government White Paper on Immortality.
82) Compulsory injection into the testicles of the entire male population over eleven years.

The protagonist accompanies this man, as he meets with members of the royal family, politicians and celebrities in a bid to raise money for the Immortality project. The plan clearly gets out of control for the interviewee, as he takes matters into his own hands:

88) Assassination.
89) I was neither paid nor incited by agents of a foreign power.
90) Despair. I wish to go back to my cubicle at London Airport.
97) I was visited in the death cell by the special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
98) That I had killed the Son of God.
99) He walked with a slight limp. He told me that, as a condemned prisoner, I alone had been spared the sterilising injections, and that the restoration of the national birthrate was now my sole duty.
100) Yes.

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 2 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Ballard’s investment in us as active readers also allows meaning to be gained from absence. Ballard finds his preoccupations and themes best explored through the paratexts that traditionally surround culture’s dominant storytelling mediums. A list of answers, an index, and the footnotes of a single sentence become vehicles for the Ballardian. It is within this free interplay with the reader that we are able to construct a narrative, regardless of how unreliable the protagonist may or may not be. Within these empty spaces and narrative vacuums, the reader is empowered to create meaning. The dichotomous function of these omissions provoke us to address the character’s mental state, and serves to further problematise the role of the unreliable narrator/s within. As the author Ursula K Le Guin states in her review of War Fever, Ballard opts for storytelling in which we see the ‘condition of fictional bones without flesh — crystals without molecular instabilities to cloud the clarity’. Ballard uses metatextual techniques to highlight the devices of fiction and in doing so, provokes the reader to dwell on the relationships between fantasy and reality, concepts central to ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’.

It is these narrative devices so rooted in the literary form of the story that potentially problematise a cinematic adaptation (yet also make the concept very alluring). Conceived from the perspective that the source material is merely a starting point, Alvise Renzini’s short animation Grande Anarca diverts from ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ in a number of notable ways. Although strongly influenced by the unusual structure of Ballard’s original text, the film completely dispenses with the central storyline of ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, ignoring the second-coming, immortality project, murder of Jesus plot points. However, there is continuity in the film’s eerie voiceover, as the omnipotent narrator answers a set of unheard questions. Replacing the Jesus narrative with a story regarding a genetic experiment carried out on the inhabitants of a block of flats, the film also manages to confront and adapt the medium-specific tropes encoded in the literary form of the source material.

Although Renzini is credited with photography, animation and direction, the film is clearly a group effort, produced under the ‘joint tradename’ of Opificio Ciclope. Producers of various media forms, including music videos, TV graphics and documentaries, the Italian collective purports to have a ’shared interest for interacting, mixed techniques and hybrid formats’. It is certainly this mastering of art/media forms that bestows Grande Anarca with a unique visual complexity.

The film is literally multi-layered, the images painstakingly built up in successive levels. Firstly, the background is hand-illustrated, the images then photographed and projected as slides. These slide projections are then shot using 35mm film, the individual frames then serving as a canvass to be painted and etched upon. Finally, digital post-production provides the last layer to complete the film. This inter-medial technique for building a film layer-by-layer brings to mind the German short film Copyshop (2001) in which a photocopy shop worker begins to literally replicate himself in an endless cycle. The short is produced by filming almost 18,000 photocopies of digital frames. It could be said that these animation devices, particularly well executed in Grande Anarca, in which the viewer is confronted with the mechanics and textual processes of the medium, somehow mirror the self-conscious literary referencing of Ballard’s original story.

And it is within this visual process that Grande Anarca evokes much of its drama. Dark fractured imagery blends onto inanimate objects which drift into our vision, as obscured tower blocks meld into shimmering close-ups of cells and bacteria. Distorted alien-like bodies glimmer before us, gasworks flash, abject bodies morph into DNA structures. Buildings vying for dominance over nature obtain a hallucinatory quality as swift editing coupled with repetitious music (dramatic repeating violin chords) compliment the images of tree like cells inhabiting cityscapes. The film ranges between stark black and white before displaying sepia tinted browns and blues. Although ostensibly an animation, the film does feature real footage of apartment blocks and abandoned train stations. The geometrics of man-made, Vorticist shapes mingle haphazardly with biological structures. The calm, dispassionate voiceover and the melodious repetition of the music almost produce a feeling that we are watching a propaganda film, benevolently advertising a social experiment, only the visuals offering a sinister reminder that all is not well.

The story that unfolds in Grande Anarca is clearly a major deviation from Ballard’s source story, but it is the narrative replacements that really illuminate the film-makers application to the task. The answers start off relatively dull, though are notable by their contrast to Ballard’s original text:

01) Corals.
02) Light.
03) A face-shaped flower vase.
04) Glaciers.
05) Emerald green.
06) Science fiction books: Fritz Leiber, James Ballard, Stanislaw Lem.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

As the film develops, it becomes clear that the narrator was involved in a complex genetic experiment on the inhabitants of a huge multi-storey building:

20) Tenants were selected from thousands of applicants.
21) Yes, I think it was a crucial event in my life.
22) Apartments were identical in shape, size, and decors. The building was divided into 22 units, identified with a letter. Each unit had 8 floors. Each floor housed 64 persons in as many apartments. The whole of the tenants were divided in 4 groups: A, T, C, G. The building contained 5632 persons.
23) I was part of the original project team, and I came up with several of the ideas in the experiment.

Importantly, the inhabitants of the building are represented by the protagonist as being both co-operative and willing participants:

30) All the tenants were aware of the nature of the experiment in different ways. I would not therefore paint in-house relations as unconscious.
31) They were deeply involved in the experiment, and they talked about it regularly: when they met on the stairs or in the garden, or during building meetings.
32) Each tenant had to spend 4 hours with the other three individuals on his team, then 8 hours on his own. He had to write 4 pages a day. In the early stages, that was how we looked for similar descriptions, cross-references, reoccurring words. At a later stage, they were forced to write about their personal desires. Finally, about their dreams.
33) In each apartment, a pneumatic system provided food rations in exchange for the reports. Locks were automatically operated. To open the doors, tenants had to deliver their daily reports.

Eventually we see thematic cross-overs with Ballard’s original story, as the synthetic depiction of DNA creates a startling psycho-pathologic relationship:

36) The building was a to-scale replica of the DNA from algae. Tenants represented nucleotides.
37) We wanted to communicate directly with the DNA, with no go-betweens.
38) We wanted to endow it with some sort of awareness.
39) By collecting the tenants’ dreams.
40) We measured everything: heartbeats, the patterns created on the windows by electric light, decibels. Everything.

As the voiceover draws the film to a close we start to view the possibility that Renzini is sourcing more than just one Ballard text, with allusions to the effects of the building architectures acting as a kind of Tarkovskian Zone:

48) During the third stage, the building started to emit a frequency at night, while the tenants slept. The wave reached a range of over 20 kilometers. Suddenly everyone was aware of the experiment.
49) The wave from the building reverberated through the dreams of whoever lived in the area. It was those obsessive dreams that spurred the riots.
50) Lies, now as before, you keep repeating your lies.
51) That was not our purpose.
52) I would rather not talk about that.
53) Several such buildings were destroyed by mistake.
54) Scientific research is not a democratic system, nor should it be.
55) The experiment could be repeated.

ABOVE: Grande Anarca, part 3 (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

In Grande Anarca we see the narrative structure of ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ married to the Ballardian tropes of urban alienation, techno-surveillance, sociological experimentation and the psychological consequences of man-made environments, as best exemplified in High-Rise (1975). So whilst the film may break free from the plot points of the source story, it still exists within a wider Ballardian universe. We see the moral complexity of social experimentation, the actions of a closed community reverting to a primal state and the symbiotic relationship between man and urban structures. As Rick McGrath states in his affectionate and incredibly detailed analysis of the novel, ‘Reconstructing High-Rise’:

The horror of meaningless acts piled high with Ballard’s trademark detatched omnipotent narrator. High-Rise can both shock and exhilarate its reader, and its insistence that the ‘ends justify the means’ reinforces Ballard’s geometry of violence…

Further to this we see textual equivalents in the actions of individuals acting as a group, and the type of belief systems (religious, political and moral) that can become normalised in the reverie of community psychology. McGrath again illuminates these notions of the intoxicating myth:

J.G. Ballard has often told interviewers that his characters all seek a kind of highly personal psychic salvation, and that they will, if necessary, create their own self-defining mythologies and pursue them to their furthest logical ends, no matter how illogical it seems, or what the cost. In High-Rise, Ballard has created an isolated environment for the close study of the deconstruction of an ultra-modern apartment block into a new, devolved society…

The compliance of the subjects in the film to willingly engage with these socio-scientific experiments, even though their food can be kept from them if they do not co-operate, draws on some well explored Ballardian areas. What is exposed in both High-Rise and Grande Anarca is a pathological willingness to be imprisoned or otherwise confined in institutional regimes. As Ballard puts it in a 2001 Literary Review article, we can see ‘hints that a benign version of a Sadeian society is still emerging, of tormentors and willing victims’. Ballard explores the willingness to be dominated by these architectures of control, as the character Sinclair notes in Super-Cannes (2000), these ‘totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong’.

Unfortunately, Grande Anarca is far from perfect, and at least for me, fails on one quite fundamental level. In most cases I am an admirer of extreme deviation from the adapted source material, but Renzini, like so many others, appears to disregard or ignore the ironic humour that saturates most pages of Ballard’s writing. From the opening line of High-Rise, through to most of the chapter titles in The Atrocity Exhibtion, Ballard is able to infuse his stories with subtle but biting wit. Taking ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ as an example, many of the protagonist’s answers are nothing more than in-jokes as Ballard plays with the edges of humour in ways that are reminiscent both of Bret Easton Ellis and William S Burroughs:

33) Porno videos. He took a particular interest in Kamera Klimax and Electric Blue.
34) Almost every day.
36) At the Penta Hotel I tried to introduce him to Torvill and Dean…
37) Females of all ages.
38) Group sex.
58) He had a keen appreciation of money, but was not impressed when I told him of Torvill and Dean’s earnings.
63) He announced that Princess Diana was immortal.
71) He wanted me to become the warhead of a cruise missile.

The humour found in Ballard’s work is usually satirical, sometimes surreal, and always illustrative of the moral malaise infused through the story. To ignore Ballard’s humour, as I feel the makers of Grande Anarca have done, is to reduce Ballard to less than the sum of his parts. But these actions could be considered deliberate aesthetic acts, removing humour for the sake of some artistic achievement.

ABOVE: Still from Grande Anarca (2003; dir. Alvise Renzini).

Traditionally, fans of Ballard’s writing have had an uneasy relationship with adaptations of his writing. It seems that for some, films that explore Ballardian themes, or which have influenced Ballard, can offer more comforting routes to understand his work. These include both Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and Solyaris (1972), Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Lucas’ THX 1138 (1971), and of course the most potent Ballardian film, Chris Marker’s remarkable short La Jetée (1962). All benefit from their potential to be arguably more useful cinematic texts with which to contextualise Ballardian tropes, than actual official adaptations of his own books. These films are liberated from the compare-contrast analysis that dogs literal Ballard adaptations such as Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) and Weiss’ The Atrocity Exhibition (2000), amongst a host of others. The confining responsibility of fidelity can raise the stakes for the Ballard reader, in which we are not always able to read these films either objectively or fairly.

Cronenberg, both in Naked Lunch (1991) and Crash attempts to decant experimental literary narratives into a more linear cinematic language (albeit an idiosyncratically unorthodox one). Perhaps to the point where his earlier films Videodrome (1983) and Dead Ringers (1988) could be seen as a more fitting arena to explore the Ballardian. Likewise, Spielberg’s moral subjectivity, a kind of revisionist 50’s idea of ‘Boys Own’ heroism and the inevitable triumph of good over evil, constrains his adaptation of Empire of the Sun. To the point where many, as before, may find more interesting material in his Duel (1971) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) with which to better understand the relationship between Ballard and cinema. It is left to one’s imagination to wonder what could have occurred if counter-intuitively, Cronenberg had taken on Empire the Sun, and Spielberg tackled the auto-erotic allegories of Crash.

I believe that Weiss’ over-faithful use of iconic 60s imagery in his bold reworking of The Atrocity Exhibition makes the film stand out for me, in contrast to some who believe that these images lack cultural punch due to their sell-by-date expiring. In contrast to this, Renzini instead prefers to place further abstractions onto the source text. However, what the film does share with both Cronenberg and Weiss is a desire to inhabit the universe of the Ballardian. Far from slavishly conforming to Roland Barthes’ battle-cry that the ‘birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author,’ Renzini pursues a thornier path – casting aside the author’s original narrative and replacing it with something that is loosely Ballardian, rather than strictly Ballard.

Perhaps there is something inherent in Ballard’s writing that actively resists successful adaptation. McGrath’s previous mention of Ballard’s trademark ‘detatched omnipotent narrator’ could be regarded as a profoundly uncinematic central character. Taking this further, McGrath expounds on the dynamically impotent character of Laing in High-Rise and the way in which he ’survives because his driving psychic force is self-preservation through isolation and passivity’. Again, perhaps cinematic narratives resist passive characters, demanding more open, morally unambiguous, actively obstacle defeating heroes. This in marked contrast to the types that survive the carnage of High-Rise simply by keeping their head down, staying quiet and isolating themselves from the mayhem. It could also be argued that some adaptations fail because the source material is so prescriptive; readerly texts that imprint visual codas onto the reader, allowing little in the way of artistic flourishes for the adaptor. However, with Ballard the opposite could be true. The moral ambiguity, detached solipsism, and exclusion of characters’ first person psycho-dynamics mean that we can only form vague (yet highly personal) ideas of main protagonists. When we encounter these people on screen, in the flesh, saying words, and reacting to external agents, it is possible that we balk at both the unavoidable physical humanity before us, and the distinctly un-Ballardian theatrics of film-acting which we excluded from our original reading.

Grande Anarca enjoys a curiously dichotomous romance with Ballard. The aims seem contradictory: rejecting Ballard’s authority over the story, yet clearly conforming to the author’s recognised signifiers and themes. In the process of leaving the story behind, the makers of this film enter into a new dialogue, re-inhabiting and re-acquiring universal themes of the Ballardian, displaying what the Collins English Dictionary famously describes as ‘dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments’.

… MORE INFO:

+ Information on Grande Anarca at Opificio Ciclope

… GRANDE ANARCA:

+ Grande Anarca Part 1
+ Grande Anarca Part 2
+ Grande Anarca Part 3

+ English translation of the voiceover.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘The Projectionst’ by ‘Alan Marker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

In Melbourne a few months back, I had occasion to see John Foxx’s live soundtrack performance and presentation of Tiny Colour Movies, a selection of found-film fragments. Regular readers will recall that I interviewed Foxx in 2006, when the TCM album had just been released. At the time John was maintaining the line that the album was the soundtrack to a found-film collection owned by one Arnold Weizcs-Bryant, who, we were told, collects home movies and ‘repurposed movie fragments’, indeed any type of film produced outside of commercial considerations and not meant for public consumption. John, so the story goes, attended a private screening of Arnold’s collection and was compelled to create a soundtrack to accompany these resonant images, what he calls ‘tiny colour movies’.

According to the TCM liner notes:

Arnold stipulates that the movies he collects must be short — none is more than seven or eight minutes long, and some have a duration of only a few seconds. He insists that these represent a new kind of art. One which is only now becoming possible to recognise. Photography has recently become acknowledged as a new technological art form and commercial cinema is currently undergoing this kind of reassessment … these ideas cross over with Stanley Brakhage. Indeed Arnold was very excited when he discovered Brakhage’s work a few years ago, since he feels it confirms many of his long held views about the aesthetic beauty and cultural significance of film fragments.

John Foxx, TCM liner notes (2006).

ABOVE: ‘Stray Sinatra Neurone’ by ‘Max Forbert’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

One of the filmmakers in Arnold’s collection is a certain Max Forbert, who makes what John terms ‘assemblage movies’. Forbert, supposedly a janitor in Hollywood, collected film scraps saved from the cutting-room floors he was sweeping for a living and later compiled them into his own sampled productions, a fragment of which was found by Arnold after Forbert’s death:

This is a section of a Forbert film that he identifies as using cutting room outtakes from a Sinatra movie, among others which remain unidentified. Shots are: Back view of a man in a suit looking through the window of a set interior (too tall for Sinatra — possibly an extra brought in to test-light a scene). Some brief outdoor shots of cars driving through a glittering downtown New York. Close-up of a woman applying deep red lipstick — again this appears to be a test shot of make-up and lighting. Location shots of Paris and Rome. Intricately cut together, these damaged fragments become an almost tactile essay on the sensual textures and enigmatic images that film can make available.

Foxx, TCM liner notes.

In the liner notes, John talks of the beauty of the imperfections in the films, the scratches and grain, the bleaching from wear and age, ‘elements which only add to the mystery, the emotional and intellectual resonance, and the sensual appreciation, of film’. Tiny Colour Movies, then, is not only an interesting document but also one that has overtly Ballardian overtones. For starters, there’s Ballard’s own interest in the subversive potential of home movies. But also, as I tried to tease out in the interview, The Atrocity Exhibition features many examples similar to what John identifies as a ’sample film aesthetic’ in the Weizcs-Bryant collection, including therapeutic DIY film groups designed to aid the recovery of schizhophrenic patients:

Cine-films as group therapy. Patients were encouraged to form a film production unit, and were given full freedom as to choice of subject matter, cast and technique. In all cases explicitly pornographic films were made. Two films in particular were examined: (1) A montage sequence using portions of the faces of (a) Madame Ky, (b) Jeanne Moreau, (c) Jacqueline Kennedy (Johnson oath-taking). The use of a concealed stroboscopic device produced a major optical flutter in the audience, culminating in psychomotor disturbances and aggressive attacks directed against the still photographs of the subjects hung from the walls of the theatre. (2) A film of automobile accidents devised as a cinematic version of Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. By chance it was found that slow-motion sequences of this film had a marked sedative effect, reducing blood pressure, respiration and pulse rates. Hypnagogic images were produced freely by patients. The film was also found to have a marked erotic content.

J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Throughout Atrocity, T-, the book’s troubled protagonist, stitches and sutures together fragments from the media landscape — TV broadcasts, snatches of film, billboard representations of movie stars, the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination (even the ‘time music of the quasars’, derived from a strange contraption on his roof, a sculpture consisting of ‘antennae of metal aerials’) — into a form that will make sense to his disordered psyche. This is most clearly expressed in Ballard’s dictum that politics today has become a branch of advertising that sells personalities rather than policies, and that as a result politicians involve us in their fantasies without our consent — fantasies of power, ego, domination, celebrity, lust, all disguised as governance but which are really designed to place us in peripheral roles as impotent bystanders in the major decisions affecting our lives. In Atrocity, then, Ballard’s schizophrenic patients involve politicians in their fantasies, notably the hapless figure of Ronald Reagan:

The conceptual role of Reagan. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc. The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the non-functional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which re-formulate the roles of aggression and anality… In assembly kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

ABOVE: T- devising the ‘optimum sex death of Ronald Reagan’ in Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Essentially, T- reclaims the inner space he feels has been invaded by media and advertising — the colonisation of the subconscious and the stealing of his memories — repopulating it with a collaged, open-ended landscape of images drawn from the free circulation of signs and signals of what we can now view, with hindsight, as Ballard’s own proto version of hyperreality.

As Ballard says,

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.

J.G. Ballard, annotations (1994) to The Atrocity Exhibition.

This strategy of treating all media and perceptual inputs as equal, with no distinction between the inner world of fantasy and the outer world of reality, seems a clear precursor to the kind of culture-jamming hacktivism that would reach a peak in the 90s with the sound artists Negativland and their followers:

Negativland occupies itself with recontextualizing captured fragments to create something entirely new — a psychological impact based on a new juxtaposition of diverse elements, ripped from their usual context, chewed up, and spit out as a new form of hearing the world around us.

As audio artists, we pursue a uniquely contemporary and wholly appropriate creative process which inevitably emerges out of our electronic age of media saturation and the reproducing technologies available to all consumers.

Negativland, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (1995).

ABOVE: JGB in London Orbital.

More explicitly, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, in the film version of London Orbital, acknowledge a clear debt to Ballard, whose influence over the film looms large, both in the interview with him in the middle section and in the reading by Sinclair of JGB’s ‘What I Believe’ that frames it. Sinclair and Petit see the Bluewater shopping centre, ‘Ground Zero’ for the film’s aesthetic, as an architecture mediated by technology, specifically the omniscient CCTV cameras which in their endless, plastic and formless state create what the filmmakers call ‘a new nostalgia, a new boredom, a new kind of time’. If everything is filmable then, Petit and Sinclair’s method of resistance is to become like the surveillance camera, to always be open and to always be filming but to locate the degradations in the tape, the fraying at the edges, recovering and recycling elements of old technologies, what Esther Leslie calls an ‘aesthetic of refuse’, drawing on the double meaning of ‘refuse’: as both rubbish, in that if everything is filmable then everything is junk, valueless; and as resistance, ie refusing to be dissolved into the ‘electronic slums’, to use Petit’s term. Thus Sinclair inserts his home movies into the end of the film, recovering a memory that is in danger of being overwritten yet still framed in the logic of the image, both inside and outside at once — an aesthetic that instantly recalls Atrocity and many other Ballard stories.

Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies project seems a direct descendant of this lineage, especially given this statement of John’s from our interview:

Movies will be played with, just as sound was sampled, for fun and surrealism. Simply because it can be done. I remember positing this five years ago in a talk at the London College of Music and Media. Around that time, I made a movie called A Man Made of Shadows from several other movies. This made a new movie from existing films by collaging, repurposing, hommaging, stealing, sampling, appropriating. Whatever you like to call it. ‘Repurposing’ is my current fave term, along with ‘theft’. Watch out Hollywood. Movies had better get used to this because it will happen. Inevitable.
…
We’ll also need to develop new aesthetics of film, to regard elements formerly regarded as faults as intrinsic qualities inherent in film itself. The beauty of scratches, bleached out film ends, emulsion faults, grain, frameslip, etc. Just as we now value surface scratches in audio sampling.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Lost New York’ by ‘George Wilkes’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

So, freighted with all of this intertextual baggage, I was therefore very excited to learn that John was bringing the Arnold collection to Melbourne; I knew he’d premiered it overseas with a live soundtrack, but that’s about all I knew. I hadn’t really done much research on John since we last communicated, but I still harboured the suspicion that, as I detailed in the afterword to the interview, Arnold and the filmmakers were fictitious personas and that the films were in fact John’s own inventions. I sensed various clues that gave the game away including the name of one of the filmmakers, ‘Alan Marker’. This seemed far too close to the aura of Chris Marker (but with an amusingly British first name), especially given John’s stated admiration for La Jetée, which of course is also about memory being overwritten and recovered.

I felt there were more clues, not least the fact that the synopses of the various filmmakers and their motivations in the liner notes to the album resembled John’s own very individualistic short stories, especially one he wrote a while back called ‘The Quiet Man’ (for even with the best of intentions the best of artists can find it hard to disguise their ‘voice’ when inhabiting alter egos):

The old newscasts affected him greatly, the Kennedy Assassination, the images of Christine Keeler, early Beatles footage, all in a slightly worn Black and White. He edited together a film containing all these images and more, and played it constantly. He found it profoundly moving, the images gaining even more emotive power with each viewing. All these characters of his past moving in old daylight, waving and smiling and moving on.

One of his favourite films was The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, and he often played this without the soundtrack, drowning in the crude beauty of its early technicolour.

At home, too, he kept a small 8mm projector for playing home movies that he came across in his exploration of the city’s deserted apartments. He was fascinated by all the tiny intimate details of these films, the jerky figures waving from seaside and garden at weddings and birthdays and baptisms, records of whole families and their pets growing and changing through the years.

John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1978.

In fact, my musings sparked off quite a bit of debate in various forums about the nature of Arnold, with many people, including myself, initially believing the entire story of Mr Weizcs-Bryant and his amazing collection of found film.

But John remained tight-lipped… or so I thought. More on that later.

ABOVE: ‘Skyscraper’ by ‘Jerry Golden’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

From the first film of the performance, I was drawn into the degraded beauty of the Super 8 footage and the blown-out and colour-saturated celluloid on display. And yes, this was clearly found footage, the genuine article. It appeared I was wrong — you can’t fake period details, hairstyles and cars, on John’s limited budget. But it had been assembled artfully, like the looped film of traffic on LA freeways drawing out the beauty of this perpetual motion sculpture. Or time-lapsed shadows and sunlight passing across buildings, slowed down or reversed, the motion of the elements becoming imperceptible, the buildings and backgrounds the same but not quite as shadows gently ripple across them as if the fabric of time and molecular space was slowly re-weaving itself. When a building became covered completely in shadow, the film was edited so that another building emerged from the black and into daylight, a slow modernist dance of compacted grace and proportion. It seemed a trick of the mind designed to evoke the passing of civilisation, like the classic Ballardian ideal that treats reality as just a stage set that can be pulled away at any moment.

At this point, I thought I might need to re-assess: if these films were genuine, maybe Arnold was, too.

There was much to enjoy throughout the program. Extraterrestrial, sun-soaked clouds magnified to massive proportions so that they seemed composed of nothing but pure colour and grain. Flickering film projected onto women’s faces, turning them into shapeshifting cats and dogs with whiskers and elongated ears. A naked woman underwater, swimming among the wrecks of submerged automobiles as the sunlight from above the surface turns her and everything it touches into a blue dream.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Underwater Automobiles’ by ‘Robert Rouncefield’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

But then I began to imagine that John had made a very clever play: he’d inserted what I was sure were his own films into the found footage. The giveaway for me was twofold. First, the film ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’ featuring a man walking into a series of smoke-filled rooms — we never see his face as it is either obscured by smoke, or he is filmed from the side or behind. In the liner notes, Arnold says this:

I saw these marvellously lit sequences which seemed to have a very definite story, yet there is no explanation or development or resolution. We can have no idea what the filmmaker had in mind. Because of this lack of resolution, they seem strangely suspended. You begin to make connections, you feel compelled to write a story. But there is none. There can be none. The effect is tantalising, like a damaged and incomplete fragment of memory.

But, I’m sure, both the film and this explanation is very obviously the voice of Foxx; this film, to me, is another iteration of Foxx’s ‘quiet man’ persona, the ghost moving through the streets of the city, his identity never quite coalescing, always escaping the gaze. As John has said, ‘The point of view I’ve always worked from is that of a ghost in the city — someone who is a sort of drifting, detached onlooker — but still vulnerable and trying against the odds to maintain a sort of dignity in the face of all the static.’

ABOVE: ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

There appeared to be more confirmation in the film ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’, a montage of shots supposedly featuring a mysterious extra from Hollywood films:

He has appeared in dozens of major Hollywood movies and American television series, yet he is completely unknown to the public. He appears as a background character, a passer-by, often wearing a grey suit, or a raincoat. His calm unhurried walk, his spectacles, his lapel flower and his habit of turning his head briefly (seemingly so that his face will be momentarily on the film), are what eventually make him distinctive. The film was researched and assembled by the man who first discovered his existence, Evan Parker. Parker is an academic whose field is the evolution of Hollywood. In the course of his studies, Parker watched hundreds of films and had begun to speculate about making a study of the extras, those figures passing by in the background. That is when he began to notice one who appeared to be present in several movies. Intrigued, Parker began a search and was surprised to discover the presence of this figure in dozens of major and minor Hollywood movies. This is a slow-motion montage of all the clips of his appearances so far discovered. His identity remains unknown.

TCM liner notes.

Note the reference to the GREY suit!

‘A Peripheral Character’ is an intriguing concept and very well put together, but at times you could tell John had judiciously selected clips of not the same mysterious person, but of similar looking actors from dozens of films, always with their face half turned away, or shot from behind, or bending over — you might just be convinced if you weren’t paying close enough attention that you were viewing just the one ghost in the city.

By the program’s end, I felt as if I’d finally worked it out for sure: that ‘Arnold Weizcs-Bryant’ was merely another psuedonym for Dennis Leigh (Foxx’s real name), and that it was indeed John Foxx himself who is the passionate collector of found footage, the underground filmmaker inspired by what he has stumbled across to create his own ’sample films’, his own ‘tiny colour movies’…

And the live music? Well, it was classic Foxx, yes, lovely electronic washes drifting as timelessly as the shadows and sunlight of the films. I do like John’s work, but even so I have to say I was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be much improvisation, given that this was ostensibly a live performance of the soundtrack. Tracks stopped and started exactly when the films did, and it all seemed a bit too perfectly sequenced, too faithful to the CD. I would have liked more of a continuous flow, more segues to sustain the atmosphere, more improv, more of the scratches, collages and squelches that John so admires in the films, for as good as the music is, it just seems far too clean, too digital in the live context to suit the conceptual conceit of the films themselves. As a standalone CD it’s great; as an audiovisual package, I’m not so sure.

And then it was question time, and John appeared from behind his bank of keyboards, dressed head to toe in black like a handsomer version of Lux Interior. Before the show I’d thought of sticking my hand up and asking him if Arnold really did exist, but as I was watching the films I decided it just didn’t matter at all to me anymore. Whatever the answer, either way, John’s assemblage of the results had become compelling — if John wanted to keep up the pretense, if indeed that’s what it was, I was happy to play along. Besides I’d already voiced my suspicions two years ago and I didn’t want to seem like a curmudgeon or a stalker by hounding him forever more about it. Also, I was curious to see if anyone else in the audience would broach the subject. Perhaps no-one even cares…

ABOVE: Stills from ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

Questions were asked about Ultravox, about the soundtrack and always John’s answers were mystical, evasive, talking of dreams and flight. Then someone asked him about the Hollywood extra. ‘Did you ever ask Arnold if he had any info on the extra, or whether he’d tried to trace his identity?’ John fidgeted, looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Er… no’ he replied. The mere mention of Arnold appeared to be making him nervous.

Then someone else stuck up a hand. ‘John, I read the piece on Ballardian where you talk about the influence of J.G. Ballard on your work.’ Ah, he’d read my interview, meaning he’d know of the afterword where I first expressed my doubts! We were getting warm, no doubt about it, but would this guy pop the burning question? But ‘Which of his novels is your favourite?’ was the interrogation and the moment had passed again.

A few more questions and then someone asked John if he wanted a beer. He quickly said he’d love one, but then just as quickly said his goodbyes and hustled off the stage, always the enigma, always elusive, never to be seen again. The end.

And I couldn’t help but think of part 2 of our interview, for I was greatly surprised to see him in Melbourne in the first place.

Because when I asked him if he would ever tour Australia, this is what he said: ‘I’d like to. But it will most likely be as drifting molecules about twenty years from now…’

POSTSCRIPT: After the screening, my dormant interest in John Foxx was reignited and I went Googling for more information. As I mentioned, all I really knew of the background to this project was what had emerged in our interview. As far as I knew, for others, as it was for me, the mystery was still sustainable. Little did I know that John had recently come clean! In this post on John’s forum, for example, it’s claimed that ‘The footage that JF and Mike Barker use in TCM is bought at car boot sales, jumble sales and at market stalls. Sometimes people put their home movie collections up for grabs on ebay… this is then digitised and re-edited to produce TCM.’

And this is confirmed in an interview John did just before the Melbourne screening:

I used to buy reels of film (from Brick Lane and Portobello Road markets) and didn’t know what they were and view them to see if there was anything interesting on them. Eventually I amassed all this stuff and didn’t quite know what to do with it. Then I saw this collector’s reel of films one night and thought ‘Yeah — that’s exactly right! It is finite. It does have a place in history’. And some of it is unique and some of the stories behind the pieces are very interesting too. It’s like reading an obituary; which is something I like — it’s not morbid at all. It’s very interesting because you get a summation of someone’s life and their achievements…

So, is it actually John’s collection on display? It would appear that way, yes, judging by this interview. It would appear that Arnold is John, just as John is Dennis. And what of the filmmakers and their backstories? As I wrote in the afterword to the 2006 interview, after mulling over the ‘Frank Watts’ film:

Urban drift; walking through the city; submitting to psychic entry points … surely this is yet another brilliantly evocative John Foxx short story? Yes — the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the case … re-reading the liner notes, the parallels with these ‘filmmakers’, with their obsessions and aesthetics, to Foxx himself now seem all too obvious (let’s not forget that ‘John Foxx’ is a character that Dennis Leigh himself has said he inhabits because ‘John Foxx is smarter than me’).

Arnold’s ‘filmmakers’ are called Robert Rouncefield; Jerry Golden; Earnst Lubin — like ‘John Foxx’, these are humdrum yet fanciful names, mythical yet ordinary, dull names to the point of incandescence. Their bios and summaries exhibit all the traits of the condensed novels in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But there would be one final nail in the coffin…

ABOVE: John Foxx answering audience questions after the Sydney screening of TCM.

Something else I found in my latest research was this video of John’s Q&A after the Sydney performance of TCM. Note that this was filmed the day after the Melbourne gig. Now recall the Melbourne audience member who asked John if he wanted a beer. Finally, watch the Sydney video: as the uploader writes, ‘Note the beer in his hand. Someone from the audience was kind enough to rush off and get him one.’

Someone had obviously been taking notes in Melbourne, had flown up to Sydney, and wasn’t letting John rush off the stage without a drink this time!

Perhaps they thought the beer might loosen his tongue just a little. Indeed, it appears that way for in this Q&A John is far more expansive and revealing than in the session I attended, and even goes so far as to say that some of the TCM movies are outright fiction, ‘complete lies’ as he calls them, created by him under the guise of a fictitious filmmaker and inserted into the program to mess with the audience’s perception:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Did you cut some of those movies up?

JOHN FOXX: Oh, some of them were invented. And some aren’t. And I want to use these films as a way of telling stories. And being dishonest. Because I think dishonesty’s really interesting. What do you call someone who tries to convince you that something is true when it’s not? You call them a liar, don’t you? So what do you call an author? And that’s the thing that really interests me, is that line between truth and fiction. So some things are true in the movies, and some are complete lies. And I think it’s very interesting to try and work out which is which. Some of them are totally fabricated and some aren’t. But they’re all made up of the real thing.

So what one of the filmmakers practices, in other words cutting Hollywood up into pieces and reassembling it, I’ve been doing as well. And I want to continue doing that, because I think film is raw material now, to be used in any way we want. We’ve all grown up with that stuff. And I even dream it. Because I went to the cinema when I was 7, 6, 5 years old in Lancashire. And Lancashire was so grey, in England, and the cinema was so grey, everything merged together. You know, I was usually covered in soot when I was a kid, and everything was in black and white, the factory chimneys and smoke and all that, and when I looked on the screen it was the same thing. So all my memories of it are mixed up in the movies, old science fiction movies and utter rubbish. None of which I could understand as a kid, so I had to make things up with a kit from my own mind. It became a part of my dream language. And I still dream it. So I think we all mix stuff in strange ways because it’s in our heads, isn’t it? We’ve grown up with it. So why not reassemble it in the way we want to? Because we own it, you know — we don’t have to be dominated by it. It’s ours for God’s sake, not theirs — we own it.

However, I’m glad I went into the screening not knowing about John’s admission. It meant there was still a bit of mystery and wonder about the project, it meant I could ’script’ the story a little bit as I tried to link and crosslink various ideas and theories — using a ‘kit’ from my own mind.

Does John’s admission matter in the end? No — the project stands on its own merits. I was reminded of how many people still take Empire of the Sun to be Ballard’s autobiography, and how they are often greatly surprised and sometimes angry to discover the book is as ‘fictional’ as the rest of his novels. In this day and age, surely it is not too farfetched to suggest that authenticity is just another mask? I personally love the idea of creating a character and inhabiting it so that the boundaries become blurred, inhabiting the interzones and interstitial zones, ‘the yes or no of the borderzone’ to borrow a phrase from Atrocity, escaping definition and classification.

As does Ballard, for that matter, who has his own passion for the idea of faked newsreels, and the notion of fiction passed off as truth:

The fake war newsreel (and most war newsreels are faked to some extent, usually filmed on manoeuvres) has always intrigued me — my version of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket or All Quiet on the Western Front would be a newsreel compilation so artfully faked as to convince the audience that it was real, while at the same time reminding them that it might be wholly contrived. The great Italian neo-realist, Roberto Rossellini, drew close to this in Open City and Paisa.

J.G. Ballard, annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1994.

For anyone interested in Ballard — especially Atrocity — and experimental film, John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies performance is highly recommended. I’m not sure any of it is especially ‘cutting edge’ — Foxx’s liner notes, for example, state that the Alan Marker stuff (as commanding as it is, one of my favourites from the set) is ’surely unique in the history of filmmaking’, yet I saw the exact same technique performed with skulls and ghost imagery last week in Melbourne by Australian artists who’d been practising it for some time. And overall, in terms of experimental and repurposed film, the phenomenal, unparalleled work of the likes of Guy Sherwin, the old master, and Ben Russell and Ben Rivers, the heirs, is certainly more of an assault in both audio and visual terms.

What Tiny Colour Movies undoubtedly is, however, is Foxxian: too cold by half for some, beautiful and sad for others, an industrial spiritualism and an unalloyed sensuality of machines.

Arnold Weizcs-Bryant: R.I.P.

..:: Previously:
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 1
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 2

..:: More information::
+ Metamatic: John Foxx’s official site
+ Tiny Colour Movies official site

This strange and poetic film, directed by Chris Marker, is a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage, and creates in its unique way a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time. Apart from a brief three-second sequence — a young woman’s hesitant smile, a moment of extraordinary poignancy, like a fragment of a child’s dream — the thirty-minute film is composed entirely of still photographs. Yet this succession of disconnected images is a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter.
…
This familiar theme [time travel] is treated with remarkable finesse and imagination, its symbols and perspectives continually reinforcing the subject matter. Not once does it make use of the time-honoured conventions of traditional science fiction. Creating its own conventions from scratch, it triumphantly succeeds where science fiction invariably fails.

J.G. Ballard ‘La Jetée: Academy One’, New Worlds, 1966.

Chrismarker.org is an randomly-compiled, taxonomically naive and hopefully useful archive of ruminations, bibliographic & filmographic notations, untimely meditations, mnemonic minutiae and other glosses on the cinematic, written, photographic and multimedia work of world-citizen & time-traveler Chris Marker.

We welcome contributions in short article form from the global village that Marker helped to map. We also welcome Chris Marker news, links, memorabilia, aphorisms, quotations, images and stray insights. Contributions from animals are welcome too, of course, including but not limited to cats, owls, giraffes, emus and elephants (слоны).

ABOVE: Still from La Jetée (1964; dir. Chris Marker).

Meanwhile, we leave the academic penal colony – to which we once belonged and from which we no doubt still bear the scars – to crunch through the seemingly inevitable canonization process, as it has done so well with Walter Benjamin. That may be just what awaits epigonically for the rare few who scribble & bricole in a deep, careful, dedicated, crafty and continuous manner with a master’s brilliance and an asystematic approach, in whatever medium, ahead (or outside) of their time.

You may notice that some of the material initially appearing on this site is a port of resources from the old and crumbling edifice of silverthreaded presents chris marker, once housed at a so-called tilde account at silcom.com, now still hanging around for old time’s sake at a nowherenear relevant domain called vajramedia.com, in and amongst the rubble of a disastrous project once known as Cinema Paranoia. Upon this shaky base we build, quoting mostly, writing little, ever fascinated by and admiring always the oeuvre of Chris Marker, le plus célèbre des cinéastes inconnus.

Chris Marker: Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

ABOVE: Still from Sans Soleil (1983; dir. Chris Marker).

‘the narcissism of things’, by infinite thØught.

infinite thØught is a blog of critical theory that’s not afraid to use ‘mock’ tactics, ie, it can have a laugh and be unforced, hilarious and poignant about it. It also has a pig fixation that I don’t really get (Is it after Orwell? Or is it a Chris Marker-style intervention from the non-human world?) and that lately has manifested itself in the creation of a lolpig farm.

In fact, i.t. herself (also of the rad-film collective, kino fist) seems to have abandoned writing of late, but it’s not solely down to all that hyperporcine activity. She has been posting a series of photo essays, some captioned, some not, almost one a week for the last month or so.

This one, ‘the narcissism of things’, is outstanding, with its ‘pictures of Thames wasteland’ refracted through rusty industrial puddles.

And the latest is this one, ‘the suburbs dream of violence: a trip to bluewater’, based around the Bluewater shopping centre, one of the inspirations for the Metro-Centre in Ballard’s Kingdom Come. Included with each photo is a judiciously selected quote from K.C.

‘the suburbs dream of violence: a trip to bluewater’, by infinite thØught.

Death had no place in the Metro-Centre, which had abolished time and the seasons, past and future.

Ballard, Kingdom Come.

Of course, Bluewater inspired Ballard to implore Iain Sinclair to blow it up in the London Orbital film, and i.t. is not above a spot of Ballard-style urban anarchy herself, having previously used K.C. as a kind of instruction manual for the all-or-nothing destruction of the Millennium Dome.

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 over so much cash, the only copy I could find was at my local library and I would borrow and reborrow it, unable to let it go.

Congratulations, Zone Books. Chris Marker himself will be happy, too:

This book version of La Jetée is, to my mind, astonishingly beautiful. It brings a total freshness to the work and a new way to use photos to deal with dramatic events. Not a film’s book, but a book in its own right — the real ciné-roman announced in the film’s credits.

Chris Marker

It’s also pleasing to see that Zone is promoting the book with an admiring quote from Ballard, taken from his 1966 review of the film in New Worlds:

This strange and poetic film, a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable, and photomontage … creates its own conventions from scratch. It triumphantly succeeds where science fiction invariably fails.

J.G. Ballard.

SPOILER ALERT
This prompted me to dig out Ballard’s full review, where I am surprised to discover that Ballard gets the ending wrong. I’d never noticed that before. Ballard says the man throws himself off the pier, when in fact he is shot by the camp guard. His interpretation completely changes the dynamic. For Marker, the man’s execution means he is forever trapped in time, eternally haunted by his memories. In Ballard’s version, the man’s display of agency means he is still trapped, but that he has willingly altered time, with the expected tragic consequences, Definitely Ballardian, then, but maybe not what Marker intended.

Here’s an overview of La Jetée, which I wrote a few years back.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

An Interview with Paul Plamper and Niklas Goldbach
by Dan O’Hara

In July on the roof terrace of the Ludwigsmuseum, the major museum of modern art in Cologne, I attended a ’screening’ of a radio play. I say ’screening’ because a film had been made to accompany the play, the combined effect of audio and film a little like Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Called Hochhaus, the play was a three-part adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise. A faithful rendition in terms of plot and themes, it transposed the action of the novel to Berlin in the near future. The programme described the play as follows:

Berlin, 2013. A star architect has built in the capital the tallest residential building in Europe. There he wants to create a social Utopia: the Neokommune K 13. Nothing is wanting in this autarchy, a completely self-sufficient closed system. But the high-rise becomes a pressure cooker of neighbourhood enmity and rampant, uninhibited class warfare. In the blink of a camera’s eye, this modern super-community regresses into a biotope of primitive lifeforms. Based on J. G. Ballard’s science fiction novel, Paul Plamper has produced a horror radio play of pressing sociological relevance, which could take place in every German home. “Never forget: You are Hochhaus!”

With the Kölner Dom looming behind the roof terrace, and a panorama of the city stretching away towards the west, some fifty or sixty people settled down to listen for three hours to the German version of High-Rise. At nine in the evening, the sky was at first still too bright for the audience to see much of the film, so many of them sat with their heads down or eyes closed, concentrating on listening. In any case the film appeared to be merely a static image of a huge skyscraper, a carbuncle of a compressed city, a futurist mockery of the Gothic Cathedral at our backs.

There were some very interesting angles taken in terms of adaptation – the film was made in parts of the old GDR, and there were persistent echoes of and references to Nazism, Speer’s social engineering through architecture being one of the more telling ones. I spoke to the author, Paul Plamper, and his colleague Niklas Goldbach, a video artist who made the accompanying film. Radio plays or ‘Hörspiele’ are hugely popular in Germany – the original broadcast, on WDR in November 2006, reached around 100,000 listeners – and Ballard is relatively unknown, so this radio adaptation would introduce Ballard’s name to an audience that had hitherto encountered him only through Cronenberg and Spielberg’s films. I wanted to find out why Plamper and Goldbach had chosen to adapt High-Rise. What relevance did Ballard’s 1975 novel have, in their view, for the Germany of the near future?

Dan O’Hara teaches English & American Literature at the University of Cologne. He is currently working on a monograph on J. G. Ballard.

NOTE: Performances of Hochhaus are due to restart on 12 January 2008 at the Theater Mannheim. See the endnote for more information.

DAN: Can I ask you first of all why you chose to adapt High-Rise? Because, as far as I’m aware, Ballard’s not very well known in Germany.

PAUL: No, he’s not that well known, actually. At least not when I was searching for a German translation of High-Rise a few years ago. There were some rare copies of an old edition being traded on the internet. I got hold of one of those and was immediately attracted. In Germany, the cultural establishment builds up a strong frontier between what they call ‘culture’ and what they call ‘entertainment’, and I think some, uhm, stupid intellectuals put Ballard more in the ‘entertainment’ Schublade, the entertainment category. But on the other hand you also have thinkers like Heiner Müller being admirers, so…

DAN: Really? I didn’t know about that. Heiner Müller, the ‘Hamletmaschine’ author?

PAUL: Yes, the dramatist. He liked science fiction and he liked crime literature. So, as you see, you find Ballard in different cultural circles. The science fiction and fantasy communities read him, and from time to time an open minded intellectual. That’s what I like about Ballard, he’s not easy to put in just one bracket.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: So what was it particularly about this one novel? What did you have in mind when you adapted it?

PAUL: Well, concerning the themes, I was looking for material for a ‘horror’ radio play. I wanted to do a monster radio play without monsters, but with humans. I discovered that Ballard is rather a specialist in this subject, and that his well-cultivated and very sensitive paranoia really makes him somewhat of a prophet; you know, he wrote the novel in 1975, and now the novel is being slowly caught up by reality. He was paranoiac enough to know what was going to happen.

I’m also looking for interesting acoustical situations for my radio plays. In High-Rise there’s a small society in a very condensed space. If you just look at social interaction: when it’s silent, you hear your neighbours in your room. The wall is something that separates you from them but the level of audio is really what separates you the least. You don’t see them but you hear them. So the sort of social pressure which has to be related is really well-suited to a radio play. I’m always searching for interesting topics, but most of all for subject matters that must be a radio play and no other medium, film, or whatever.

DAN: You move the action to future Berlin; I’m very intrigued by this shift.

PAUL: Well, since Ballard wrote High-Rise, things that happen in the novel now really happen in the middle of society, in public, in the media. So we thought, we won’t put the building in a suburb, as Ballard does – in the novel it’s in the outskirts of London, hidden away, where these terrible things can happen because nobody takes notice of it. We put our house right in the middle of Berlin, and it’s a prestigious project run by an architect who is a very adept publicist. He’s played by Martin Wuttke and we named him Philip del Ponte, a character like Daniel Libeskind or similar, you know, people who make grand architectural gestures and yet who are at the same time extremely clever in developing cute ideas to sell their architecture and to be in the public eye. We moved the whole story to the border of the Spree – this is actually 100 metres from here, where I live. Where before, there was the Wall, now there’s a gap at the river, and there are vast areas where a new centre is being developed for the media, MTV moved there for example. And there are gated communities. They’re like a virus spreading in Berlin. They have all these phony names like “Prenzlauer Gärten”. Well-to-do creative people start these projects like community projects; everybody has his financial interest, buys part of the building and thinks he invests in a social project.

NIKLAS: But there’s a new meaning to ’social’ for these people. It doesn’t have anything to do with the social vision of Ballard or anyone in the ’70s for example…

DAN: It’s not to do with community?

NIKLAS: No. Well, maybe it is, but not with the idea of a social system where the stronger help the poor, for example. I don’t think you could find anything like the social system Ballard presents in High-Rise nowadays in Berlin.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: When I think of gated communities in England, the ones that Ballard’s talked about for example in Running Wild, his 1988 novel, in which some children living in a gated community kill their parents, such gated communities are very upper-middle class, and people choose to live in them apparently because of fear. These are high-security environments with surveillance cameras, private security guards… I wonder if it’s the same sort of thing in Berlin?

PAUL: We’re talking about something new. This certainly exists, but what interests us right now even more is that you have such gated communities combined with the fact that you can buy being a ‘good person’. You can purchase a good feeling by moving into a living community of house owners. In the 60s and 70s there was the start of the Kommune in Germany, Kommune Eins and so on. Now it’s part of the market, and there’s no contradiction at all. Communal feeling has been absorbed by the market. It goes together with the fact that, yes, of course these people live gated, because they say “ok, I’m moving near Kreuzberg, how exciting, a real ghetto, so I have to protect our stuff a little bit. Generally I’m open minded, come on, I was punk in the 80s, but still, I don’t want to get robbed.” They’re not really frightened, they think they’re just rationally pragmatic.

NIKLAS: And also I think what’s kind of key for Berlin, I mean, you live Dan in Cologne, right?

DAN: I do now, yes.

NIKLAS: Cologne has a completely different structure as a city from Berlin, obviously, because of the separation and the Wall. Berlin was for such a long time a kind of playground for people to try out new social structures, but lately there’s this gentrification process in Berlin that’s really overwhelming. In Kreuzberg, which was or which still is an alternative quarter of the city, now there are rich people moving in and all these condominiums being built. I saw one house where you can park your car in front, on the same level as your apartment, to make it safer for you. So there are all these weird architectural ideas popping up, and then there are other areas like Prenzlauer Berg which is in former East Berlin, where you have a real gentrification melting point, where only families live and everybody behaves as if they live in a small village. So especially from that point of view, it makes total sense to put High-Rise in Berlin. Where else in Europe right now? Probably in East Europe soon, but right now this is the place where most of the gentrification is happening, or where it’s visible. A lot of money moved to Berlin because it’s the capital, and there are so many real gated communities: there’s one right in the middle of the city for example, next to a park, the ‘Volkspark Friedrichshain’; and they have a doorman. You can only get in if you pass the doorman, and then you have a street, and a pool, and little houses, like a suburb. And this is happening in 2007 – in the center of Berlin; Paul makes Hochhaus happen in 2013, not that far away. And I don’t think it’s that much of a utopia.

PAUL: We have a doorman called Weingarten in the radio play, played by an old actor from the East who I met at the Berliner Ensemble, Heinrich Buttchereit. He has a Stasi pass in the play; he’s been hired by del Ponte because he has the best techniques in surveillance and security… They’re just very well trained. At one point, when there’s an escalation of the situation in the house, Weingarten says: “it’s just as before: we don’t have the Wall in a vertical sense anymore, now it’s horizontal, in the house, between the upper class and the lower class.” He says “ok, now I have my Wall back!”

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: There’s a great deal of political content in your adaptation; and with these references to Weingarten being ex-Stasi and, also, Niklas, I think you said you’d filmed some parts in the ex-GDR, was that right?

NIKLAS: Yeah, that’s true.

DAN: There are echoes – deliberate echoes? – of the GDR, of the Stasi and of Nazi Germany. What’s the point of these echoes for your audience? What are you trying to say to them?

NIKLAS: Well, Berlin has changed so much, at least for me. My background is that I’m a visual artist, a video artist, and most of my work is about the role of the individual in a world on the edge of dystopia. Maybe this is a very pessimistic view – let’s say it’s an artistic view, it’s maybe not only my personal view. I’d worked with Paul before, on another radio play called Release that actually took place in a prison. He told me about his new play, and invited me to a pre-listening session, and I thought about images that could occur within the three acts of the audio play. First of all I went straight to the point where Paul’s fictional high-rise would stand, between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, right on the border where the Wall was. I went and took photos. It’s a vast area, and I thought, well, what kind of architecture could be in this area?

All the three parts of the radio play are filmed in the former GDR, there’s not a single West German building. I think there are several reasons for that, but one reason is for example that the GDR system seems like a mixture of dystopia and utopia to me – it started as a utopia – of a social project. Del Ponte, the architect in the radio play, his idea is to make a social project that combines different classes of people. And this is actually what the GDR system had in common with del Ponte – maybe. His idea is to get rid of classes in this building; and that was also an idea of the GDR – West Germany never had that idea.

PAUL: You know, Ballard puts a big focus on the social classes in his novel, and at first you think, oh, the social classes, nowadays those concepts sound really seventies, but actually my thoughts are the exact opposite. West Germany since WWII has tried to have this soziale Marktwirtschaft – a social market economy – and until the beginning or the middle of the ’90s, it worked quite well. Do you have this expression, the ’social scissor’? It’s a like a scissor that’s wide or narrow: you have the classes drifting apart from each other or closer to each other. Up to the `90s, the scissor was half closed, but in the last ten years, this has been completely, outrageously reversed. Now you have the underprivileged again; you have a small upper class getting richer and more powerful. I thought that we had to start talking about classes again. Ballard wrote about them in 1975, and now it’s back, it’s a very hot topic again.

Part two of the radio play is really about this. And at the same time it’s like a fast-forward history of the extreme Left in Germany. From the initial spontaneous protests in the sixties, the fun Sponti actions, up to the Red Army Faction in the late seventies, which got to be rather violent and militarily organized. The camera-man Andreas Lang – in the novel he’s called Wilder – lives on the ground floor. Lang, played by Milan Peschel, is accused of having killed the first human in the house, the second victim after the dog. Lang’s first reaction to the accusation is to gather people around him, to play Skat, a card game. As an act of political protest, they play cards in front of the supermarket on the 23rd floor, and then their protest gets more violent. Lang moves from being a buddy of the underprivileged, to being their leader. He leads a Feldzug…

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

NIKLAS: Like a battle, a campaign.

PAUL: They go up the high-rise, trying to burn the food stores of the upper class. Barricades have already been built from sofas and so on, so that there’s no access to the upper floors anymore. Lang and his followers succeed in burning the food stores, and in a very irrational moment they announce hunger for the whole house.

NIKLAS: Their slogan is “Solidarity with the hungry people in this world”.

DAN: When I’m looking at your original blurb for the Ludwigsmuseum, it’s called a ‘Horror Hörspiel’. And yet…

PAUL: A sociological horror Hörspiel…

DAN: … yes. And yet there’s a huge amount of political content here.

PAUL: Ballard is a political author for me. Many pages in the novel are about the class system. I like his political content; but at the same time I fear that we sound like a couple of humorless Germans now, who do heavy, grey, intellectual type stuff, but don’t get us wrong, the radio play is meant to be pure entertainment; it has the rhythm of an action movie…

NIKLAS: This is what we said in the beginning about Ballard himself, that this is an entertaining book which also has the quality of political comment. It’s supposed to be entertaining, but there’s obviously a deeper meaning to it. For example, look at the function of del Ponte, the architect, as opposed to Andreas Lang, the leader of the revolution. Especially in 2007, I think a lot of different types like del Ponte are out there, you know, private people or private investors who take over functions of the state. He’s a private person sponsoring the lower class like, for example, some celebrities or rich people today give some of their earnings back to the lower class. So it’s a bit ambivalent, what he’s doing. To the outside world he looks like he’s a really good guy but in the end, he’s the one who’s living in the penthouse.

DAN: I wondered if you also had a sense of the fact that, in the book, there’s a very specific relationship between Wilder and Anthony Royal – between Andreas Lang and del Ponte in Hochhaus – there’s this Oedipal backstory in the novel. In a sense it’s as if Ballard’s using that psychological backstory to make a political point.

PAUL: Well, we have the same two characters – the big antipodes – and we pretty much go along with Ballard’s narrative. In the end, Andreas Lang, our Wilder, when he’s already quite animal-like, mounts to the upper floors and kills del Ponte. It’s almost the same story. And then he gets eaten by the women, by the Matriarchat.

When I read the novel, I felt that Ballard really likes to develop the characters and their steps in a psychologically logical order. He has plenty of time to explain what could be the psychological background of Wilder doing what he does, and of his regression into animal status and so on. But in a radio play you don’t have that much time; and also I had the sense that in 2006 you don’t have to explain why people freak out, it’s so obvious, that utopia is, I don’t know… I have the impression that Ballard still felt some sort of friction with a positive utopian vision of a society, and so he described its regression into a barbarian state. Sometimes I thought that Ballard in the novel places his figures in a kind of sociological chess game. This figure moves from here to there because of this and that. I didn’t feel it necessary to explain so much in our radio play. The dynamic is a musical dynamic.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN:I can see that perhaps you don’t need so much narration. But you did introduce a narrator, didn’t you? There’s an extra-diegetic voice.

PAUL: Yeah; the great Volker Spengler is the narrator. You might know him from his films with Fassbinder. Like in Greek tragedy where you have the person who sees things and advances them, his narrator seems to know everything. He’s the transcendent voice. Volker just does it merely by his great personality and his destroyed voice, which breathes a lot of what he has lived.

DAN: Yeah, he has a wonderful voice. What specific narrative changes did you make in the adaptation? You introduce an external narrator; you shift to a straight chronological narrative…

PAUL: A listener can’t grasp 30 people like in the novel, he has to concentrate a lot to get to know even 10. So my co-author, Kai Hafemeister and I tried to take as few characters as possible, so that we still could see this as a small society that evolves. We have eight or so main characters, and not many very small parts, because I personally have a big aversion to this ‘protagonist and many small parts’ thing. We try to create an emotional involvement with each character. We wanted to have characters that you want to get to know better with each episode, because they were broadcast on three consecutive Fridays. So we had to make you want to continue to spend your time with these horrible people.

DAN: And what function does the voice-over narration serve?

PAUL: He’s telling as much as is needed, as seldom as possible. When we call it a sociological horror radio play, he’s the horror part – supported of course by the soundtrack, which is by SchneiderTM. Spengler’s voice… It’s so difficult to describe it. Like a field in which an atomic bomb exploded… He has a post-World War Three voice…

DAN: It reminded me of Vincent Price or Christopher Lee…

NIKLAS: He’s the same kind of character…

PAUL: At the end-credits, Volker always says, ‘And remember: You – are High-rise…’ This is an allusion to a recent campaign of the CDU government in Germany. They wanted to try to impose more national feeling on us. You had all these stupid billboards – saying ‘You Are Germany’ everywhere. So Volker concludes each part – they get more and more horrifying – with ‘You Are High-rise’.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: Are you concerned about nationalism at the moment? In Ballard’s latest novel, Kingdom Come, he’s turned his attention towards specifically English nationalism.

PAUL: Yeah, I understand that. We recorded our radio play right before the soccer World Cup in 2006. There were young Germans with flags and the national colours on their faces, a new kind of ‘pop nationalism’. After what happened in the Nazi era, Germans thought they could finally show an non-violent national feeeling, just as in other countries. They had the feeling that everybody steps together, that we are a stronger society. This also infected our way of telling High-Rise, that people are trying to create this new community. And then you see what happens to it. Which would lead you, as a society as a whole, to the next war. In High-Rise, it leads you to the terrible end. I don’t know; I look at history as something cyclical, and not so much as a regression into a barbarian state. We tell the story of only one high-rise, and in the end we put a bigger accent on the fact that the women take over, as after WWII it was the Trümmerfrauen, the ‘rubble women’, in Germany who rebuilt society, and really started the German Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle. After WWII, it was the women who cleaned up the men’s mess. Like the Matriarchat in the novel. We emphasized this; you see there’s a new order evolving; it starts again, a cycle.

We have a saying, vor der eigenen Tür kehren – to take the brush and clean in front of your own door – and that’s what Kai and me are trying to do. We’re trying to tell the story as close as possible to us, as if it could happen next to us, as if it could happen within us. Of course that’s something that is much bigger than the rise of nationalism right now. It’s like High-Rise being an image for a deliberate prison, and this prison which is self-chosen just displaces your view of another prison, which is Homo sapiens not getting out of his monstrous skin. Homo sapiens has this trait of this monstrosity; let’s face the fact. It’s a very Ballardian thought. Goya once said ‘I don’t fear witches, or poltergeists, or ghosts, or braggers or giants, or evil men; I fear no creature but one – the human.’ He said that in 1790, and I think Ballard could have said the same thing. It’s really about human nature, High-Rise. All these allusions in Hochhaus to the downfall of the socialist system, or how they killed their own ideals in socialist realism – all of these elements are products of, and evolve from, human nature.

DAN: I don’t know if you came across Concrete Island, the novel before High-Rise? For a later edition, Ballard wrote a new introduction in which he refers to both Crash and High-Rise. He says something very close to what you’re saying, and what Goya said; he writes: “[A]s well as the many physical difficulties facing us there are the psychological ones. How resolute are we, and how far can we trust ourselves and our own motives? Perhaps, secretly, we hope to be marooned, to escape our families, lovers and responsibilities. Modern technology, as I tried to show in Crash and High-Rise, offers an endless field-day to any deviant strains in our personalities.” Which is precisely the point you’re also making, no?

PAUL: Yeah. And he also talks in High-Rise about the suppression of anti-social behaviour; the anti-social as something we have to suppress. But regarding Philip del Ponte, our architect, why he’s called that. It’s because there is an original for High-Rise. It’s called the Ponte Tower in Johannesburg. This is why in the beginning I was talking of Ballard as a prophet, because in Johannesburg you had in reality what Ballard’s story depicts. The Ponte Tower is 173m high, 54 floors high, with 2500 people living there and 470 apartments, and it was founded in the seventies too, as the most prestigious tower in town. Up to 2004 it was the biggest building south of the equator. In Johannesburg, you can see it from everywhere. It’s round, and in the middle you have this cylindrical space; it’s like a gigantic trash bin. After a while the Ponte Tower was full of drugs, gang wars and people throwing themselves from the floors – many, many people killed themselves by jumping into the building, into the middle – and everybody threw his trash in the middle so that there was three floors of trash. The whole building stunk terribly. Things were out of control at the Ponte, completely out of control. People trying to hire other people who owned guns to go out and do their shopping for them, because it was too dangerous; the elevators not functioning; child prostitution – it was incredible. You think, ah, Ballard must have known about this, but then the Ponte was founded in 1976 – Ballard wrote High-Rise only one year before. So our architect is called Philip del Ponte because of this tower; though he has an aristocratic ‘del’ in front of the ‘Ponte’…

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: To correspond with the ‘Royal’ of Anthony Royal, I suppose, yes?

PAUL: Yes.

DAN: It’s an unusual format; a radio play with a film accompanying it. Is this part of a bigger project, or a general direction you’re taking with your own work?

PAUL: We did the radio play first, and then I thought of how to present it in public because I thought it could be interesting to show it at the Hörspielzentrale, in a series of radio play events at the Hau, a theatre in Kreuzberg. Then of course I thought of Niklas, because he’s a specialist in architecture. We should describe the videos, no, Niklas?

DAN: I did want to ask you about the film for the first episode. There’s a sentence in High-Rise: “They would film the exteriors from a helicopter, and from the nearest block four hundred yards away – in his mind’s eye he could already see a long, sixty-second zoom, slowly moving from the whole building in frame to a close-up of a single apartment, one cell in this nightmare termitary.” Which is more or less exactly your first film, no?

NIKLAS: Yeah it is. But to be honest this is a coincidence… When Paul asked me to join Hochhaus, my first intention was to read the book, and then we decided, maybe it’s better if I don’t read the book… So instead I tried to concentrate on the characters in Paul’s version of High-Rise. And, as Paul said, most of my work is about the human environment and urbanism, and it has some formal characteristics. In my video work, for example, one of the characteristics is the manipulation of time and the control of the image, and the use of of post-production. It’s mostly about personal feelings of alienation or mass cultural fantasies; the key themes of the latest works are the contradictions between public and private spheres. I try to examine how this comes down to a personal level, and try to use video – this is a cheesy metaphor, but maybe it’s allowed – to use video as a temporal microscope, trying to capture the moment where the subconscious shifts objectivity. This is why I was completely blown away when I listened to the first version of Hochhaus, because what Paul had done on the audio level was actually what I’m trying to do on the video level in my work, because Hochhaus is highlighting the political tensions between these visions of utopia and the subjective experiences of individuals. Also, I think that humans mostly use architecture to express their power, in every form of society, and some of my videos are about the failure of architecture, about the failure of a utopia and its turning into a dystopia.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: Could you describe the three films, which accompany the three episodes?

NIKLAS: Ok. The first one, where you just said that there’s this zoom that’s described in the book. First of all it was a weird process to visualize this building because it should be mostly in the head of the audience, you know, you should imagine this building and it could have all different associations, but then I found the buildings at Ernst-Thälmann-Park, which is a socialist building park in former East Berlin. Ernst Thälmann was the leader of the Communist party during, I think, much of the Weimar Republic and his buildings are actually like a small version of what’s described in High-Rise. They were like small high-rises, but with a park around them and the buildings were on a hill so that everyone who was living in that building had a very good view, which is a kind of social idea. Obviously there are also bigger apartments on the very top and you had to be member of the socialist party to live in them, so there’s again this hypocrisy; I guess it’s a very hypocritical way to invent a social structure, when there’s power involved, anyway. I went first of all to the area where Paul’s version of High-Rise was supposed to take place, and Paul had already said that it’s close to this area where MTV and other big companies have started to have their flagship stores or their company buildings. I took pictures of one vast area where there was previously a club, and where now they’re building a big, multi-functional stadium. This is right where our imagined high-rise is, in the image in the first video. So what I did is I went to Ernst-Thälmann-Park and just stacked the buildings there on top of each other. This is obviously a metaphor: stacking these socialist buildings on top of each other to get a bigger idea of the whole thing.

PAUL: He did it almost like a plastic surgeon – from one house he makes a Tower of Babylon; it’s beautiful.

NIKLAS: It changes a lot of the content, I think. Regarding the technical aspects: at the beginning, the zoom, it’s a digital zoom, because the whole building itself is a Photoshop building. It’s combined with video in the background: the sky that’s shading from daylight into night is real; and also you see the skyline of Berlin, you see the TV tower in the background of the video, just to make the whole thing look a bit more real but also a bit like a comic. It looks like a fantasy building but it has this weird mixture of reality because it’s made from real images. The concept of the first part is that it begins in daylight, whilst in the radio play we’re listening to a TV show where the architect is talking about the building. He’s describing what you can see in the video; you look at my building, and listen to what Del Ponte says about his building. There are some parts where it’s really fitting and some others where it’s not fitting, which is good because then you have the idea that this is not the building: it’s just a placeholder for the building, in a way. When the first part of the audio play ends, it ends in the dark, at a party, and the first human dies. But this is happening at night, and so as the video image slowly zooms into the building, you end up at the entrance hall of the building, so metaphorically by the end of the first part you’re in the nightmare. It starts as a TV show, and in the end you’re in complete darkness, surrounded by the light of the windows – and you’re part of that building.

PAUL: Yeah, and the camera is right in front of the building, you know, in the entrance where the first dead person is thrown from the top floor…

NIKLAS: …out of the window…

PAUL: … that’s where the image ends…

NIKLAS: …yeah. And the people in the audio play are also looking out of the window, so they look down to the ground. This is where you find yourself at the end of the video.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

The second part was filmed in a building on the German island Rügen, a Nazi seaside resort. I think it’s the longest building in Europe: it’s 4.5 kilometers long, and it was the KDF building, which was built by the Nazis. It was part of the Nazi ‘Strength through Joy’ programme. It was supposed to be a hotel for so-called ‘good Germans’. It was never finished; it actually ended up as a ruin, but then after WWII the GDR used it as an army barracks, where the army of the GDR was stationed. And then after the Wall came down it was used as a youth hostel, and it still is – they had stopped using it as a youth hostel, but I read recently in the news that it’s re-opened, which is such a weird idea. When you listen to the audio play, the second film corresponds to what is really happening in the building, whereas the first film is derived just from the structure of the audio play. The first part introduces us to the house and the people, whereas the second part is where everything is turning from a utopia into a dystopia, or from a funny audio play into a horror scenario. In the audio play when a new chapter starts, you hear the sound of the elevator. So, in the second film, the audience is actually stuck in this elevator that you hear all through the audio play. It’s actually spectating what’s happening in the building, and you can see how everything’s falling apart literally in the image, when there’s this very slow fade from the intact floor of the building, which was actually Photoshopped, to how the building in Rügen looks today. So it fades from a fictional image into a real image, whereas the audience is just stuck in the elevator, and through the elevator doors, they’re forced to watch the process of decay.

PAUL: There are several buildings in Prora-Rügen, that are exactly the same size and so on. Some are well-kept, because there’s the youth hostel inside, then there are others which are just ruins, at least on the inside, you have all these cables sticking out. I think Niklas broke into one of those…

NIKLAS: …yeah, I did break in, I brought an axe…

PAUL: …to film the ruin, and so you see in 50 minutes a fade from a nice long, intact, well-kept floor, to the same floor as a ruined chaos of cables. The video does nothing but that.

NIKLAS: But in fact I used three images, because the floors that are intact where the youth hostel was don’t look as nice as the high-rise should look before the revolution or the battle starts. So I photoshopped it; the very first image when the elevator opens in the video is pure photoshop. And then it goes to the real image: how the intact floors look today. And then I fade into the parts of the building that are completely falling into disrepair.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

DAN: And then the third film, which reminded me of bits of Chris Marker, or Tarkovsky…

NIKLAS: I was really happy when I read that, because both of these visionaries are like real heroes of mine. So thank you for that…

DAN: Well, it’s a very clear visual echo. Ballard himself is a real fan of Chris Marker.

NIKLAS: Yeah, I can totally believe that. So, the third part is filmed in Rechlin. It’s a very, very small village in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), so also former GDR. The houses you can see in the video were model houses for Germania, built by Albert Speer. They’re four or five-storeys high, and they look like miniatures of high-rises. You find them completely abandoned in the woods, and there are no signs for how to find them. I knew about the buildings from a documentary, so I went with a car, and I really had to search. There are no signs because there are still a lot of mines in that area from the war. What happened is that the Nazis used the buildings as test buildings, and they dropped bombs on them, because the buildings themselves were a mixture of a house where people were supposed to live and a bunker. They’re massive, made out of concrete. So that was their function; and now you find these four buildings in the middle of the wood, completely abandoned.

There’s a wild garden on top of the filmed ruin – and the end of the audio play is also taking place on the roof – this is where the women build a new society, a Matriarchat. But the video actually starts in the ruins of the building, whereas the audio play starts in this Circus Maximus arena, when Andy Lang is fighting against all the others and becomes the leader of the lower class by physical violence. Then the architect, del Ponte, comes downstairs and says, well, if you are a gladiator, I am Caesar. So there are all these references to ancient Rome; and these ruins in the film, if you look really close at them they have a similar kind of patina. But when you zoom out you see that they are part of a vision of another time in history. The building on Rügen and Speer’s buildings were part of a vision that didn’t include the human being. So for me they are an architectural metaphor of a society, or a reference to a model of society in which the human actually can’t survive.

PAUL: Because Niklas uses these extremely slow-motion fades, you look at the image, but you don’t see the change. It’s a very dramatic change, but it’s not obvious when you look at it in real-time. You feel that something changes, but you can’t really grasp it. It’s so perfidious, it’s subtle, and it’s absolutely not Hollywoodesque. It has a different kind of tension. Because the radio play is so dense – yet the videos give you the freedom to have your own image of the characters. At the same time the videos show the big process, what I talked of as the evolutionary cycle.

Image from Hochhaus, © Paul Plamper & Niklas Goldbach, 2008.

NIKLAS: When I made the videos, there was this question about how you do a video to a radio play and not turn the whole thing into a movie. When I first listened to the radio play I wrote down a lot of images, but they’re all just details. In the end there was the decision to in fact just show one image in each video that’s slowly changing. 55 minutes is quite a long time for a video – and I think if you just use one image, and look at it for a long time, it kind of disappears and gets replaced by other images. Warhol said that if you look at one image and you think it’s boring, just look at it for ten minutes and if it’s still boring, look at it for like 20 minutes and so on… In our case, you’re looking at one image for 55 minutes, and there’s a change happening, but you also have the audio that’s guiding you through a completely different world. I noticed that some people during the shows were closing their eyes; it was fun for me to watch their reaction when they opened their eyes again because all of a sudden the video was at a completely different point. I think some people thought, oh, it’s just one image, I don’t have to look at that, and then after a while they noticed that a lot has changed.

DAN: Absolutely. I actually rather enjoyed the fact that, during the first part, it got dark on the video as it was getting dark in Köln.

NIKLAS: Yeah, it was. I was really happy that the screen itself was not on the side of the Dom, because that would have been really tough competition…

Dan O’Hara, 2008

Hochhaus is currently touring Germany; the next dates will be on the 12 January 2008, Theater Mannheim, and in February 2008 at the Kampnagel Hamburg. Eventually it will be available to buy at Paul Plamper’s future outlet for radio plays, Hörpark.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Paul Plamper
+ Niklas Goldbach

It’s 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. Access them via these links or the players below.

For now I’ve been adding clips uploaded by other users that fall under the ‘Ballardian’ rubric. There are interviews with J.G. Ballard and most of the adaptations of his work, plus other objects like Chris Marker’s La Jetee and bits and pieces from Sinclair, Moorcock, Tarkovsky, Foxx, Burroughs and others in the orbit. I’ll soon be uploading artefacts of my own: more rare Ballard interviews, maybe some car crash test footage, cadavers, airports, news from the sun, architectural geegaws, etc. If anyone has suggestions for what to include, please be in touch. The only rule is that the subject of the artefact (or creator of the artefact) has to have been mentioned in a reasonably significant fashion on this site, or at least have been significantly overlooked. If you’d like to be notified of further updates and additions, please subscribe to the playlist of your choice.

Thanks to the YouTube community for the uploads.

J.G. BALLARD INTERVIEWS
Ballard interviews.

J.G. BALLARD DOCUMENTARIES
Ballard docos.

J.G. BALLARD ADAPTATIONS
Ballard adaptations including ‘making of’ docos.

J.G. BALLARD’S TOP TEN SCIENCE FICTION FILMS
JGB’s ten, as reported in the Independent newspaper, 2005.

BALLARDIANA
Filmic artefacts inspired by, sharing similar concerns with, or pointing to memes in Ballard’s work.

SOUND ART/MUSIC
Music and sound art artefacts inspired by or sharing similar concerns with Ballard’s work.

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 of Eno-era Roxy Music, betraying a demonstrable Ballardian outlook — all crumbling cities, random genders and the ‘music that machines make’.

Foxx left Ultravox after Systems of Romance, tired of the group mentality. In 1980 he was back with his first solo album, Metamatic, which birthed the all-synthetic ‘metal beat’ sound. As Foxx says, he was ‘reading way too much J.G. Ballard’ when he made this album, and it’s obvious: JGB is etched into every groove, from the car-crash scenarios in the lyrics to the glimpses of shattered glass, plazas, underpasses and urban sites of psychological degradation. If you know a bit about Ballard, you’ve probably heard of Metamatic, even if Foxx’s work is less familiar: it’s the one that always gets namechecked as the archetypal Ballardian album.

Foxx’s channelling and championing of Arnold’s media-interruptus aesthetic would do Talbot/Travis/Travers in The Atrocity Exhibition proud. I spoke to him about the continuing influence of JG Ballard in his work.

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– Simon Sellars
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NOTE: Part 2 of this interview can be found here.
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Still from the ‘No One Driving’ video, 1980

I was in retreat from bands, mightily convinced that electronics were the future, and reading too much J.G. Ballard. I lived alone in Finsbury Park, spent my spare time walking the disused train lines, cycled to the studio every day and wobbled back at dawn, imagining I was the Marcel Duchamp of electropop. Metamatic was the result. It was the first British electronic pop album. It was minimal, primitive technopunk. Car-crash music tailored by Burtons”.

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– John Foxx, Assembly sleevenotes, 1992.
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SIMON SELLARS: During the Metamatic era, which Ballard books were you reading and how exactly did Ballard’s writing influence you?

JOHN FOXX: I was reading Crash and High-Rise. And Burroughs — The Wild Boys. These were all making a sort of continuous landscape I recognised which intersected perfectly with living in London in the mid-to-late 70s. Grey, grainy, exhausted. Yet a constant tantalising feeling of some kind of event or entity always about to manifest itself. A whirlpool with seductive furniture. That’s why you stay. You get edges of the same kind of involvement with the place as I understand hostages can develop for their captors.

The car-crash scenarios were particularly resonant for me, for three reasons. First, a perfect metaphor for my own life and what was happening with technology: an enjoyable journey interrupted by a couple of crashes. Second, I love and fear cars, how they’ve changed cities, landscapes, economies, our apprehension of time and our view of our own bodies – and the way they have made new and terrible crimes possible. Three, because I’d been involved in two car crashes and so had some good friends. The beautiful Hiang Kee (who played synth on the TV performance of ‘No One Driving’) was, by complete coincidence, just emerging from surgery to remedy severe facial damage caused by a windscreen in a crash. The TV appearance helped her regain some confidence.

The Burton’s bit was to ensure the landscape was British – not confusable with America, which I love but I’m always trying to eliminate from some aspects of my work.

The geometry of the plaza exercised a unique fascination upon Talbot’s mind.

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– J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970
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Across the Plaza
A giant hoarding of Italian cars
Across the Plaza
The lounge is occupied by seminars

Down escalators, come to the sea view
Behind all the smoked glass no-one sees you
A familiar figure comes to meet you
I remember your face
From some shattered windscreen…

From the Plaza
The highways curve in over reservoirs
On the Plaza
A queue is forming for the cinema…

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– John Foxx, ‘Plaza’, from Metamatic, 1979
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How do you think your relationship to Ballard’s writing has changed over the years? In 2006 would you still count him as an influence?

Of course, it alters over time. Just as memory does. I think he’s now part of the beginning of a collective understanding of aspects of the ways technology can affect us, and how human desires intertwine with all that. So, I feel many of his ideas can only continue to gather resonance.

From the late 70s to the early 80s, it seemed that most “post-punk” artists were happy to claim Ballard as an influence: Numan, Siouxsie, Ian Curtis, Cabaret Voltaire, yourself… Why did Ballard have resonance for such a particular group of musicians back then?

I think some of this may have been an attraction to the new modes of physical and intellectual violence on offer and to the uncompromising outer edge stance. This attraction naturally alters as the ‘mode of the music’ changes. Many other writers have since begun to colonise what JGB established, and elaborated that grammar to deal with new technological events, but it’s still essentially the same stance.

He was the first radical and relevant novelist of this technological age in Britain. You had Burroughs and Philip K Dick in America but they were connected to the beat movement, using drugs as a lens, reflecting an American landscape. I always enjoyed JGB’s Englishness, living in a middle-class suburb writing about a new landscape we’d only just come to live in – more akin to McLuhan’s academic/romantic take on the unrecognised present.

I think what Ballard maps out so well is that moment of surrender to the terrible. A total, inevitable, final embrace. After Hiroshima we really had no choice. It was impossible to pretend that the world would ever be the same again. We all sleep there every night, now. Ballard blueprinted all that like no one else I’ve ever read.

UltraFoxx: John in 1977

As far as musical subcultures go, why doesn’t Ballard get namechecked today?

Ballard has much more competition for attention now: a flood of engaging, contemporary writers. There is also the moment of contemporary recognition, where a generation recognises and comes to trust an author. After a while the writer becomes part of that generational landscape and succeeding generations need to find their own. It takes a while for the contemporaneity to fall away, so a writer’s relevance can be more accurately assessed. It’s too early to view Ballard like that yet. Sometimes it’s enough to be relevant to that generation only.

As a marginal digression, I have a theory that we can’t truly understand anything without a direct sensual involvement. Sensuality is an intellectual device, which allows understanding, and I include eroticism with all that. So we have this terrible need to become entangled in order to comprehend.

I suppose another part of this compound is a wild and often forlorn hope of somehow being able to absorb and dominate the thing eventually. As irrational and recognisable as the urge to jump from a high place in order to surmount the fear.

Just as EL Doctorow was the first to use real historical characters in a fictional matrix, then a stream of others began to do the same: Ackroyd, Winterson, Rushdie, etc. Doctorow receives little credit for this and is not as well known as the others here, yet he did it first. Ballard is in a similar position. A writer who invented a territory that was colonised swiftly and efficiently by many others. Happens all over.

All day the derelict walls and ceiling of the sound stage had reverberated with the endless din of traffic accelerating across the mid-town flyover which arched fifty feet above the studio’s roof, a frenzied hypermanic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines that hammered down the empty corridors and stairways to the sound stage on the second floor, making the leaden air feel leaden and angry”.

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– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Sound Sweep’, 1960
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Architectural Music. The music is … made of layers of echoes and reverberations. The form of chant now known as Early Music was allowed by large-scale architecture – through harmonies which occur when a human voice responds to its own delayed reflections from the walls of churches and cathedrals … Through new reverberation technology, we can now sing into digital architecture of infinite dimensions. Layers of music and image can interconnect seamlessly and in the same ways for the first time, since they have recently become part of the same digital continuum.

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– John Foxx, ‘About Cathedral Oceans’, 2005
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I read that you pick up ideas for music by “listening to ambiences”. Do you respond to the “ambient” nature of Ballard’s work, to the sonic/architectural elements in his writing? It seems to me that Ballard’s work records the ambient hum of the technological landscape, which is then reflected in inner space.

Yes. There’s a lot in how we respond to cities — and how we use them to build ourselves — that we are just beginning to get to. I like the idea of architecture and the city as an extension of the human body. This springs also from McLuhan, but Ballard elaborated the idea and explored it in literature. I also like his ruminations on time and on memory. These are both subjects that preoccupy me more and more.

I feel that cities and organisations of all kinds are built on this same unconscious matrix. We keep elaborating outwards on our own internal structures — libraries are an extension of memory — rooms can represent compartmented thoughts and feelings, even fears and moods. Television is an extension of the eye, radio of the ear, etc.

John Foxx’s ‘Motorway Demolition/Public Memory Project’
(From the Cathedral Oceans website)

I also feel that streets and avenues are neural pathways we re-use to reprogram ourselves with layers of memory and association. I think all this is amoebic in origin and we’ve replicated it outward since then, as an evolutionary survival and colonisation mechanism. We’re all still hard at it, building the old coral reef. Ballard has used many of these kinds of thought experiments beautifully as components of his writing, manifesting them in landscape and detail.

An intimate knowledge of urban ambiences is a joy as deep as anything in Green Nature. I have a fascination with Grey Nature, or Technicolor Nature – ecologies are emerging which are as subtle as anything Green. In cities, you have to walk and experience and try not to allow your knowledge or present understanding prejudice your reception of the experience. Requires a trance like state and concentration combined with suspension of disbelief. Watch out for traffic.

He sank to his knees in the soft loam which covered the floor, and steadied himself against a barnacled lamp-post. In a relaxed, graceful moon-stride he loped slowly through the deep sludge … On his right were the dim flanks of the buildings lining the sidewalks, the silt piled in soft dunes up to their first-floor windows … Most of the windows were choked with debris, fragments of furniture and metal cabinets, sections of floorboards, matted together by the fucus and cephalopods”.

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– J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962
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Down Oxford Street the buildings were festooned with ivy and Virginia creeper. Trees grew from the windows of Selfridges, the pavements and Tarmac were split by plane trees spreading across Marble Arch from Hyde Park, purple loostrife waved in the breeze scattering its white, floating seeds, glowing in the late afternoon light.
…
Above him the sky was bright blue now, and the light was going golden across the top edges of the crumbling buildings. At the bottom of Oxford Street stood the tall Centrepoint tower, its remaining upper windows glinting, while most of the base was covered in vines. (mile-a-minute vine especially had grown out from many of the gardens, and living up to its name, had swamped quite a number of roads and buildings in the city)”.

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– John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1982
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The “car-crash” element in Metamatic is often used to identify Crash as Ballard’s major influence on your career. But is JGB’s The Drowned World another kind of “ur-text” for you? Were your visions of a verdant London (and, by extension, Cathedral Oceans) inspired or at least informed by Ballard’s imagining of a devolved Earth, with its urban areas overgrown by jungle and swamps?

image from Cathedral Oceans

This began long before I came across The Drowned World. I was relieved when I read it because, at first, I feared it might have taken the territory I was developing. But I do think it had an effect of defining more closely what I was doing with Cathedral Oceans, if in a negative way.

The visions of an overgrown London also began earlier and there is some correspondence there. I’d seen a painting of an aerial view of woodland, which on closer scrutiny turned out to be a view of a ruined overgrown London from the top of Centrepoint. I also remembered a Daumier engraving of a view of a deserted London being sketched by a future tourist.

Such images are part of a long tradition of contemplation of ruins, being useful devices for meditations on the works of humankind. Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’; the end scene of the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes; Quatermass and The Pit; and Celebrity Surgery being other useful ones that immediately spring to mind.

Your myspace bio says that when you gave up music and worked as a visual artist, you illustrated a Ballard book cover. What book was that and can you tell me a little about the process by which you arrived at a suitable aesthetic?

Sadly, I never made an image for a Ballard cover. I worked on new books by lots of authors I enjoyed — Anthony Burgess, Jeanette Winterson, Shakespeare, Doris Lessing among many others. I would have been more than pleased to do something for Ballard, along with Burroughs, Ishiguro, Auster, Byatt, Doctorow, Pulman, Calvino… Ballard’s would certainly have been derived from video or Super 8mm — found, damaged footage. Books may move in future, so a flickering film loop is perfect.

The images of surrealism are the iconography of inner space. Popularly regarded as a lurid manifestation of fantastic art concerned with states of dream and hallucination, surrealism is the first movement, in the words of Odilon Redon, to place ‘the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible’. This calculated submission to the impulses and fantasies of our inner lives to the rigours of time and space … produces a heightened or alternate reality beyond that familiar to our sight or senses … To move through these landscapes is a journey of return to one’s innermost being”.

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– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, 1966
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Your work seems to have the logic of dreams, of Surrealist art, where externally illogical worlds function perfectly well according to their own internal logic – Redilon’s “logic of the visible at the service of the invisible”.

I’ve always felt dreams are important and a number of coincidences — and waking experiences involving dreams — and memories of dreams as a component — continue to bear this out. There’s a neat intersection here with cinema. I think cinema can be a sort of public dreaming — the same time shifts, flashbacks, and so on. It seems that the language of cinema is being drawn almost entirely from dreams and we are witnessing an externalisation, an extension of this process, through technology. Of course, cinema is a compound — made of ingredients from theatre and literature as well, and those bear separate attention.

Songs are an interesting compound of music and words as chant — a hypnotic process, where the operator attempts to slip a piece of dream cinema under the door while the recipient is distracted. An attempt to persuade the listener to suspend disbelief long enough to watch the movie. But it’s an internal movie. One composed of the listener’s own experience. All you do is allow a space big enough for the listener to walk inside and construct their own movie, while believing that it is all someone else’s work.

This strange and poetic film … is a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage, and creates … a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time … this succession of disconnected images is a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter”.

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– J.G. Ballard, ‘La Jetee’, 1966
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Your lyrics freeze moments in time — while also suggesting a kind of neurological time travel. Maybe in the same way that memories work. Or photographs. We know that Last Year in Marienbad is one of your favourite films, but is Chris Marker’s La Jetee another influence?

Yes — I really enjoy La Jetee. One of the first flashback movies. After this it gradually became part of the language but its taken around forty years to get fully assimilated — an incredible and singular act of originality on Chris Marker’s part, since film is such a fast moving medium. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the latest version. It’s taken that long for everyone else to catch up.

You can only find this place by drifting. It is impossible to walk directly here. You must first surrender yourself to the tides of the city. Takes years to do it. Slowly the tides will take you here”.

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– John Foxx, ‘The Grey Suit’, 1997
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Do you see your philosophy and ideas as embodying a “psychogeographical” aspect, echoing Guy Debord? I’m especially thinking of your notions of “drift music” and “drifting through the city”.

Yes — I was Debording before I came across his ideas. Everyone does it to some extent. It’s just that their attention is on other things, allowing the really important aspects to slip by. What’s in this slipstream deeply interests me.

… Petit remains the most Ballardian of British film essayists. There’s an element of shared background – colonial childhood, public school, suburbs – but it goes deeper than that. The fascination with a frozen aesthetic of motorways, business parks, airport hotels: franchised Surrealism. A present tense world of swift, spare sentences; a controlled surface disguising a sense of loss, a damaged past that can only be annealed through the rearrangement of images.

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– Iain Sinclair, Crash, 1999
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John Foxx today

It seems a similar approach to the London Orbital book and film by Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. What do you think of their project — which, of course, is refracted through Ballard — to reclaim London as a narrative space for drifting?

It’s about time – London was neglected as a mythland before Ballard. I used to wonder why, when it was so gloriously filthy and sprawling and magical and repetitious and various and shifting. Richer than Los Angeles or New York, bleaker than Beijing. More concealed than a convent. Driftland in Excelsis – or at least in Albion.

First Ballard, then Ackroyd came along from a completely different angle — now Sinclair is on the case. It’s good to see this happening. Chris Petit’s film was a brave early attempt to weave all these elements together and stands as a sort of historico-fictal documentary fragment. It blueprints a lot of British film possibilities that haven’t been taken up yet.

I was excited by this at the time, because it looked like the beginnings of a sort of New British Cinema Verite which has been hinted at but hasn’t quite happened. Kes is another example, in a different genre. An interesting evolution through three directors. He began life as Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s 400 Blows and ended up filleted as Billy Elliot in a ballet frock. How we kill our finest.

We always need these accounts so we know who we are and where we live, as directly opposed to the generic readymades available through most media. These mostly have sinister subtexts anyway and so are best ignored. I remember not watching TV for two years and discovering I lived in a different country. Get out there and walk.

What do you think Ballard’s greatest contribution to late-20th-century/early-21st-century art has been?

Making new images of where we currently live. Positing terrifying new aesthetics, then evolving it all to a fully realised state.

Each afternoon in the deserted cinema Tallis was increasingly distressed by the images of colliding motor cars. Celebrations of his wife’s death, the slow-motion newsreels recapitulated all his memories of childhood, the realization of dreams which even during the safe immobility of sleep would develop into nightmares of anxiety.

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– J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970
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The old newscasts affected him greatly, the Kennedy assassination, the images of Christine Keeler, early Beatles footage, all in a slightly worn Black and White. He edited together a film containing all these images and more, and played it constantly. He found it profoundly moving, the images gaining even more emotive power with each viewing. All these characters of his past moving in old daylight, waving and smiling and moving on”.

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– John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1982
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The Atrocity Exhibition reads like an instruction manual in how to disrupt mass media and recontextualise technology — a manual you would appear to have digested, judging from the above quote. Now, what strikes me most about your liner notes to Tiny Colour Movies is the sense they give of a continuous history of people working in the margins to break down this notion of filmmaking as a monolithic, mysterious, endless process — it really did put me in mind of the ‘T’ figure in Atrocity reconfiguring the media landscape ‘in a way that makes sense’ (as did your ‘Quiet Man’ story). Is there a line we can draw that connects The Atrocity Exhibition to “The Quiet Man” to Arnold Weizcs-Bryant to Tiny Colour Movies?

Sure. We can easily draw several dozen lines in and out. Some ideas are cumulative.

Will Arnold’s collection ever be made available for public screenings?

There are plans.

Clearly the time is right for a proper real-world revolution in filmmaking — we have the tools and the new technology — and, as Arnold’s collection demonstrates, the precedent.

Movies will be played with, just as sound was sampled, for fun and surrealism. Simply because it can be done. I remember positing this five years ago in a talk at the London College of Music and Media. Around that time, I made a movie called A Man Made of Shadows from several other movies. This made a new movie from existing films by collaging, repurposing, hommaging, stealing, sampling, appropriating. Whatever you like to call it. ‘Repurposing’ is my current fave term, along with ‘theft’.

Watch out Hollywood. Movies had better get used to this because it will happen. Inevitable. A financial legal structure already exists to deal with ownership and payment from sampling in music, but this hasn’t been investigated yet because lawyers and laws don’t cross pollinate easily, but it will happen.

Everyone can now make films and this wasn’t possible until three years ago. But like music, film is a swarm activity. Solo filmmakers and commercial cinema will increasingly arrive at Tarnation-type scenarios, and I expect some obsessive genius to make solo high-grade commercial animations in the near future.

Entirely new forms will evolve. Documentary is in for a huge revival. We will now get to know how everything works — from the inside. There will be a great deal of government counter information and myth planting. Virals, Flashmovies, phones, Epaper, and Ebooks will generate new and hybrid purposes, some unguessable, some too sordid to contemplate, and others a sheer delight.

Old media will get cannibalised all along the way. There will soon be a swift download – the Napster equivalent for movies. Pornography will become a mainstream Hollywood genre. Everyone will film everyone else doing everything. Virals will be endemic and there will be much inverted subversive hijacking of these new forms by crafty commerce. There will always be a grubby subcurrent. We’ve already had snuff movies and happy slapping. God help us. Some of it will get worse as surveillance increases in efficiency.

What’s the next step, then?

New folk tales will evolve. For example, from people filming infidelity with other people’s wives then emailing it to them. Awareness of this will force modifications in behaviour and new etiquettes. Office parties will become more guarded from now on. Mobile phone cameras are the next device for urban dramas of all kinds.

I was fortunate to be able to view some of the Weizcs-Bryant collection recently … They were like flickering transmissions from another world. Here you see old sunlight from other times and other lives. Juxtapositions of underwater automobiles, the highways of Los Angeles, movies made from smoke and light, discarded surveillance footage from 1964 New York hotel rooms. After the viewing, I began to understand what Arnold meant when he spoke so passionately about the intrinsic beauty of the medium — how the scratches, the grain, the bleached out sections, all once regarded as imperfections, can now be appreciated as qualities — elements which only add to the mystery, the emotional and intellectual resonance, and the sensual appreciation, of film”.

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– John Foxx, liner notes, Tiny Colour Movies, 2006
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illustration by Dennis Leigh

We’ll also need to develop new aesthetics of film, to regard elements formerly regarded as faults as intrinsic qualities inherent in film itself. The beauty of scratches, bleached out film ends, emulsion faults, grain, frameslip, etc. Just as we now value surface scratches in audio sampling.

Scale will also be a vital component. New projection technologies are emerging. I want to see a 24-hour showing of a single close up from a selected Hollywood movie. Let’s bathe in it. Project it 500 feet high. Onto smoke. Onto clouds. Into oceans and lakes. Project vast slow-motion home movies so we can dissolve into a glorious buzz of glowing grain. Let’s have a sunset at each end of the sky — or all night. Project people as buildings and buildings as skies.

The possibilities of projection and digitisation are multiplying as we speak. LCD shirts showing SloMo pornography. Naked GlowClothing. Invisibility suits which display the background at any viewing angle, picked up by woven nanocams. Steadycam projectable faces — change your face every two hours.

It will drive us all crazy when SpamVision rogue projection advertisers get started.

So, will simplicity be the crucial thing (systemically, of course)?

Only if you have to operate a damn computer.

Or will the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

Now you’re kidding me.

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– Simon Sellars
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AFTERWORD: A thought occurred to me within hours of posting this interview: are the ‘found movies’ of Arnold Weizcs-Bryant fictitious? Something had been nagging at me about the aphorisms attributed to Arnold in the Tiny Colour Movies liner notes: they ’sound’ exactly like John Foxx. Also, Arnold’s nowhere to be found on Google, which is no indication of anything, really, but all the same I can’t help wondering: do the filmmakers in Arnold’s collection — indeed, does Arnold himself — even exist? The liner notes are brilliantly evocative, full of urban explorations, such as the burnt footprints on sidewalks that ‘Frank Watts’ is supposed to have captured on video.

Apparently, this is a still from a ‘Frank Watts’ film.

Foxx writes: “On his habitual walks through London, Watts gradually came to notice something strange. He often came across odd, burnt patches on pathways and more secluded pavements. These were always small and often contained the charred remains of items of clothing or shoes. Watts conjectures that these places appeared as a result of a person at such a location being subject to some intense discharge of energy such as a lightning strike, or possibly an unknown method of transportation or vaporisation”.

Urban drift; walking through the city; submitting to psychic entry points … surely this is yet another brilliantly evocative John Foxx short story? Yes — the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the case … re-reading the liner notes, the parallels with these ‘filmmakers’, with their obsessions and aesthetics, to Foxx himself now seem all too obvious (let’s not forget that ‘John Foxx’ is a character that Dennis Leigh himself has said he inhabits because ‘John Foxx is smarter than me’).

Arnold’s ‘filmmakers’ are called Robert Rouncefield; Jerry Golden; Earnst Lubin — like ‘John Foxx’, these are humdrum yet fanciful names, mythical yet ordinary, dull names to the point of incandescence. Their bios and summaries exhibit all the traits of the condensed novels in The Atrocity Exhibition…

One of them’s even called ‘Alan Marker’: surely a nod and a wink to Chris Marker! But infused with a ’suburban English’ first name… the section on ‘Alan Marker’ even reads like a precis of Chris Marker’s career, with particular reference to La Jetee (which, of course, we discussed in the interview). Foxx writes: “For the past four years Alan Marker has made a fascinating series of short films …. the images are carefully framed and sequenced moving film clips and loops as well as photographic stills … The result is a strange merging of the subject with the projections. A sort of modern mediumistic transference appears to take place. The faces seem to melt and reform into each other as the initial subject dissolves into a series of hybrid identities, nebulae of remembered and incorporated personalities. These films … are surely unique in the history of filmmaking”.

It all seems so obvious now. I’ll go so far as to say that I’ve been had…but I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Rereading the interview, I can now see that John was scattering clues throughout, dropping hints which I blatantly failed to tune into: the Marker exchange; the Ballard book cover that never was, with its ‘found, damaged’ Super-8 aesthetic; his admiration of ‘the beauty of scratches and bleached out film ends’, identical to the elements that have so engaged ‘Arnold’ (and which I quoted); his belief in cinema as ‘public dreaming’; his cryptic answer to my Atrocity/TCM comparison… I feel like I’ve been the unsuspecting guinea pig in a very clever thought experiment conducted by Dr Foxx.

These people do not exist.

When I asked ‘John’ if ‘Arnold’ would make his collection available to the public, he said ‘there are plans’. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong and a real person named Arnold Weizcs-Bryant, with his precious cargo of ‘found films’, will one day emerge from the shadows. But maybe more likely, it will be John himself who will step into the spotlight, with a collection of moving pictures that represent the first tangible fruits of his own oft-stated ambition to make ’samplefilms’…

Of course, it doesn’t matter either way: fictitious or not, the results will be incredible. And inspiring. And Ballardian to the max.

– Simon

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..:: LINKS
+ John Foxx: Seductive Whirlpools, Part 2 More in the Key of John
+ Metamatic: Official John Foxx Site
+ Official Cathedral Oceans Site
+ Rockwrok UltraFoxx tribute site
+ ‘old sunlight from other times and other lives’: John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies patented ‘k-punk’ analysis
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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, and the inclusion of JW’s original, lengthier reply to one question (which I missed the first time around; see the note), plus my follow-up response and JW’s follow-up response. See the postscript for more background to this interview. SS
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When film adaptations of JG Ballard’s work are discussed, it’s Crash and Empire of the Sun that grab the headlines. And then there’s Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition. For ages, JGB watchers have speculated about this film — because it’s had just a few screenings since its completion six years ago, it’s gathered a thick crust of secrecy. Weiss, working with very limited resources, oversaw a stop-start production that unfurled over a number of years. Originally running at 105 minutes, the film was edited down to its present 90-minute form after its screening at the 1999 Slamdance festival. And that was pretty much it for The Atrocity Exhibition — it never had a theatrical release, was never marketed. Very few people have seen it. But now, thanks to the Dutch company Reel 23, which recently released this buried work on DVD, we can finally see what Weiss was up to — as Andrés Vaccari did in his review of the DVD for Ballardian.

And now here it is, flawed, fatal and totally flammable — the Jonathan Weiss Interview.

– Simon Sellars

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All images © Jonathan Weiss and Reel 23
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How did you first come across Atrocity Exhibition, the book?

I had been hunting for the book for a long time, maybe without even knowing it. I never went to film school and initially had no desire to be a filmmaker in the traditional sense. I had been making some truly ‘experimental’ films (I usually hate that term) in that I really was experimenting with film structure looking for what worked, what did not. I started to realise that the duration of short films might be posing inherent problems for what I had in mind. But I found very few feature length films that did what I was interested in, perhaps only Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and a bit in some of the Derek Jarman Super 8 films blown up to 35mm, like Last of England.

And then somehow I found the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, and I knew in about two pages that I had the book I was looking for. It was absolutely perfect. It was already a shooting script for a film, but since Ballard was an author, he called it a book. I had read other Ballard works, but of course they are totally different from The Atrocity Exhibition, which is the ultimate distillation of his thinking, rendered in a poetically scientific style.

How did you approach Ballard?

I wrote a letter to his agent asking for permission to use the text to do a Super 8 version. I received some sort of vague permission, which would have been worth entirely nothing later. But the film became a real production, as people who were commercial entities in New York City at the time found out about what I was doing and begged to sign on. You cannot believe how enthusiastic people were to help me make it into a ‘real’ film — something that could be projected from 35mm in a typical movie house. So we just made it. It reminds me of the children’s book, Stone Soup: you start making a cauldron of soup with nothing but stones and water, but if you do it right, at the end it’s filled with vegetables and meat.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

At the end of the filming process, when we had a rough cut that was close to the finished version, a friend from England who knew Ballard’s daughter offered to deliver a copy of the VHS to him. He called a few days later to report it delivered. The next day, I heard my wife at the time, Anna Juvander, who plays many roles in the film, screaming. I went to see what the ruckus was about. She was standing by the fax machine, shaking, reading a fax. It was the first one from Ballard, praising the movie. The next day, I kid you not, we received another. He loved it. He loved it so much, in fact, that when I read the faxes I thought, ‘Maybe he’s not quite right any longer’. I was not ready for him to call the movie ‘a poetic masterpiece’ — I would have been happy just hearing that he could watch it in one sitting, or something similar.

We subsequently were able to buy the rights, very reasonably, because of that. In the nick of time, too, as Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa company were after it. I shudder to think what would have happened if JGB did NOT like the movie. Moral of this story: don’t ever, ever, ever do anything as stupid as making anything without getting the rights, in stone, for one million years minimum.

Did Ballard have any input into the film?

JGB indeed helped after the film was finished with a suggestion for a little introductory sequence, which makes the film a tad bit more accessible. I liked the inaccessible opening, but saw the wisdom in his approach. Other than that, he essentially rubberstamped the film with his good wishes.

What was the funding structure like? Was it entirely private?

You are obviously not an American. There is NO such thing as public money for this kind of film in the USA. There might be public money for making a documentary about Eskimos with Down Syndrome, but not for features. That is one reason why American film is the way it is and why other countries’ films are, also, the way they are.

Why did you cut 30 minutes from the original running time?

We took out all the good parts. Like the serious sex and violence.

OK, but why?

Just kidding. I did have a funny interlude with the head of programming for the Sundance Channel, who wanted to buy the film but wondered whether the few frames (less than one second) of hard-core penetration would make it through corporate headquarters. I suggested I replace the footage, because it did not have to be penetration to do what I wanted in that scene. She looked at me like I was a naughty child: how dare I contemplate ‘compromising’ a work of art by self-censoring it. So I said, ‘Fine, leave it in’. She was fired or left the station soon after, anyway. The porn is still there. We just did some necessary editing. I am happy with the length of the final version of the film. Longer was not better.

The film took a number of years to complete. How did you maintain the look and feel over time?

Formaldehyde works wonders. The film took more than a year to shoot, mainly because the shooting schedule coincided with the worst winter in about one hundred years. The editing took forever and went through three different editing houses, because we had no money — it was done as a labour of love, and love runs out.

How did Reel 23 come into the picture?

They liked the film.

That’s it? You suggested to me that the parent company, Filmfreak, actually created Reel 23 so your film could finally be seen. That must have been a huge boost to your confidence.

The people at Filmfreak and Mr Ballard have been the only bright spots on an otherwise very depressing and bleak landscape since making the film. The problem, of course, is that the film is SO very different from other films that to sell it you need to differentiate it from the rest of the stuff in the store. To do this the wonderful people at Filmfreak really went out on a limb and made a very risky investment to market Atrocity and, importantly, other films like it or in the same spirit. This includes very different material, like David Cronenberg’s first films. They had Atrocity subtitled in most languages necessary for a wider release and even had the master made for a NTSC DVD, which to date is waiting for the right distributor to take on the film for America. They’re a European company and not in a position to do distribution for the USA and Canada.

How do you feel about your home audience missing out?

It’s tragic.

Are you being sarcastic?

Wouldn’t you be sarcastic about the prospects of finding distribution for a tiny Ballard adaptation in the ultra-commercial, competitive American market if the main Ballard website thoroughly trounced your film? It’s like asking a thirsty man if he wants something to drink, whilst turning the spigot off. I was at an event a week ago that precipitated this — where someone asked if I had read Vaccari’s review of my film. It was clear from my conversation with them just how damaging this is to TAE in terms of finding a distributor. You may not think so, but you are not in the film business, to my knowledge.

You may not realize the irony of the situation, but having started TAE at the age of 25, (I turned 42 yesterday), I now find myself having to try and undo the damage that some two-bit clod has perpetrated, so that some people might still want to see my film. You talk about the “dire” situation of film in Australia, due to a lack of funding, you say.

[ NOTE: I mentioned to Weiss that I have interviewed many independent filmmakers here in Australia. I told him this mainly in an attempt to establish some kind of common ground -- also to express sympathy with him and with the concomitant plight of independent filmmakers working with extremely scarce resources. I needn't have bothered. Jonathan refused to meet me halfway, and my attempt was swiftly used against me. ]

Do you realize that the problems with film, on the level of something like my film, for example, are far more complex than getting the government to give you some cash? Imagine working for more than 15 years on a difficult, little film which one would expect at least Ballard fans to appreciate. Then having some ham-fisted moron who authoritatively pronounces Ballard to be “outmoded” in his thinking (on a “Ballardian” website, no less) trashing the film as being “dated” because it does not mention Britney Spears and Paris Hilton!

NOTE: Andrés mentioned Britney and Paris, in his comment after the review, as an example of how cultural icons become dated, not of how Weiss’s film is dated; he never calls for either woman’s inclusion in the film and to suggest otherwise is a clear misrepresentation. Also, Andrés never calls Ballard outmoded; rather he suggests that the one book, Atrocity, has not worn as well as some of JGB’s other works. I don’t agree with that, but it’s Andres’s opinion and he’s entitled to it.

Don’t you feel embarassed publishing that? Would you really want to have a drink with Jim after he read that? What would you say to him? Something like, “Sorry to publish that blather, but its not my opinion. Really.”

[ NOTE: That's 'Jim Ballard', in case you're wondering. ]

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment, Simon. Your website, and others like it, are about the only portal through which prospective audiences for TAE will likely travel. At the moment, the world walks the Google path and the first place they are going to start is yours, as far as this is concerned. Google “Atrocity Exhibition” and film and see where you go. For most people the first stop, with an authoritative name like Ballardian, is also going to be their last. How many people who read the review will go to the trouble of trying to see TAE? I would not waste my time, if I were the usual sort, having read such a cursory dismissal of not only the film but the book itself.

[ NOTE: I can't wear this charge. I never look at one review when deciding whether to see a film; I always like to gather a range of opinions, and as far as I can tell that's a pretty normal attitude... By this stage I was getting thoroughly tired of Jonathan’s attempts to bully us into giving him a favourable review, tired of him belittling my journalistic credentials, tired of him abusing my colleague despite repeated requests to stop, and tired of this website bearing the brunt of being the only site to review Weiss’s film. I suggested to him that he publish his own website devoted to the damned thing. Jonathan could then shape public opinion the way he wanted to shape it. As it is, Reel23’s graphics-intensive Atrocity page does him no favours — with no text, merely images of text, it is nowhere to be found on Google. In this day and age of instant access and instant publishing, Jonathan really has only himself to blame for Google searches returning at No. 1 anything other than the official, sanctioned Atrocity product. ]

In short, I think you have done a disservice to the only small, independent film ever made of one of Ballard’s works, and you worry about the “dire” condition of film? Rather ironic. I would be extremely suprised if either you or Mr Vaccari ever gave any thought whatsoever about the effects of your actions on a film like this. Mr Vaccari’s motivations seem clear — this is his little moment of authority and attention. Your motives escape me.

Reading what you have up now, you would never even know what Ballard himself (namesake of your site, remember) thought of the film, which is quite extraordinary. Most authors quietly hate what is done with their work on film.

I’m sorry the review played a part in your decision to not contact distributors, but neither I nor Andres should feel any responsibility or obligation to you in that regard. What if a major newspaper like the Guardian published a negative review in their online section? What then? You really need to get out of the trap of thinking that this site has some kind of obligation to publish a positive review of your film. I’m sorry to say, but I don’t run a Ballard ‘fan site’. I am as interested in publishing critical opinions of Ballard’s work and related products (like film versions) as I am in praising the man. The site is not hagiography.

Would you care to expand upon your responses to Andres’s criticisms? It would seem he is not alone in voicing some of these points. Other reviewers make similar claims, like this one.

Anyone who thinks that the world depicted in The Atrocity Exhibition has been rendered obsolete in anything but its decorative attributes is severely deluded. That review suggests I ‘made a grave error’ in thinking that the content of Atrocity is still relevant. So what is that content: that we DON’T live in a pervasive media landscape where reality checked out long ago? That we are not obsessed and consumed by psychopathologies that create and determine our relationships with ourselves, our family and friends, our celebrities, our governments? That our cars and other vehicles stopped having polyperverse identities, and are no longer sexualised fetish objects? Has sex itself receded from the flood plains of our time and gone back to its purely procreative origins?

The problem is that as subsequent generations are born into this upside-down world, they see it as normal and natural. It is not. They see the wardrobe, props and sets change and use these ephemera as a surveyor sets his stakes.

NOTE: Weiss originally emailed me the following ‘postscript’, which I missed the first time around, but which I recently discovered at the bottom of another message. I’m publishing it here, for completeness’ sake.

Mr Vaccari’s contention that the book, the film, or both, are “dated”, seems to be making two points. One is that the film belongs to a certain specific historical period (I assume the late 60s) and that is bad. It’s bad to be dated. Which means that all historical films, for example, anything that tries or simply does evoke a period is bad (TAE, by the way, does not do that as a matter of course). Bad meaning dated. Toss all Merchant Ivory, not because it’s sickly film culture, but because it’s historical, it’s dated, thus it’s bad. Toss Andrei Rublev, too, I would assume. Where we stop tossing, I don’t know.

The second point pertaining to this line of attack would be that the references themselves, being historic, are dated and getting old and grey. They don’t work anymore, don’t have the power they used to. Nobody can identify with Marilyn Monroe anymore (excepting yesterday’s Wall Street Journal dated April 10 06, discussing the economics of control over her image). Mr Vaccari must know this problem himself from rereading his own torturous attempt at recreating Ballardian fictional prose and style in “Chariots of Fire”, a delightful piece I found on his website, using Princess Di to “update” things a bit from Ballard’s “dated” original. Actually, if truth be told, Mr Vaccari has quite the hard on for Atrocity Exhibition, despite his professed disdain, as he copies it yet again in form and function in the wonderful short bit, “Why I Want to Fuck John Howard,” a real treat and topical to boot.

But back to Mr Vaccari’s major point of criticism — the point of referencing. References function in a myriad of ways, and no film, nor any work of art, can possibly be divorced from the culture and icons which comprise it. People have no problem watching films set in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, etc. Why? Because whether a film is good or not has nothing to do with the period in which it is set or the references it contains. If you needed a Rosetta Stone to watch the film, that would be another story.

There’s an interesting quote over at Senses of Cinema: ‘Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair have never done anything so vulgar as attempting to “adapt” a Ballard fiction. They understand too well that we now live in the landscape that Ballard has been faithfully anatomising and populating with characters since the 1960s. Why bother ‘adapting’ when you can hit the motorway and find all the sets, the actors, and the (CCTV) camera positions ready and waiting for you?’

Mr Petit and Mr Sinclair do not make feature films. They make arthouse installations, but call them ‘films’. Here’s an IMDB comment on their London Orbital: ‘Pompous, pretentious, meaningless and totally pointless’. Maybe they should try being vulgar next time. Since you bring up Mr Sinclair, please note that his BFI book on Cronenberg and Ballard [also called Crash] was so filled with fabrications and outright lies in its discussion of my film, still then a work in progress, that when I spoke to JGB about it he was as appalled as I was. That some of the self-appointed gatekeepers of ‘avant-garde’ culture in the UK, and, for that matter, Ballard’s work, have to invent things about The Atrocity Exhibition, as Sinclair did, suggests another agenda at work.

That shocks and surprises me. Do you want to set the record straight and point out exactly what Sinclair got wrong?

Sinclair invented erroneous figures for how much the film cost and where the money went — having NEVER having talked to me or communicated with me in any way. I even called Ballard as some of the errors were actually attributed to him. JGB assured me that these things were fabricated and indicated he had his own issues with the veracity of the book.

I can live with a so-called serious author trying to belittle my little film, in a book on a relatively big film by Cronenberg, by saying it cost a fraction of what it did, and that the money was spent in a trivial way, et cetera. What I cannot abide by was Sinclair’s central premise: that all filmic adaptations of serious literary work have to be divorced in spirit from their progenitors. If not, Sinclair insists, they have no integrity. Well, I consider Ballard to be a very good judge of things like integrity. Ballard loved the film and has been the film’s biggest support. But Sinclair could not mention that, because his premise and his pay check was to write a book praising Cronenberg’s take on Ballard, which compelled him, I assume, to denigrate my approach.

Why would Sinclair do that? Because you’re from outside the UK? I haven’t read the book; I’m just speculating…

The problem, well understood in academia and minor cultural zones like this, boils down to territoriality. The stakes, understood in terms of money or power, are miniscule. This breeds the worst kind of petty territorialism, where supposedly intelligent adults behave like spoiled children not wanting to share their sandbox. I assume Mr Sinclair, who later went on to try and make a Ballardian film with a small budget himself, was trying, like a dog pissing on a hedge, to mark off his own little fiefdom. The fact that some unknown American with no pedigree had actually made a full-length adaptation of the most difficult-to-adapt book Ballard ever wrote, and having Ballard LIKE the movie, may have pissed off some people in the UK, Sinclair included.

I also, in retrospect, now think the same of Mr Vaccari’s very strange dismissal of both the book and my film, as he has obviously been inspired enough by The Atrocity Exhibition to write his own undisguised copies of parts of the book.

NOTE: I have since read Sinclair’s book and I cannot see how it could have provoked such a reaction. As Tim Chapman mentions in the comments at the end of this interview, Weiss’s film is barely mentioned in Sinclair’s book, but even so Sinclair actually notes that Ballard praises the film. Tim has reproduced the relevant excerpts in the comments section: see it and decide.

Have you ever confronted Sinclair?

I would not know how to reach him let alone expect him to come clean. If you fabricate a bunch of garbage and someone confronts you with your malfeasance, would you expect contrition?

I had a similar thing happen at the same time with the BBC. They had requested a copy of my film to include in a program about adaptations of Ballard’s work. I was thrilled, of course. Imagine my shock when they used footage from my film as if the BBC had shot it, with no context and no proper acknowledgement of my film. They even used an actor to narrate OVER my film, from the book! No mention at all that I had made The Atrocity Exhibition. When I demanded an explanation and retraction, it was a month later and all I got was a curt letter admitting what they had done and removing my footage from their piece.

This is how even the BBC behaves with small films. It’s truly shameful, and no one cares.

Is a Ballardian aesthetic still needed in film and literature these days? Is Ballard’s worldview still relevant?

If it was not relevant, why operate a Ballard website? Nostalgia?

The question isn’t whether I think a Ballardian aesthetic is relevant today, but whether you do. Do you? I’m not attacking you; I’m genuinely interested in your answer.

Ballard’s work is essentially dystopic. Its subject is the world gone wrong, usually a slightly-in-the-future world which makes the whole thing easier for the reader to accept. In the last several decades, the Ballardian project has become centred on the decline of a value system which has held sway for Western Civilisation for centuries, even millennia. What is supplanting this value system — something extremely nihilistic — Ballard seems to see very clearly and be able to capture in his work. I felt that is true in The Atrocity Exhibition, and I feel it compelling his most recent work, perhaps even more strongly. Very few authors have the ability to both sense and capture this seismic change. He is a philosopher as much as an artist. Thus his aesthetic, his thinking, is more relevant than ever.

That does not even begin to come to terms with Ballard’s prescription for the malady, which is truly, majestically radical. It can be summarised, perhaps, by not rejecting or resisting the process of decline, but by abetting it.

Because your film deliberately subverts traditional narrative and contains some fairly disturbing imagery, people perceive it as ‘difficult’ viewing. Did that make it hard to market the film? How did audiences initially react to it?

The film has never had a theatrical release. And perhaps it should be that way, given the ‘vulgarity’ (to use the word properly) of film marketing and the realities of theatrical distribution today, worldwide. Where the hell is it supposed to play? At my local multiplex? I can count all of the theatres in New York City that play other films such as this on the fingers of one hand, with a few fingers left over. It’s not exactly March of the Penguins, now, is it? The film was never marketed because marketing requires money, hiring a publicist, et cetera. We never had the money to do that. I was hoping that a few influential critics or cultural figures (besides Ballard) would help the film in that regard, but I was mistaken. This website constitutes marketing, because the readers here are the core audience for the film, and look at how well that is going.

As for being difficult, if people call a film difficult, then it becomes so. I have had numerous instances of people showing up at private screenings with NO idea of what the film would be, dragged there by a friend, with no warning. At the end of a typical screening, it is usually very, very quiet. For some minutes. People are usually very still. They are in some kind of other state — maybe it’s shock, but I don’t think it’s that. Quite frequently, people who have nothing to do with the film business, or the culture world generally, are the best viewers, the ones who get the most from the film — the ones who understand the most, precisely because they THINK the least. The most difficult aspect of the film is actually seeing it.

Was the 1999 Slamdance screening the first?

The film first showed at Rotterdam in 1998, as a work in progress. As for festivals in general, they are not very good places to expect people to seriously watch films. They are essentially big parties, or rather disgusting, stupid, frenzied greed fests with people desperately running around, literally, looking for the next indie film that could make them a few million bucks. Considering that the problem with indie film (meaning everything save studio megaliths) today is the utter triumph of the worst kind of commerciality, it is really pathetic to see adults spend the kind of energy they do in the film world to make a few, paltry bucks. If you want to be a capitalist, it’s such small change.

You could, for example, be a hedge-fund manager and make in one year the total gross of all of those films. Then you could finance or even make yourself any films you wanted, and not give a shit how much money they made or lost. Obviously, the rewards are elsewhere.

You co-wrote the script with Michael Kirby [who also plays Dr Nathan in the film]. How did the working process between the two of you evolve?

Normally, a script is extremely important, as a film is about characters and you understand them through dialogue and action. The Atrocity Exhibition is very different. It is about places, space — meaning architectural space — time, events, unusual forms of consciousness, et cetera. There is no narrative. A non-narrative film. How do you make a ‘non-narrative’ film? They don’t teach you that in film school, which I had no interest in going to, anyway. You cannot read books or magazine articles on this subject. Michael, who was a very smart man, realised that the best approach for a book and a project like this is to create the illusion of a narrative.

People are so thoroughly conditioned in narrative, they will project it ANYWHERE they can. Everyone who watches The Atrocity Exhibition will construct a narrative of their own, and I have never heard two that were identical. Some viewers become quickly frustrated by the lack of narrative and think of it as a personal affront, an insult to their intelligence. Since they do not ‘get it’ because they are looking for ‘it’ in the wrong place, they become upset and dismiss the film. But others, who just let it flow over them, have reported experiences usually found during serious drug episodes, extended periods in isolation tanks or other attempts to get beyond the purview of quotidian consciousness. I guess that means Michael was on to something.

I wrote my part of the script visually, seeing the scenes happen. Michael did most of the dialogue, which is often lifted from the book. We were not looking for a ‘natural’ effect, but it might be worth noting that I spent most of my time directing the actors to stop acting, and deliver their few lines in as natural a way as possible. Michael did most of his writing for the Wooster Group, a very famous theatre company in SoHo, New York — funny how no one complains that the Wooster Group, people like Willem Dafoe, are doing non-narrative stuff.

The best way to look at dialogue in the film is like traffic signs for a motorist. They are there to keep you from getting lost — or worse.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

The film is full of striking imagery — in parts it plays almost like a photo-roman. Do you have a photographic background? Is Chris Marker’s La Jetee an influence on your work?

I adore that film, and often wonder why so little came after it in the same vein. As for imagery, my issue with cinema is that it is not about film, it’s just filmed theatre — if you want to do film, it’s about the image. So if you make a non-narrative film, what is on the screen had better be compelling visually. Other than my sensibility, I have no photographic background and am a crap photographer.

Many people are surprised to learn that’s there’s a film version of The Atrocity Exhibition. How does it feel being the father of the ‘bastard child’ of JGB film adaptations? How do you see your film in relationship to David Cronenberg’s Crash and Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun?

I don’t see any relationship with those films.

Right, but what I’m getting at is this: do you feel your film has suffered unfavourably when Ballardian adaptations are discussed, considering you were up against the King of Hollywood on one side and the Indie King on the other?

It would be nice if people could just watch my film for what it is and not compare it to something as heterogeneous as the other Ballard films. But that does not usually happen, and considering the hostility to The Atrocity Exhibition, I have to wonder why? What is so threatening about this film? It has nothing in common with the other films — is that the issue? I truly do not know myself.

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition

I see some similarities. Just as the Atrocity book seems a prototype of Ballard’s novel Crash — a prequel in many ways — I wondered if you saw your film as serving that function to Cronenberg’s Crash. There seem to be similar stylistic choices: the blue light bathing some scenes; Victor’s acting as ‘T’, which seems to share mannerisms and tics with Elias Koteas in Crash; Anna’s Novotny, again sharing traits with Holly Hunter in Crash; the framing of scenes in car parks and so on. Or are such similarities merely functions of Ballard’s writing and its remarkable consistency?

Just to set the record straight, I shot The Atrocity Exhibition BEFORE Cronenberg shot Crash, so there is no possibility of influence from his film, nor would I copy his look, because I never liked Cronenberg’s cinematography, though I like some of his earlier films, like Videodrome. Anything shared between the two films is due to the books emerging one from the other, as Cronenberg, ‘parasite’ that he is (to use your fellow reviewer’s terminology) also lifted the exact same lines from Crash as I used in Atrocity. Ballard actually repeated material word for word in both books.

Cronenberg took a literal, ‘narrative’ approach to another supposedly ‘unfilmable’ book, Naked Lunch. Now, on the DVD’s commentary track you say you had no idea how to film Ballard’s ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ scene, and so you went for the most literal approach [in the film, T has sex in an automobile with Karen Novotny as she wears a Ronald Reagan mask]. But wouldn’t a literal approach have simulated some kind of mental therapy group, with patients masturbating over pictures of Ronald Reagan?

The issue, which keeps coming up in the comparisons with Cronenberg, is that I am literal in my adaptation of Ballard, but in fact Cronenberg is not. Just as he was not in Naked Lunch. Read that book and tell me that it is anything like the text. My problem is simple: Naked Lunch or The Atrocity Exhibition are essentially exceptional vehicles, which if read properly, will take you someplace very different from what is considered normal life. Cronenberg’s very style, which is extremely mainstream from a cinematographic and editing point of view, will always be at odds with his subject matter, at least when it comes to a book like Crash. To me, that is a fatal flaw. If you want to ride the vehicle to the end of the line, it has to be stylistically consistent or at least not fighting the material, the essence of what is being portrayed. I thus had to use a style as extreme as the book itself, something Cronenberg NEVER does. All his films look the same to me, visually speaking, the only difference being that over the years they got a bit slicker and better produced.

Anna Juvander as Karen Novotny in The Atrocity Exhibition

Regarding my ‘literal’ approach to the Reagan scene, I simply ask myself, ‘What is really happening here — in the text?’ People are in a constant sexual flux, consistent with the chaos of images we have created for ourselves, continuously overlaying images over objects and vice versa, often to sexual ends. In the film, there are scenes where ‘literally’ people are confused as to what is more ‘real’ — the image of a thing or the thing itself.

You’re keen for me to emphasise to our readers that Ballard was totally sold on your vision of the film. But Ballard was also keen on Empire of the Sun and Crash. So, it seems to me that Ballard would rubberstamp any filmed version of his work. Obviously, though, his reaction means a lot to you. Can you tell us a bit more about your relationship with Jim?

This is a tricky subject. As it is no mystery what I think of the films you mention, it may seem contradictory that I actually believe what JGB thought of my film. With Empire, Ballard was paid a lot of money and had access to a huge new audience for his work. If I were Ballard, I would not be complaining about Cronenberg, either. Ballard is certainly not biting the hand that feeds him. I honestly don’t know what Jim said about Crash. I know he was generally positive, but I never discussed the other films or directors with him. I thought that crass. I do not, however, see what Jim could possibly gain from spouting a bunch of goo about my film. He was very clear, for example, in those initial faxes, that he thought the film might fall irretrievably between the cracks. In private, he completely dismissed other attempts to film his work. So I believed him, and especially so since he did the DVD commentary, something to my knowledge he has not done for either of the other films. There is really no motivation, in this instance, for Ballard to fluff The Atrocity Exhibition. Unless you think he is some senile old geezer who just loves anyone making a film, however bizarre, of his work.

If I have to choose who, as an authority and a critic, to listen to regarding Atrocity, I will choose Ballard and not chimps like Vaccari and Sinclair. Since I gather your readers might follow my inclination, I noted the omission of Jim’s positive comments in the negative criticism of Vaccari and Sinclair, whose motives I find suspect on a host of counts — such as the fact that they are both guilty of trying to make really bad versions of Ballardian film or writing.

The two commentaries on the DVD (yours and Ballard’s) suggest there was a great deal of congruence between your interpretation of the book and Ballard’s views on his own text. Was there any area or aspect of the book where you found Ballard’s interpretation substantially at odds with your own?

I must be the most sheep-like of all possible interpreters of Ballard’s work, as I found no place I was at variance with the material I worked upon. Because of this, some reviewers enjoy using the term ‘parasitic’ in discussing my approach. A parasite, however, is defined by its negative effect on its host. JGB has yet to voice his objections.

My DVD copy is very grainy. Is that a deliberate effect?

You need a better TV set.

The set I have is just fine. The grainy texture merges the filmed footage with the archival film — it’s a good effect. So, is that a deliberate effect or a bad transfer?

I spent a great deal of time in pre-production choosing film stocks, lenses and exposure settings to create a very different film look, almost a vintage look, a bit like the visual texture of some of Tarkovsky’s films (I am only talking about the texture or grain here.) We used an Agfa stock, discontinued about when the film commenced shooting, which looks completely different from Kodak or Fuji, what everyone else uses. Same with the black and white, which was Ilford.

Would a bigger budget have changed the film? Would you have retained the archival footage?

I set out to make a film that I had never seen before. That much I accomplished. Having no money made it a much better, more interesting film than if I were better endowed. I moved out of Manhattan and found a large, industrial loft space in a very bad area of Brooklyn where I could shoot and live at the same time. That enabled a much different mode of production, where I could actually cook for my crew while a shot was being setup, for example. It was far more human, less hurried and stressed. It’s hard to work on a train when it’s doing 60mph, they say, and it’s true.

The archival footage was an interest of mine long before making the film. With the book, I found an ideal project to put such material to work. There is a very special psychological effect that comes from using decontextualised real footage, even after our little reality TV epidemic. When you view plastic surgery footage, or car crash simulations with dead bodies, outside the context of a documentary or program on that subject, the result is entirely different from watching the same material with a narrator droning on. The archival footage I used in Atrocity, which required months of searching in US government archives, brought another level to the film, one that could not have been achieved in any other manner. All the footage I used, by the way, was obtained gratis, contrary to what Mr Sinclair wrote in his book, where he asserts that my film’s budget was consumed by purchasing archival footage.

North American directors are all over Ballard film adaptations, but to me much of Ballard’s work is especially British. Obviously, much of his work is set in Britain, but there’s also a peculiar kind of British reserve regarding issues of class and sexuality that JGB appears to be sending up. Any thoughts on that?

I don’t see the book I adapted as having much to do with these issues. I actually went to University at London School of Economics, and understand what you mean in terms of British pomposity and sexual repression, but don’t find it relevant in this instance.

In your DVD commentary, you say that people watch narrative films to escape their ‘dull, boring’ lives? Isn’t that a little patronising?

Is it really patronising, or just true? Do you think I was talking about everyone else’s life whilst my own is so brimming full of excitement, sex, violence and generally interesting conflicts that culminate in highly satisfying denouements? Come on.

The modern world is replete with slaves: you have office slaves, factory slaves, agricultural slaves. The ones who have enough money to spend on two hours of escape go to the movies. That includes, of course, the rich, bored slaves, too, of which there are plenty. In fact, in 20th-century terms, just about everyone leads dull, boring lives, as seen relative to the lives of people like Tom, Brad and Angelina, whose real lives are mythologised on checkout-stand magazines so that the illusion is complete and pervasive.

Just go back to the film:

Traven: ‘Don’t you want to be in the movies, Karen?’
Karen Novotny: ‘We’re all in the movies’.

Are there any current directors at all whom you feel kinship with? Or do you feel that you’re at the vanguard of a new sensibility?

I would suggest that I am merely a leftover from an older sensibility, of directors inconceivable today. Unfortunately Tarkovsky died prematurely and all the other directors I admire, like Antonioni, Kubrick, Passolini, Teshigahara, Ozu, Kurosawa and the like, are long gone. Men who cared about what humanity is and what it is becoming. That especially is what I am interested in and is the sole concern of my filmmaking. Other people can make the entertaining stuff.

That would tie in with your DVD commentary, where you claim Atrocity is some kind of ‘nurturing’ film rather than a ‘junk food’ film.

‘Nurturing’ sounds like I made a granola bar into a film. Or that I’m some sort of wet nurse. At least the part about Atrocity not being the filmic equivalent of junk food is indeed correct. It’s not some empty crap that when consumed gives the illusion of fullness and satisfaction, if only for an instant. And then leaves you fat and sick.

I did not set out to make this or any other film as a stepping stone to a greater career in film, which was obviously my first, and perhaps my last, mistake. I’ve found that people in the film world, even the part of that world that pertains to my kind of films, really take you seriously only if they sense you are a ‘player’. They want to see where you are going. Lest you think I am kidding, Darren Aronofsky made PI around the same time I did Atrocity. It looked to me like a bad student film, but it was shrewdly marketed and now the guy is making Batman films.

That is the state of films today — it’s total sell-out land. So no, I don’t feel any kinships with people working today, not even people like Gaspar Noe, who I am sometimes compared with, because I am no fan of either gratuitous violence or doing anything in a film for the sake of effect or shock value.

Is it possible to change audience perception within a narrative-driven film industry? You must feel under siege from critics who see a non-narrative aesthetic as some kind of fault.

Go back a hundred years and look at the art world. How many artists were leaving traditional painting and representation for abstraction? What happened to them? Does that answer the question?

Not really — I’m not especially versed in the art world and its history.

My point is very simple: when abstraction arrived in the art world it was met with total derision, condemnation and refusal by the academy and the mainstream. Today, in a world where everyone is supposed to go to art museums, if only to catch the King Tut or Van Gogh megashow, we actually delude ourselves that we are culturally more astute than our forebearers, that a development like abstraction would immediately be greeted today with open arms, and/or that the avant garde has been subsumed into culture generally.

Cinema is the most comprehensive current art form, also the one uniquely of our time. Yet there is virtually no filmmaking being done that deserves the name of art. Film is entertainment, which is basically what art has become, as well. Abstraction, a bastard child of art which came to define modernism, is obviously kith and kin with the departure from narrative in film. And I can tell you from personal experience that you get the same reception making non-narrative films today as abstract painters or some poor bastard like Van Gogh got one hundred years ago.

Narrative film for me is pretty much dead. All the stories have been told, in their essence, to death. Every conceivable plot device has been done, every combination has been done, the only thing that changes is the time, place, etc. This is why there is a continuous progression towards ever greater violence and pornography in film (notice the ‘new’ movement in Asian cinema of ‘extreme’ violent film.) The elements of shock and titillation try to cover the banality and exhaustion of the form of what I call ‘filmed theatre’.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

Beyond the narrative horizon lies this incredible territory of possible films, but no one is brave enough to go there. If you do go, the people in the industry, morons that they are, don’t get it. Ordinary people do, however. But for the film industry, ordinary people are like subatomic particles for quantum physicists. As soon as they are placed under observation, their true nature becomes suspect, impossible to ever verify. All their research and focus groups suggest remaking Mission Impossible until the Rapture. Or for the independent crowd, assuring that every gay, lesbian, minority and special interest group receive their just due on screen, albeit using the same stories traditionally reserved for the mainstream.

Given the criticism you’ve faced, and the lack of exposure the film has received, do you feel the whole experience has been worthwhile?

I cannot say whether making the film was worthwhile. I made a worthwhile film, yes. It cost me dearly. It may never be seen by many people, and if it were up to some of the so-called Ballard ‘authorities’ like Mr Vaccari, it would not even be seen by Ballard fans, which would truly be a shame. I still hold out hope that a few people will somehow see the film and realise that it is possible to make a different kind of cinema and be inspired to make better films themselves. That would be enough for me.

What do you think JG Ballard’s greatest contribution to the 20th century is?

TBD.

Come on — let’s talk about Ballard. He deserves it. What do you appreciate about the great man?

I’ve basically spent my entire life trying to figure out why everything is so fucked up. Most people either don’t seem to know that this is the case, or pretend not to notice. When I discovered Ballard’s writing, it was obvious that he was one of those very few people who confront the world with astonishing honesty, insight and intelligence. The reason he is considered prophetic is simply his degree of awareness and his imaginative force. He sees around him, today, what others miss, understands the conflicting forces at work, and suggests probable or at least interesting outcomes that will occur in the future. It’s like watching balls go flying by. If you see the direction they are going, and their speed, you can predict fairly accurately when, where and what they will hit. Placing this process in the near future makes it appear prophetic.

Ballard is a new breed of philosopher, a far more interesting type, and maybe the only one to survive as the traditional ones are doomed to extinction. He is able to take very complex, subtle ideas and give them aesthetic form, give them import. This is so very rare.

The Atrocity Exhibition is your only feature film. Do you have plans to make more?

Given that Atrocity took all my energy and money for such a long time, and that the film world and the art world still don’t know what to do with the thing, I have been reconsidering making another film. As I have often said when people remark how wonderful it must be to be a film director — it’s a task I would not wish on my worst enemy.

…:: THE END

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POSTSCRIPT: Since this interview was first published, a couple of positive reviews of the film have appeared online, notably from influential British film magazine Sight & Sound, which renders Weiss’s claims that North American distribution solely rests on what this site has to say in a very different light. I haven’t included everything in the interview, but rereading our email trail today, I am still as shocked and bewildered as I was at the time. The clincher, as far as my decision to tell the story of this encounter open and honestly, was in Jonathan’s very last email, where he branded me ‘journalistically corrupt’ for editing the interview down from over 10,000 words, and for slightly rewording some of my original questions to him. I just couldn’t win. Not only did I do this after Jonathan pointed out that some of my questions unnecessarily referred to negative reviews, which I agreed with, but also because the nature of email interviews means you throw everything in, as you might not have a chance to ask follow-up questions — then you edit down later. The changes to my questions were minor and I stand by them — the originals exist for anyone who wants to see them. It’s not like I was hiding anything, either — the reason Jonathan knew about this was because I showed him the transcript before it went online. I was also accused of altering the tone of the interview with this rewording, which is why I have expanded the interview to include replies from Jonathan that were originally left out. The tone was already confrontational, right from the start.

Having said all that, I do wish Jonathan all the best for the future. I’m positive his film will find the audience it deserves. In the end, though, as far as he’s concerned, it probably doesn’t matter — a lot of people have taken quite an interest in this interview and have said to me that it’s made them even more determined to see the film. Some guy on a film forum even called it ’superbly vitriolic’. So, ‘every cloud’, eh Jonathan?

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MORE INFO
+ Andrés Vaccari’s review of the DVD.
+ See Reel23 for bios of Weiss and Ballard; a Director’s Statement; and letters from Ballard to Weiss praising the film; a trailer from the film; and information on how to order the DVD.

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 from cell to cell – randomly, instantaneously, elliptically.

La Jetée is perhaps the most ‘fictional’ of Marker’s output, weaving its story of a nuclear-devastated Paris in the near future; it is far from conventional. Lasting 29 minutes, shot in black and white and consisting almost entirely of still photographs – imaginatively blended with dissolves, wipes and fades – this is the bare bones of science fiction. It highlights why we are attracted to SF in the first place: not for bug-eyed aliens or galaxy-hopping spaceships, but for the way in which the form can twist our most cherished versions of reality inside out. Indeed, La Jetée belongs to a fascinating epoch in French alternative cinema, when a number of directors engaged with SF as a philosophical tool. Its concept of circular time and ‘Chinese box’ narrative recall Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) as well as Jean-Pierre Gorin’s fascinating, but failed, attempt to film Philip K Dick’s Ubik.

La Jetée’s prologue depicts a young boy watching passenger jets take off from the jetty at Orly Airport. There is a commotion and he sees a man fall to the ground, shot and killed. A distraught woman also witnesses the scene.

Flash-forward to the aftermath of World War Three: Paris is in ruins as a ragged band of survivors hole up underground. Here we meet our unnamed protagonist, a shell-shocked citizen who has been selected by scientists to test a new time-travel technique. He is to visit the Paris of the far future and ask for assistance – food, medicine, technology – so that the planet may be rebuilt.

He is sent to the past on a trial run: the scientists know he has a deep-rooted memory from that time that will cushion the shock of ‘awakening, fully born, into another age’. It is of the Orly jetty, and the woman; he was the little boy. Our protagonist has grown up with the indelible image of her face and her vulnerability, and has fallen in love with her.

Time-travelling, he meets the woman. They share an intimate bond, as if they have known each other all their lives. They spend days, weeks together – and then he disappears, plucked from his reverie. The scientists send him to the future, where he is given a power supply to reignite the world’s industry. Upon his return, he is to be liquidated as he can be of no further use. But the denizens of the future transmit to him: ‘Join us’. He refuses their offer, instead asking his new allies to transport him once again to peacetime Paris and the woman who awaits him. They grant his wish.

He is at the Orly jetty. He sees her, runs to her – and notices an assassin from the underground camp. He is shot dead. The woman watches the murder, as does… (but it would be improper to reveal the film’s final, astonishing twist here. You must see it for yourself and realise the utter futility of our hero’s dream.)

This is a familiar synopsis, given that David and Janet Peoples used La Jetée as the foundation of their screenplay for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. As are most of Gilliam’s films, Twelve Monkeys is a sublime, brooding masterpiece – but it is not La Jetée. For Marker puts the vast majority of big budget SF to shame.

La Jetée’s lead actors (Hélène Chatelain and Davos Hanich) are beautiful and doomed, as is Trevor Duncan’s score; and the resonant, measured narration (from Jean Negroni) is poetic and fluorescent, infused with awe and mystery – even when subtitled into English. However, like all time travel stories, La Jetée doesn’t make much sense; but then again, time and memory do not make ’sense’, at least when articulated by a technology as arbitrary as language.

Rather, La Jetée’s virtue is its immediate, haunting ability to evoke the emotions of love and desire; its use of photomontage poignantly conjures up the frozen moments that constitute memory. As the man remembers his past, and the woman, he relives it – never really sure if he is sent or if he is dreaming – one snapshot literally coming alive with his subjective colouring. The familiar SF framework is merely a narrative hook by which Marker hangs this essay on Inner Space.

La Jetée’s influence is palpable. In a 1966 review for New Worlds magazine, JG Ballard considered it to be one of the few convincing acts of SF cinema, while a scene from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – in which a photo of Rachel’s ‘mother’ animates for a second – is a direct homage to the truth and beauty at the core of this film (Blade Runner was co-scripted by David Peoples, and is famously about the unreliability of memory).

Our memories haunt us eternally, morphing and evolving through time so that we are constantly revisiting them, triggering them, repressing them; time-travelling to the past, so to speak, and projecting them into the future; confronting and modifying past, present, future versions of ourselves, family, lovers. This, then, is the subject matter of La Jetée, a minimalist masterpiece affording us an all-too-rare glimpse at the paradoxes and complexities of perception and the subconscious.

But an artificial exercise such as this can never do justice to the film. Finally, it must be experienced.

– Simon Sellars