Rick McGrath’s Letter From London: The JG Ballard Memorial

All photography by Rick McGrath.

Sunday, November 15, 2009, 3:45pm, The Founders Pub, London.

Dear Simon,

Greetings from London! Hope all is well with you. I’ve just attended the long-anticipated JG Ballard Memorial celebration at the Tate Modern and now I’m catching my breath — and a few beers — at a nearby Thames-side pub with fellow Ballardians David Pringle, Mike Holliday, Vale, Marian Wallace and Gee Vaucher. We’re having a wonderful time — wish you were here.

Left: Toby Litt.

But let’s start at the beginning. We have time to order some Alsatian off the barbie. For the first two days in London I actually wondered if somebody’s god was sending us a message, as the elements did their best to batter us with the kind of weather that resembled a vicious blend of The Drowned World and The Wind From Nowhere. Running from doorway to doorway in search of a tube entrance, I kept stumbling through the usual detritus: soggy cigarette ends, broken umbrellas, empty condom packs. I kept wondering where JG might have visited to inspire The Drought. Certainly nowhere in the UK.

The day of the Memorial, however, broke bright and sunny and warm — a good sign and a fitting description of the events to follow.

The plan was for everyone to meet at the Tate Modern at 11am for an 11:30 start. I overtook a walking Toby Litt about a block away and together we made our way to the top floor of the Tate’s east wing where a substantial crowd had already gathered, spritzers in hand, strung out along a glass and steel corridor that emptied to a large anteroom with a commanding view of old London to the north and the high tech security guards of Canary Wharf to the east. I kept looking down to the Thames, though, hoping to see a bit of wing floating by from a light airplane. Not today. The venue might also have reminded some of Royal’s penthouse suite in High-Rise, but regardless of the number of people fighting their way up the stairs it was an appropriately Ballardian venue, made even more so by the Tate’s current show of “Pop Life: Art in a Material World”, featuring Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Synchronicity? Perhaps.

Claire Walsh.

It was in this enormous space the 100 or so celebrants convened for the Memorial – tributes to The Man from JG’s family, friends, colleagues and admirers on what would have been his 79th birthday. The area was liquid with light and the format was a simple stage and microphone with flanking video screens. We sat in chairs that fanned in a wide arc along the length of the room. Our mistress of ceremonies was Bea Ballard, and after thanking the event’s organizers — her sister Fay, Claire Walsh and JG’s agent, Maggie Hanbury — away we went.

Our speakers — 13 in all, four reporting in by video — gave us a wonderfully Ballardian triad of facts, stories and myths about JG, and I couldn’t help thinking that once again Life is reflecting Art, unconsciously reproducing his Atrocity Exhibition structure of the public, the personal, and the symbolic. His work, his life, and his myth were the topics we wanted to hear about, and Simon, no one was disappointed.

Hold on. We’ve just had a discussion here at the pub, and Mike has suggested that this three-part structure may also be the most appropriate for this re-telling. Vale? Dave? You agree? OK. Planes do intersect.

THE PUBLIC

Will Self.

The celebration of JG’s work is also the celebration of his deep impact and the shock waves he sent through the literary community, emphasis on the later generations. And then there was that second wave of carpet bombing in the 1970s, the one that resonated with punk, with the abandoned, with RE/Search, with architecture, with the whole explosion of everyone’s quantification and eroticism of the “outer world of reality”. Unfortunately, Simon, the room held mostly literary types, so JG’s influence on the Ballardian arts was not addressed. Never mind. What was missing in breadth was made up in breath. “A touchstone of authentic genius,” Will Self intoned in his best British boom, “my single most important mentor and influence.” Will also commented about the length and consistency of JG’s oeuvre (pronounced as if it had 14 syllables), and how JG rarely left the road he most preferred, the one where he was caught in the wet headlights ironically waving a warning flag to a population already asleep at the wheel. He’s been at it, Will said, from his early changing planet stories to his last four novels of wacky westerners, that quartet or warnings about the dangers of boredom associated with living behind gated minds and programmed lives.

Not to be outdone, but still a tad cagey about it, Martin Amis beamed in on video to announce JG was “uniquely unique”, and spoke at length about JG’s art and his high place in the pantheon of imaginative writers. He was the only speaker who basically concentrated on JG the writer, rather than the man, and it was good to have him there even in video, although the final effect was a bit Intensive Care Unit, if you know what I mean.

JG’s life story has long been part of the public domain, and The Man did make an appearance, appearing onscreen in segments from the BBC documentary of his 1991 return to Shanghai. We see an obviously emotional JG standing in the yard of his family home on Amherst Avenue, wandering through the rooms, wondering about that second life he might have had if the war had not occurred and he stayed in the terrible city. Then the famous scene at Lunghua where he stands in the cramped room in G Block his family of four called home for three years. This is the closest thing to what I call home, JG told us, “I came close to an adult mind” here. We were treated to one other bit of Ballard before the day was over: the organizers had obtained a video of the What I Believe light display shown at Barcelona, and once again we were all reassured the power of the imagination can remake the world. In a way, that’s why we were there.

THE PERSONAL

Fay Ballard.

Here’s the heart of the matter. The angles between the walls. Let’s start with the daughters, Fay and Bea. Both talked exclusively about their relationship with ‘Daddy’ and their rather envious home life among the muck, movies and manuscripts. Fay, the artist, spoke first, and I was amazed and amused when she announced she would simply read out a series of thoughts, a verbal collage of unstructured memories. Perfect, I thought. It’ll be just like an Atrocity Exhibition list. And it was. Bea, also, offered up her remembrances, but took a more organized approach, mixing the humour with tales of darker times, such as the passing of her husband, and how she relied on JG’s help and experience from his own tragedy, and now even that support is gone. Sobering. And from Bea we have another inkling of JG’s self-deprecatory nature when he described himself as domestically “slattern”, when in reality the organisation level was probably at full Lunghua. “You can clean a house in five minutes if you don’t make a fetish of it”, JG once told her. I got the feeling the regimen was simply an extension of JG’s life: work hard, play hard.

Other Jimbits? JG never or rarely replaced or updated anything in the house. Nor did he throw much out, viz a peeled orange that had stood on the mantelpiece for 40 years. The daughters remember the clacking old typewriter and JG perched over it, speaking aloud the words he’s typing. Spending an entire summer naked in his back yard. Watching a tape of Double Indemnity together on TV, all the lights out, and talking about Civilization and Its Discontents. JG doing surrealist paintings! Constant encouragement for all their enthusiasms. Acceptance of a menagerie of pets, including Bea’s rat. Chinese dinners with — get this, Simon — lobster and noodles. A serious approach to education. Bear hugs. The unicycle. Trips to the movies after school. Ahh, memories.

Michael Moorcock.

Mike Moorcock stayed on this plane for his presentation, too, after he managed with some difficulty to negotiate passage to the stage with his crutches, and then actually alight it. Mike stayed Mike, fumbling thru masses of folded paper to find his notes, and then regaling us with stories of domesticity rather than literary appreciation and New Worlds gossip. It was very interesting to hear stories of JG’s early days, and nowadays Mike treasures most his memories of their times in restaurants, pubs and kitchens, wives at one end, Mike and Jim at the other, with all “forever arguing”. Mike had to put up with “cobblers” from his wife, JG with “you know that’s not true, Jim” from Mary. If you were eavesdropping you might think they were plotting the overthrow of SF, except nothing happened because no one could agree. Alpha males, no? When Mary died Mike was there for JG, not only helping him out of his “closed down” fugue, but ultimately introducing him to Claire — “the best possible choice for Jim” — and finally becoming each other’s editors — “logrolling”.

By far the most famous of the name-brand personalities to attend was Steven Spielberg — I got to sit right beside him! Ha, just kidding. Steve and the two Empire producers also attended, albeit in pixilated form, and gave an obviously glowing, but also somewhat underwhelming appreciation of their brief time together. They liked having JG around to help in the “dimensionalizing” of the book, whatever that means, and, of course, they had lots of fun shooting him in the Shanghai party scene, even if that clip was cut.

Steve’s warm memories of JG were also shared by Crash producer Jeremy Thomas, who recalled JG was unusually generous to his film adaptors. His memories involved food and cars, the former being a meal he enjoyed with JG in Cannes after Crash was panned, or should we say skewered? The latter involves a ride he gave JG in a Ferrari, and The Man reaching out to fondle the dashboard leather. A fellow “petrol-head” Jeremy called JG, a secret connoisseur of car magazines, “the equivalent of centerfolds in Penthouse”. I think he’s confusing the author and character here a wee bit, no?

Thomas made way for the enthusiastic and entertaining V Vale, who flew in from his RE/Search offices in San Francisco to breathlessly relate his stories of how he first became aware of JG and his immense appreciation for The Man: “He’s the Shakespeare of the Twentieth Century, the bard of Shepperton”, Vale pronounced, much to the glee of the audience. I’m toasting Vale right now, Simon, for that great line! Dressed in his trademark all black (as he still is), Vale began by confessing he started off as a Burroughs man, and first became aware of JG in 1974 when someone told him Bill had written a preface to a book called Love & Napalm: Export USA. He read it and experienced a life-changing moment. In 1978 Vale interviewed both Bs for the 10th issue of his seminal punkpaper, Search and Destroy. He then realized he had “spent his entire life preparing to meet JG Ballard”, and Burroughs slipped to second place. Cheers, Vale, and thanks for pointing out the obvious to the locals.

Left: V. Vale. Right: Bea Ballard.

After Vale the long, lean and lanky body of Will Self undulated itself to the microphone, and Will amused us all by reading out a handwritten letter –- actually, two of JG’s ubiquitous postcards — he received 16 years ago. Will had written JG, tentatively suggesting he might be the man to write a screenplay for Crash. The reply was short on encouragement, but long on suggestions: JG recommended Will immediately go out and buy a book called The Black Box, which featured the final recordings of crews involved in aircraft crashes. “I’m thinking of writing a novel based entirely on black box recordings,” JG enthusiastically wrote, then suggested it might be a technique Will might try. “He was always suggesting story ideas to me,” Will intoned in a lazy, eccentric drawl oddly reminiscent of JG’s dulcet tones. “I knew it was because he had already thought about it and had abandoned the concept”. Much laughter. Will also revealed a bit of JG’s horror of all things literary and fête. When JG won a PEN Award four months before his passing, it was Will who accepted on JG’s behalf. When he delivered the award, JG took pains to warn Will about the “tweedy” side of the literary world — “It’s very good of them to give me the award but we must always remember” (here, Will’s voice drops conspiratorially) “they are the enemy”.

Left: Jonathan Waxman. Centre: Chris Petit. Right: James Ballard, Jnr.

A very interesting speaker was Professor Jonathan Waxman, JG’s oncologist, who movingly re-emphasized JG’s stoicism and bravery, usually expressed as endless concern for others rather than himself. I kept wondering if this Doctor was anything at all like the endless Doctors who passed through JG’s fiction. He didn’t look like he’d ever been to Africa, though. We learned of the closeness between JG and Claire near the end, although even these emotional moments were subject to JG’s wicked one-liners, such as the time Jonathan called up to see how things were going. “Claire’s been absolutely magnificent,” JG replied, “but then I have to say that, as she’s sitting opposite me cradling a Luger in her lap”. Or his description of chemotherapy being akin to “continually eating bad oysters”.

THE PSYCHE

Left: Bill Spencer.

This is where these planes intersect, and images are born. Or, in this case, reinforced, as blending the public and private in JG is essentially the basis of his creative technique. JG has said himself his greatest story is his life, and the image I think we all will carry forward is of a bifurcated genius — generous family man on the one hand, hard-drinking shockwave rider of a writer on the other. Unique, to paraphrase Amis. My takeaway image was the vid of JG at Lunghua, white hat, white suit, looking suspiciously like someone who firmly expects to see their 14-year-old self appear around a corner. When I got home I patted my brick from G Block.

And that was basically it for the tributes, although they might have gone on all afternoon given the guest list, which included Iain Sinclair, Chris Petit, Toby Litt, Tom Sutcliffe, Maggie Hanbury, Marian Wallace, Joan Bakewell, Solveig Nordlund, Peter York, and JG’s friend from his Cambridge days at the Copper Kettle, Bill Spencer, looking sharp in a hot pink bow tie. Yowsers!

Direct family members who were in attendance but didn’t speak included James Ballard, Jr. — who shares many physical similarities with JG — and JG’s sister Margaret.

Absent or unable to attend were Brian Aldiss, Emma Tennant from Bananas, Hilary Bailey, Martin Bax and Michael Foreman from Ambit, and academics such as Roger Luckhurst, Jeanette Baxter and you.

Left: Iain Sinclair.

What else did I find out during the informal chit-chat afterwards? A few items you may find interesting. Remember all those stories about JG taking his manuscripts out to his back yard and burning them after the book was published? I asked Bea Ballard about this, and she looked at me like I had been in the care of Dr Nathan. No, they haven’t been burned — the girls have all that stuff. Good news. Toby Litt was saying he’s heard the ICA is negotiating with the CCCB in Barcelona in an attempt to get the Autopsy exhibition in London. Their space is quite a bit less than the 90,000 square feet the CCCB lavished, so we’ll see what transpires. I was also approached by Claire Walsh and Gee Vaucher regarding another proposed Ballard exhibition the ladies are planning for a subterranean exhibition at Waterloo. So, perhaps things are picking up in the UK after all.

The memorial ended as these events normally do, Simon, with a sort of time trickle of people down to the remaining few — us, of course — followed by a vote to repair to the nearest bar to discuss the experience, which we’re now doing. Interestingly enough, all of us at the table agree the event was also a sort of Rubicon, a boundary we have now crossed which marks the end of mourning JG’s passing to celebrating his extraordinary life, his loving and generous personality, and, of course, his amazing legacy of work.

It was a helluva day. I’m glad I was there.

Cheers,
Rick.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘What exactly is he trying to sell?’: J.G. Ballard’s Adventures in Advertising
+ ‘Like Alice in Wonderland’: Solveig Nordlund on J.G. Ballard
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Review: Grave New World
+ It’s An Ad, Ad, Ad World
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

Image: JG Ballard and Iain Sinclair in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

by David Cunningham

There are few concepts in contemporary social and cultural theory whose meaning is so apparently nebulous, and whose historical novelty (or even reality) is so disputed, as that of ‘globalisation’. Yet, for better or worse, the questions that it serves to frame are ones that increasingly work to define a trans-disciplinary problematic across all the humanities and social sciences, as attested to by a range of celebrated publications in the last few years. In the case of the critical analysis of cultural and artistic production, perhaps of utmost importance has been the issue of the historical transformations being undergone by ‘local’ forms and practices in the face of the global generalization of capitalist relations of production and exchange; an issue which, for literary theory and criticism, goes beyond, and in some sense historically sublates, the specific problematic of post-colonialism.[1] As such, what is customarily thought to be at stake here might, in its broadest terms, be summarised in the following questions: If there is, for the first time, now (tendentially at least) a ‘single spatial ground to the definition of the historical present’, what happens to place as a spatial variable in such a new global economy of a capitalist modernity? How is it inscribed ‘in the [new] spaces of culture?’[2] And what critical ‘role’ can cultural forms and practices, that have been historically associated with the specificities of place and localised traditions, realistically hope to play at such an historical moment?

While then its qualitative historical newness has undoubtedly been over-exaggerated in some quarters, the emergent spatial dominance of what Castells terms the ‘space of flows’ that traverses the planetary ground of contemporary capitalist modernity — ‘flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organisational interaction, flows of images, sounds and symbols’ — clearly does bring radically into question the ontological character of what has traditionally been understood as spaces of place, whether ethnologically or sociologically; that is, a ‘locale whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity’. It is the ‘concrete outcome’ of such an immanent negation that, famously, the French anthropologist Marc Augé, and, more recently, Hardt and Negri, have sought to articulate as new forms of non-place: the proliferation of spaces which ‘cannot be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity’, and which, indeed, resist all localised patterns of legibility. Materially, and most visibly, it is these spaces that are reproduced through the now familiar ‘glass phantasms’ of an ‘architectural Esperanto’ — the built form and ambiences of airports, motorways, corporate towers, and retail outlets — populating an ‘urban panorama’ across the planet, which progressively engenders an ‘inexorable sameness of…landscape that turns all travel into arrival at the same destination’.[3]

If such presently operative ideas — several of the most influential articulations of which I have rather bundled together here — provoke certain questions in relation to the specific concerns of this essay, it is, of course, because if there is one distinctive aspect of the work of Iain Sinclair — a formal and thematic principle that might seem to unify his entire oeuvre — it would relate to the intimate association it suggests between literary production and the particularities of place; in Sinclair’s own case the unique locale of East London. ‘The poet’, he claims in a 1979 interview, is distinguished by the way in which he or she is necessarily ‘drawn to a specific location; to activate a monologue that is already available there’: ‘Place needs the person to give it voice. Place activates the poet’.[4] Nearly twenty years on, such a poetics is re-iterated in Sinclair’s essay ‘The Shamanism of Intent’, in which the contemporary shaman’s ‘sickness-vocation’ is explicitly defined as the capacity to ‘re-enchant place’ through ‘working their own turf’. For the true artist as shaman: ‘The life-force of the city is measured in the candlepower of its keepers, the activators of place’. The writer is a chronographer, ‘hungry for place as expressively potent, place as experience…as a trigger to memory, imagination, and mythic presence’.[5]

Image: Iain Sinclair in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

In its literary origins, such a poetics of place is in fact most immediately traceable in Sinclair’s work, not to the present resuscitation of the politicised European avant-gardism of Surrealist re-mappings and Situationist psychogeography, with which it has been latterly associated, but rather to the largely occluded influence of a certain post-Poundian, mainly American poetry that played a crucial role within the so-called British poetry revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Perhaps most important, in this respect, would be Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, centred around his home town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and their poetic conception of a ‘new localism’; a modulation of Poundian epic ambitions in which writing, as the construction of spatio-temporal matrices capable of generating form, becomes what Eric Mottram describes as a ‘locationary action’.[6] Nonetheless, whatever the distinctive cultural roots of such an ‘action’, as it manifests itself within Sinclair’s writing, it is fair to say that its somewhat belated mainstream fashionablity has coincided with a far more culturally generalised ‘poetics of place’ which would seem to draw together a bewilderingly wide range of different artistic forms and practices of the last few decades, and which appears — if we are to judge by current academic discourses — to have reached a certain fever pitch in our own contemporary moment. To note this is not to diminish the singularity of Sinclair’s work. Rather it is, I want to suggest, to provide a necessary interpretative framework for the kind of critical reflection that may serve to bring forth this singularity all the more forcefully within its contemporary context.[7]

Potential examples of the contemporary ‘hunger’ for place are various: the proclaimed return in architectural theory, after the final disintegration of the Modern Movement, back towards what Christian Norberg-Schulz terms ‘the “vocation” of place’ and the regulative ideal of the genius loci;[8] the increasing dominance of site-specific works within post-conceptualist art practice of a type that would seek ‘to animate old sites … reoccupy lost cultural spaces, and propose historical counter-memories’;[9] the seductive melancholia of W. G Sebald’s books that conjure a ‘heartache…caused by the vortex of past time’ accumulated on the sites of Liverpool Street Station or the Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold;[10] and what might best be described as the pseudo-Situationist and Benjaminian aspirations of much contemporary urban theory.[11] The desire for what the architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton calls a critical regionalism, whose ‘salient cultural precept’ would be that of ‘place creation’, is seemingly rampant in our time.[12]

Yet what cultural function does such an apparently ubiquitous ‘precept’ serve in a resurgent globalised capitalism? As one recent commentator on contemporary art has put it, it is certainly hard not to suspect, given the increasing ‘historical loss of distinctions of place’, that ‘the ideological function of site-specific work’ is ‘now to manufacture such distinctions artificially, in order to compensate and cover over the loss’. For if, in the words of Hal Foster, ‘the local and the everyday are [commonly] thought to resist economic development, they can also attract it, [insofar as] such development needs the local and the everyday even as it erodes these qualities, renders them siteless’. The renewed importance, within globalised capitalist development, of ‘monopoly rent’ — the ‘exclusive control over some directly or indirectly tradeable item which is in some respects unique and non-replicable’ — gives rise to a very contemporary form of what we might call the ‘capital of location’, and to new forms of financial speculation that follow from it. In a familiar pattern, the regeneration of the East End of London, with which Sinclair has long been concerned, might well be understood as exemplary in these terms, promoting itself on the basis of a collective symbolic capital deriving from its distinctive (spectacularised) history and myth (from the distant pathos of Huguenot and Jewish immigrants to the gothic frisson of Jack the Ripper and gangster chic). Yet, as David Harvey observes, this process rapidly heads ‘deep into contradiction’. For ‘as opportunities to pocket monopoly rents galore present themselves on the basis of [this] collective symbolic capital … so their irresistible lure draws more and more homogenising commodification in its wake’. It is the tension at work here that determines the cultural politics of globalization in general.[13]

Explicitly resistant, then, as his work may well be to the contemporary construction of literature’s latest ideological role as an effective branch of the heritage industry — fetishising the quirky and mildly exotic signs of ‘local colour’ for a global market — the marks of such a problematic complicity with the forces of investment capital cannot be entirely erased from Sinclair’s own works, as he is clearly aware. Indeed it is an alertness to the danger of such complicity which is increasingly, even obsessively, self-reflexively enunciated, in a familiar narratorial conceit, throughout the pages of a novel like Downriver. ‘Would it be ethical to make our discovery public?’, the narrator asks at one point. ‘To endanger this time-warped reservation?’. For to ‘make public’ is always to risk feeding those who need ‘a mythology to underwrite property values’; the ‘standard pre-development scenario’:

When artists walk through a wilderness in epiphanous ‘bliss-out’, fiddling with polaroids, grim estate agents dog their footsteps…The visionary reclaims the ground of his nightmares only to present it, framed in Perspex, to the Docklands Development Board .[14]

Such self-conscious marking out of the changing socio-economic processes which would culturally enframe and threaten his poetics of place — the reshaping of London by the ‘occult logic of “market forces”’ which serve to dictate ‘a new geography’ — is a persistent feature of the ironic distance apparent within the narrative voices of Sinclair’s recent prose; a specific modulation of the kind of reflexive commentary that ‘is so thoroughly interwoven with action that the distinction between the two disappears’.[15] Indeed, something of the distinctiveness of Sinclair’s recent works is precisely to be found — unlike in, say, the ultimately conservative pleasures of Sebald’s superficially similar writings — in the ways in which they immanently register a certain crisis within their own mode of literary production. For if it is indeed a certain ‘magnetism’ of place that activates the ‘poet’, the historical loss of distinctions of place clearly raises questions about the contemporary possibility of poetic experience in general, as Sinclair conceives it. Moreover, and as such, this problematic comes to constitute far more than a mere historical ‘backdrop’ or thematic ‘context’, but necessarily manifests itself as an immanent problem of form; rendering visible within its own formal structures, and stylistic constellations, the social contradictions that it engages.

If, therefore, the conception of literary production as ‘locationary action’ is evidently one that persists, in a certain continuous fashion, through all of Sinclair’s writings, up to the present day, it must also be thought of as subject to, and as immanently registering, an irresistible transformation. The stories and forms of poetic experience engendered by what Patrick Wright describes as ‘the precipitations of history, rumour and memory which were still clinging to the streets of Whitechapel as Sinclair knew them in the seventies’ — and which provide much of the material for Lud Heat, Suicide Bridge and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings — are, by the early 1990s, presented as progressively fragile in the face of the ‘deregulated energies’ unleashed by Thatcherism. In the pages of Downriver and Radon Daughters, one previously ‘disregarded landscape’ after another is ‘dragged from cyclical time’ to the ‘pragmatic time’ of capital accumulation.[16]

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

What might be at stake in this for the politics of contemporary literature, more generally, is something that I want to consider here through the staging of a ‘confrontation’ between the very different — in some sense, opposed — manifestations of the contemporary novel’s spatial and formal possibilities to be found within the oeuvres of Sinclair and of J.G. Ballard. Such a confrontation is not one that is imposed from the outside. It is, crucially, internal to Sinclair’s writings of the last five years, and, I want to claim, serves, in part, to mediate their developing relations both to the history of the novel form and to the contemporary problematics of place and non-place, of spaces of places and spaces of flows. Yet, as such, this textual presence of Ballard is a rather more disturbing presence within Sinclair’s writing than are the familiar allusions to Blake, Dickens, Conrad, et al. For Ballard’s own style and concerns, in their tension with Sinclair’s, mark something like an introjected point of resistance (which cannot simply be digested or overcome) to the poetics of place upon which the latter continues to insist.

In London Orbital, Sinclair records an actual meeting with Ballard at his home in Shepperton — an act of ‘homage’, he suggests — but we find the first explicit staging of this confrontation a few years earlier in the short book on Crash, written for the BFI Modern Classics series, in which Sinclair addresses, at some length, his particular interest in Ballard’s definitive ‘fascination with a frozen aesthetic of motorways, business parks, airport hotels … A present tense world of swift, sharp sentences’. This is a fiction that ‘grows out of [an] undisclosed, over-familiar urban landscape. Ballard’s trick [is] to forge a poetic out of that which contains least poetry’ (Crash 77). In this way, Sinclair argues, Ballard’s writing conforms, in its own idiosyncratic manner, to a poetics of place. Like the areas of London that, in Lights Out For The Territory, Sinclair parcels out to the likes of Angela Carter, Allen Fisher and Aidan Dun, this fiction can be sited, insofar as it is a particular place, Sinclair claims—’the transitional landscape of gravel pits, reservoirs and slip-roads that surround Heathrow’ — that activates Ballard the poet. The ‘psychogeographical field’ of Crash ‘was posited entirely on the London perimeter, the Heathrow pentagram that Ballard knew so well’.[17]

Yet it is worth noting that there is — by contrast to Fisher or Dun, who fully subscribe to their own versions of an Olsonian poetics of place — a rather deliberate elision of certain key aspects of Ballard’s own self-understanding apparent in such a reading; an elision which is, for example, revealed in discussion with Sinclair’s sometime collaborator Chris Petit. As Sinclair relates the latter’s conversations with Ballard around the possibility of making a film of Crash, he recounts that a major problem for Petit concerned his difficulty in imagining it ‘being set anywhere except the isthmus between the Westway, Heathrow and Shepperton’. The implicit basis for such a view is re-iterated in Sinclair’s own judgement on the David Cronenberg film that was eventually made, where, he writes, ‘the strange particulars of London that Ballard pressed into a Blakean mapping of his own…dissolve into the netherworld of … Toronto’. Yet, as Sinclair is also compelled to acknowledge here, such disappointment was emphatically not shared by Ballard himself. Indeed Ballard would love Cronenberg’s film.[18]

Now, the dissensus at this point can, perhaps, precisely be conceptualised in terms of the dialectic of space and place at work, respectively, in Ballard’s novel and in Sinclair’s reading — or, rather, creative mis-reading — of it. As Petit relates, Ballard himself saw ‘Crash as much a Tokyo novel or a Toronto novel as a London novel’; the reasoning for which is made quite evident in Sinclair’s own interview with the writer:

The areas peripheral to great airports are identical all over the world. You can land at any airport these days and for the first twenty minutes, as you take your cab, you go through a landscape that is identical … Two-storey factories, flat housing, warehouses.[19]

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

In this sense, for Ballard himself, the ‘spatial field’ of Crash, and of the novels that followed, is not, in fact, related to a ‘place’, as Sinclair might like to imagine, but to a necessarily generalised non-place, in something like Augé’s terms. The spaces of Ballard’s fiction are those populated by ‘the same car-rental agencies and hotel rooms, with their adult movies and deodorized bathrooms’. As one of his characters says of the central ‘location’ in Cocaine Nights: ‘Estrella de Mar isn’t anywhere’.[20]

In exemplary ethnological fashion, such spaces of non-place are taxonomised by Augé himself as including ‘air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called “means of transport”…the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, and large retail outlets’, both ‘transit points and temporary abodes’, ‘holiday clubs and refugee camps’, as well as the spaces ‘where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce’.[21] I will not be entirely the first to note that this check-list in fact reads like a thematic summary of Ballard’s own fiction, from the concrete dystopias of High-Rise and Crash through to the decadent, gated communities of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.[22] And the spaces of such fiction cast a considerable shadow over much of Sinclair’s recent work, most obviously London Orbital, obsessively returned to throughout its pages. Indeed, this latter book might well be read as a kind of self-conscious encroachment upon, and rewriting of, what Sinclair regards as Ballard’s own territory, from the Bluewater shopping centre — described as a ‘Ballardian resort’ — to the ‘enclaves with no memory’ that constitute the new housing estates ringing London, to, above all, the M25 itself.[23] The echoes of Ballard would thus seem entirely deliberate. Compare, for example, the following two fictional ‘spaces’, selected almost at random; the first from a recent Ballard novel, the second from London Orbital:

Despite its title, the Pangbourne Village estate was not built near the site of any former or existing village…[It] has no connections, social, historical or civic with Pangbourne itself…Secure behind their high walls and surveillance cameras, these estates in effect constitute a chain of closed communities whose lifelines run directly along the M4 to the offices and consulting rooms, restaurants and private clinics of central London.

A colony of the disenchanted in a panorama of disenchantment. Amnesiaville…Chafford Hundred thrives because it is not really there. It’s displaced, not placed: 2,000 (and rising) pristine, anti-vernacular units. Scimitar-shaped Draylon-grass carpets. Second cars. An empty-by-day enclave with no centres and no purpose.[24]

In this way, Ballard’s work provides something like the intertextual point of mediation for Sinclair’s own engagement with the contemporary dialectic of place and non-place; that is, with what is earlier figured by the ‘sorry meniscus’ of the Millenium Dome, Canary Wharf’s ‘crystal synthesis of capital’ — ‘Treeless, broad, focusing on nothing’ — or the ‘discreet tyranny of “now”’ established in the ‘money lake’ of the City of London’s archetypal space of flows. The British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, Sinclair writes in London Orbital, ‘is universal…In supermarket heaven, you’re at home everywhere’. You are, in other words, lodging in Ballard’s home; a home which is, it might be said, no kind of home at all. Just as Sinclair seeks to re-read Crash through his own poetics of place, so we might say, more generally, that he thus seeks also to re-place the fictional spaces of Ballard’s novels through what is described as a tenuous act of re-enchantment. In doing so, the formal and conceptual dialogue between these two poles of contemporary British writing is rendered internal to the text, allowing the remorseless absences and solitudes of Ballard’s own spatial configurations to immanently inscribe the historical limitations of Sinclair’s poetics; a kind of dialogic imperative which, collapsing the distinction between form and reflection, allows the dialogue to debate the very basis of the work itself. Ballard’s stripped-down language of dislocation, with its unvarying stylistic register, comes to be dialectically entwined with Sinclair’s own characteristically dense prose style and its encyclopaedic accumulation of literary and cultural allusions, as if the lexical variety and richness of the latter might overcome the emptiness that it confronts; re-vivifying place through a Rimbaudian alchemy of the word. At the same time, if the imagistic intensity of Sinclair’s prose, with its dazzling expansiveness of diction, would seek, in an act of memory and ‘counter-magic’, to re-instate the image of place within the space of flows, the present-tense ‘images’ of Ballard’s writing, and of its ‘willed limbo’, provide its opposition and resistance. As Vidler writes of Martha Rossler’s (very Ballardian) photographs of American freeways and airport terminals, they ‘assert’ that ‘not only is no orientation possible in the technically determined scheme of road and vehicle [or passages and ramps], but that no amount of image proliferation will restore orientation’.[25]

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

At the structural heart of this tense conjunction is, of course, the endless dislocated space of the M25 itself. ‘Out here on the motorway rim’, Sinclair writes, ‘there were no memories’. ‘Back stories’ are ‘erased’; history is ‘revised on a daily basis’.[26] The great gambit of London Orbital is to try — against all odds — to re-form the images and paths of place and memory within this kind of non-place that Ballard’s texts so powerfully render; creating, through a familiar urban metaphorics of the body, the organic pump of blood that would circulate around the tourniquet which might otherwise kill the city.[27] For Augé, contemporary ‘traveller’s space’ is ‘the archetype of non-place’. The artist’s ‘counter-magic’, the ‘pedestrian circuit of London’s orbital motorway’, thus might be understood as a re-placing of the anthropological ‘route’ or ‘path’ — what, for Bakhtin famously, was the pivotal ‘space of encounter’ for one of the novel’s dominant historical chronotopes — in the exemplary non-place of the continuous motorway.[28] Although Sinclair claims, in his conversations with Kevin Jackson, that the ‘road is the river, the M25 is the equivalent of the Thames’, he must know that in fact an unbridgeable history divides them. (The trick is, if only for a moment, to bring them together). For if the rivers and roads, that are the sites of the journeys in Downriver, still (just) retain a liberatory passage to past and future — in the ‘posthumous brilliance’ of their history — the endless, circular ‘ribbon’ of the orbital allows for no such opening. Perhaps its most obvious prefiguring in the earlier novel is found in the central metonymic image of the nineteenth-century establishment of ‘railway time’ in chapter six, which, pressed forward by the capitalist ratio, already abstracts and negates the temporal nuances of place. Yet, even here, the train itself provides a novelistic space of encounter and narrative production — Strangers on a Train, Murder on the Orient Express, Woolf’s ‘Mrs Brown’ — that the ‘mobile cabins’ circulating the motorway cannot.

Following Bakhtin, in his 1998 ‘atlas’ of the nineteenth-century novel Franco Moretti asserts that ‘in modern European novels, what happens depends a lot on where it happens’; ‘without a certain kind of space, a certain kind of story is simply impossible’. Hence what he describes as the ‘place-bound nature’ of the novel (what Reiner Hawsherr calls Ortegebunden) — its ‘peculiar geometry, its boundaries, its spatial taboos and favourite routes’ — a ‘platial’ character which he traces through its relation to the formation of the modern spatial configurations of the nation state and the nineteenth-century metropolis. It is the changing ‘chronotopes’, formally constitutive of the novel, that serve, Moretti argues, to explain its historical development in complex relation to ‘an actual material reality’. Citing the exceptional moments of the late nineteenth-century Russian novel of ideas and post-war Latin American Magic Realism, ‘in both cases’, he asserts, ‘the new model is the product of a new space…A new space poses new problems — and so asks for new answers’.[29] Yet what new stories might the spaces of non-place and of flows provoke? What answers might be given to the problems that it poses? The M25, as Petit states in the London Orbital film, seemingly ‘resists any kind of story’. Without beginning or end — a kind of purgatorial eternity — no narrative or image can finally stick. ‘What other than a surveillance camera’, asks the soundtrack, ‘would want to record its ceaseless undramatic motion?’ In the absence of the orientations of place, the dynamics of story are displaced by the perpetual, un-editable loop.[30]

The power of Ballard’s writings — no doubt, in some sense, for Sinclair himself — come, then, from the ways in which they imply the irresistible submission of the novel’s narrative modes to the contemporary forms of a present-tense ‘information loop’ that characterise a globalised commodity culture. The attempt to locate a sub-Benjaminian agenda of redemption here in a kind of ‘technological uncanny’ — such as is apparent in, for example, Roger Luckhurst’s (otherwise very useful) book on Ballard — fails to engage what is most challenging in this work:[31] its absolute self-dissolution into a contemporary language of abstraction and dislocation, of advertising copy, technocratic jargon and cheap pornography. As Tafuri writes of Mies van der Rohe’s post-war sheets of reflective glass, Ballard’s texts ‘assume in themselves the ineluctability of absence that the contemporary world imposes on the language of forms’. They ‘negate dwelling as they reflect the metropolis’. For Ballard, in Adorno’s withering phrase, ‘dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible’. Against this, the danger inherent within the current obsessions with memoration, as supposed ‘act of resistance against the totality of spectacularisation’, is simply that, as Stewart Martin argues, it in fact becomes an art of forgetting; a forgetting of real historical movements and of the changed conditions of present. In a world of heritage, retro and Rough Guide-style ‘alternative’ tourism, to evoke the flâneur or the rag picker (or, even, the Situationist dérive) is, without qualification, to fail to understand the road historically travelled. Sinclair’s force as a writer comes from his (only rarely acknowledged) refusal to do so; re-asserting a poetics of place only through the textual introjection of that which would historically challenge it.[32]

It is not here a fatuous question of choosing between Sinclair and Ballard — as if such a thing were possible — but of tracing, through their immanent confrontation, the role of writing, and of cultural production more generally, at an historical moment marked by the particular spatial relations generated by the dialectic of places and flows; an historical moment in which ‘the relationships between the local and the global are all in flux’. If, as Adorno once suggested, it is part of the modern novel’s distinctive fate to incorporate its ongoing dissolution within its very form, then it is perhaps as a new stage in such a process that the (dialectically inseparable) novelistic forms of space and time inscribed within the singular prose styles of Sinclair and Ballard might best be understood.[33] What, in time, will come to re-place the novel remains, of course, an open question.

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

This essay was first published in Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge (eds), City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), pp. 134-146. Reprinted with permission.

NOTES

[1] See David Cunningham, ‘Notes on Nuance: Rethinking a Philosophy of Modern Music’ in Radical Philosophy 125 (May/June 2004), 22-26.
[2] Peter Osborne, ‘Non-Places and the Spaces of Art’ in The Journal of Architecture 6, 2 (Summer 2001), 184; Saskia Sassen, ‘Analytic Borderlands: Economy and Culture in the Global City’ in D: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory, Volume Three (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 5.
[3] Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 442, 423. See also pp. 408-9; Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London & New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 77-8. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 216-7; Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture/2, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (New York: Rizzoli, 1976), p. 339; Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 173.
[4] Iain Sinclair, unbroadcast interview with Paul Green for BBC radio (1979).
[5] Lights, pp. 246-7, 252; Orbital, p. 101.
[6] See Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (eds.), Poems for the Millenium Volume Two (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press 1998), p. 102; See Peter Barry, ‘Allen Fisher and “Content-Specific” Poetry’ in Robert Hampson & Peter Barry (eds.), New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1993), pp. 198-215. The Olsonian character of Sinclair’s early poetics of place is clearest in the opening piece of Suicide Bridge (1979), ‘Intimate Associations: Myth and Place’ (Lud/ Suicide pp. 147-154).
[7] For even if it is a question here of resisting the facile appropriation of Sinclair’s work in the name of some fairly dubious forms of cultural politics, then it must be in relation to such a context that this resistance is articulated.
[8] Christian Norberg-Schulz, ‘The Phenomenon of Place’ in Kate Nesbit (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995 (New York: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 426.
[9] Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1996), p. 197.
[10] W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 182-3. See also W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill Press, 1998).
[11] See, for example, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds.), City A-Z: Urban Fragments (London & New York: Routledge, 2000); Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivana and Jane Rendell (eds.), Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City (London & New York: Routledge, 1996).
[12] Kenneth Frampton, ‘Prospects for a Critical Regionalism’ in Nesbit (ed.), p. 482.
[13] Peter Osborne, ‘Installation, Performance or What?’ in Oxford Art Journal 24, 2 (2001), 151-2; Foster, Return of the Real, p. 197; David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 395, 406.
[14] Downriver, p. 397; Rodinsky, pp. 66-7; Downriver, pp. 16, 265.
[15] Theodor Adorno ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel’ in Notes to Literature, Volume One, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 34;
[16] Patrick Wright, ‘Rodinsky’s Place’ in The London Review of Books 9, 19 (October 29 1987), 3-5. In his conversations with Kevin Jackson, Sinclair remarks that, in the 1970s, Brick Lane in London’s East End ‘still had the ambience of the Late Victorian era, a derelict area with the brewery as its focus’ (Verbals, p. 71). By the 1990s, of course, the brewery, in which Sinclair once worked, had stopped brewing, having been ‘redeveloped’ as a complex of bar, offices and studios; Downriver, pp. 158, 33.
[17] Crash, pp. 37, 77. Lights, pp. 145-6; Crash, p. 15.
[18] Ibid., pp. 87, 11.
[19] Ibid., pp. 87, 48.
[20] J. G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp. 10, 17.
[21] Augé, pp. 79, 78.
[22] See Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between the Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), pp. 129-31.
[23] Orbital, pp. 388, 136.
[24] J. G. Ballard, Running Wild (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp. 11-12; Orbital, p. 400.
[25] Downriver pp. 276-7; Lights pp. 91, 107; Orbital p. 262; Ballard, Cocaine Nights, p. 34; Vidler, Warped Space, p. 175.
[26] Orbital, pp. 141, 123-4.
[27] Given the organicist tendencies which always underlie the metaphor of city as body, Sinclair’s admiration for the liberal Christian account of the city to be found in the work of Richard Sennett is perhaps less surprising than it might otherwise seem. See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), especially chapter eight on the anthropomorphic projections in urbanism derived from Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood (pp. 255-281).
[28] Augé, p. 86; See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 243-5; Verbals, p. 135; Downriver, pp. 6, 170-1.
[29] Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London & New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 70, 100, 5, 196.
[30] Soundtrack to Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit, London Orbital (Illuminations Films/Channel 4, 2002).
[31] See Luckhurst, p. 135. Luckhurst’s argument for an uncanny return of the repressed at work in Ballard rests on the evidence of a fairly short passage in the novel Concrete Island — in which the central character stumbles upon the half-buried ‘grand-plans of Edwardian terraced houses’ — and draws (all-too-typically) on that conception of the ‘outmoded’ to be found in Benjamin’s 1929 essay on Surrealism. But there is, it seems to me, little ‘revolutionary nostalgia’ at work in Ballard’s fictional world, little sense of an alternative future figured within that which lies derelict and discarded in ‘the interstices of new economies’, only a rigorously non-nostalgic vision of a coming desert in which all ‘cultural accretions’ are finally erased.
[32] Tafuri & Dal Co, p. 312; Massimo Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’, trans. Stephen Sartarelli, in K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 400. See also David Cunningham, ‘The Phenomenology of Non-Dwelling: Massimo Cacciari, Modernism and the Philosophy of the Metropolis’ in Crossings: A Counter-Disciplinary Journal 7 (Fall 2004), 156-8; Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London & New York: Verso, 1978), p. 38. As Sinclair acknowledges in London Orbital, for Ballard the ‘“local” was finished as a concept’ (Orbital 177); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. xxv; See Stewart Martin, ‘W. G. Sebald and the Modern Art of Memory’ in David Cunningham, Andrew Fisher & Sas Mays (eds.), Photography and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), pp. 180-201.
[33] Harvey, Spaces of Capital, p. 226; See Adorno, ‘Position of the Narrator’, pp. 30-36.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An Interview with Iain Sinclair
+ ‘Obeying the surrealist formula’: Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard
+ ‘His personal horizon’: Sinclair and Self on Ballard

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

I reread Iain Sinclair’s BFI book on Cronenberg’s Crash recently as research for my article on the Crash! short film. I have to say I am amazed the BFI ever agreed to publishing it in a series about ‘modern film classics’. Cronenberg and the film take back stage to Sinclair’s virtuoso reconstruction of Ballard’s life in the early 70s, full of digressions from Sinclair’s friends and collaborators (also Ballard’s) like Chris Petit and Mike Moorcock, with brief stops to also analyse *their* life and times for context!

Imagine the poor customer, keen on the film and wishing to know more about it and its director, picking this up and discovering that discussion of Crash, the film, takes up barely over half the book.

That’s fine by me, though, because I find it an absorbing read. I’m starting to think of it as the middle section of a Ballard biography that’s yet to be written. There are plenty of academic volumes on Ballard, but all the same (and with all due respect to those previous volumes) what we really need is a proper JGB biography written by someone with all the right connections, someone who has imaginatively fused with the subject’s interior life.

Someone like Iain Sinclair.

ABOVE: Crash! on YouTube

by Simon Sellars

CRASH! (1971)

Director: Harley Cokliss
Writer: J.G. Ballard
Starring: J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake

I wasn’t satisfied by just writing SF stories, you see. My imagination was eager to expand in all directions.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, 1982.

Leached away by the camera lens, the dimension of depth is missing from the room, and the two figures have an increasingly abstract relationship to each other, and to the rectilinear forms of the settee, walls and ceiling. In this context almost anything is possible, their movements are a series of postural equations that must have some significance other than their apparent one.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)

..:: MORE: Ballardian.com transcript of the film’s voiceover and meta-narration.

When Paul Haggis won the Best Picture Oscar in 2005 for a film called Crash, fellow Canadian David Cronenberg wasn’t among the well-wishers. In fact Cronenberg was positively livid, accusing Haggis of ‘functional stupidity’ for allegedly stealing the title of the Baron of Blood’s 1996 Ballard adaptation. But funnily enough Cronenberg wasn’t the first to direct a film called Crash. He wasn’t even the first to direct a Ballard adaptation called Crash. That’s a title claimed 25 years earlier (allowing for the presence of a rogue exclamation mark) by Harley Cokeliss (formerly known as ‘Harley Cokliss’), who made the 1971 short film ‘Crash!’ from fragments found in Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition (including the film’s title, punctuation and all, lifted from the title of an Atrocity chapter). Of course, Cokliss also pre-empted Jonathan Weiss’s feature-film version of Atrocity, released in 2000.

That achievement, of being the first — pre-Cronenberg, pre-Weiss — is worthy in itself, but Cokliss’s film has something even more prized, something else the other two could never have: it stars J.G. Ballard. With his brooding, hypermasculine presence, Ballard plays a version of Atrocity’s ‘T’ character alongside the actor Gabrielle Drake, her own role a composite of the book’s archetypal ‘sex-kit’ women.

The film was a product of the most experimental, the darkest phase of Ballard’s career. It was an era of psychological blowback from the sudden, shocking death of his wife in 1964, an era that had produced the cut-up ‘condensed novels’ of Atrocity, plus a series of strange collages and ‘advertisers’ announcements’. One of the ‘ads’ featured a bondage photo of a bound and ball-gagged woman set to inscrutable text: ‘In her face the diagram of bones forms a geometry of murder. After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised.’ Later there were further literary experiments, concrete poems and ‘impressionistic’ film reviews, as well as an aborted multimedia theatrical play based around the car crash. After that came an actual gallery exhibition of crashed cars, replete with strippers and the drunken destruction of the ‘exhibits’ performed by the enraged-for-real audience.

Then came Cokliss’s ‘Crash!’.

In all of these experiments, aborted works, happenings, events, the motif of the car crash is crucial. Ballard sought to understand the role that automobile styling, and therefore mass consumerism, plays in our lives. His sights were set on the built-in death drive that technology embodies, the effacing of identity, the shutting off of our neurological systems. Our willingness to submit to the amniotic bliss of the technological womb. Of course, today we know where all this would eventually beach: his 1973 masterpiece, Crash. But in 1971 Ballard was still pushing the farthest limits of his obsession, refining riffs and routines, expanding the parameters of the car crash as far as popular culture would allow. Crucially this was far beyond the stuffy confines of ‘literature’, which Ballard has never had much time for, and into visual art and film: the realm of the popular imaginary.

‘On 12 February 1971 … the Radio Times announced, for 8.30pm on BBC2, ‘Crash!’. To be introduced by James Mossman. ‘For science fiction writer J.G. Ballard, the key image of the present day is the man in the motor car. It is the image that represents the dreams and fantasies that all too easily can turn into nightmares. In a film for Review Ballard explains the beauty and fascination of this potentially deadly technology.’

Quoted in Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, by Iain Sinclair (1999).

J.G. Ballard and Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

‘Crash!’ is rather a strange film. It doesn’t have a title sequence, there are no credits and there is no explanation of who Ballard is (although perhaps this was provided by the aforementioned Mr Mossman). It begins with Gabrielle Drake in profile, turning to the camera as a discordant oscillator tone is heard. Then we see Ballard, his strident gaze alighting on his natural environment: the rooftop of a multistorey car park.

Next we hear a meta-narration enacted by a plummy BBC type, as vintage crash-test footage plays. Old, finned American cars collide in slow motion. Plastic dummies are expelled through windows and doors, gracefully shattering into smithereens. The narration is a slightly edited version of a passage in Ballard’s ‘You, Me and the Continuum’ (1966), one of the Atrocity texts. But it’s a tougher version. The original told us the crashing cars were ‘worrying each other like amiable whales’ but there’s nothing of the kind here, just a pure litany of impact zones, flying fenders, severed torsos, dummies disintegrating in a ‘carnival of arms and legs’.

I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. They were using American cars of the late 50s, a period I suppose when the American dream, and American confidence, were at their highest point.”

J.G. Ballard, voiceover from Crash! (1971).

Intercut with the crash tests are subliminal glimpses of Ballard and Drake, before Cokliss switches to Ballard cruising in his large vehicle. Crucially it’s an American model, a left-hand drive, and in it our man rumbles down motorways and feeder roads, down the Westway, on the M41 towards Shepherds Bush. There are some heavy-handed repeats set to phased sound effects: motorway signs looped over and over like the revolving backdrop in a Warner Bros cartoon. The meta-narration gives way to Ballard’s own voiceover: first person, in a tone you just don’t hear from him in interviews or in person. In Iain Sinclair’s book on Cronenberg’s Crash, which features a discussion of the Cokliss film, Sinclair describes Ballard’s voice here as ‘a schizophrenic buzz’. To me he sounds weary, almost jaded, maybe a little disgusted, as he tells us that that ‘the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car’ (see the appendix for a full transcript of Ballard’s voiceover and of the meta-narration).

His aim, Ballard suggests, is to home in on the ‘marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives’. It’s a key point, a partner to his assertion later in the film that ‘we only make sense of ourselves in terms of these huge technological systems’. Indeed, the egocentric popular culture of today, the all-invasive media landscape in which the private becomes public — the Myspace glossolalia of intimate, private space projected onto a global screen — can perhaps be understood in these terms, a result of what Ballard sees as ‘the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape’.

All filtered via this very 70s incantation of cocooned drivers in a ‘metallised dream’.

J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

The point made, the music returns, edgy and stressed, perhaps synthesised (maybe Mooged) but also sounding like plucked, discordant violins. Ballard, the driver, turns to his right and sees Drake, the woman, in the passenger seat. He blinks, looks again and she’s gone. We now know what she represents: our ‘strange love affair with the machine, with its own death’, according to his voiceover. There’s a clunky edit and the music cuts (well, I say ‘music’ but it’s ‘sound design’ — it serves as pure atmosphere and is as functional as stage-set mise-en-scene). Ballard walks around a new-car showroom admiring Pontiacs, Cadillacs — the kind of American cars that add so much gravitas to Atrocity. Ballard’s voiceover tells us that ‘the styling of motor cars, and of the American motor car in particular, has always struck me as incredibly important… I’m interested in the exact way in which it brings together the visual codes for expressing our ordinary perceptions about reality. For example, that the future is something with a fin on it’.

But acolytes know you’ll never find a tail fin in Ballard’s future, for his future is an anti-Gernsback continuum that has no need for sci-fi trappings because science fiction, for Ballard, is the stuff of the everyday. Ballard’s future is a fiction of the next five minutes, of the spinal landscape, of our bodies tracked and extended into utterly banal technology. Cokliss knows it too, and he shifts gear, treating us to canted tracking shots of fetishised car grilles. The sequence is hypnotic, lasts a few minutes, before Ballard, his chest thrust out, walks on by with the stride of a man on a mission. He stops at one particular vehicle, looks in the window, jaw set.

J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

At this juncture, let’s reflect: Ballard knows exactly where the camera is. He’s a natural. In this film, he’s an actor. He has presence, undeniably. Wearing his ‘drunk tank Haiti suit’ (as Sinclair describes it), he sees the woman inside the car and there’s a musky erotic charge as her coquettish gaze returns Ballard’s smouldering stare. There’s a close up: her hand is between her thighs and we recall the second of Ballard’s ‘advertiser’s announcements’ for Ambit magazine, with its coded message: ‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’. The merging of our bodies with technology; the manner in which even our most banal and everyday actions are super stylised in the face of an enveloping technological reality — it’s all here in this film. Importantly, the film is a continuum with Ballard’s earlier works, with the multimedia experiments outlined earlier.

LEFT: Gabrielle Drake’s hand in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).
RIGHT: detail from Ballard’s second Ambit ‘advertisement’ (1967).

[Harley Cokliss] was an American who was over here. He made a number of documentaries for the BBC. Then he went to the States. He made a thriller with Burt Reynolds and one or two other films. I don’t know what he’s doing now.

J.G. Ballard, quoted in Sinclair’s Crash (1999).

In an interview for Sinclair’s Crash book, Chris Petit is dismissive of Cokliss, saying ‘I was amazed that Harley had read Crash, because he’s not a big reader. Although he never particularly had a career, he was a major hustler’ (of course, Cokliss’s film is based on Atrocity, not Crash). Sinclair asks if Cokliss had ‘any status as a director’; Petit replies, ‘Not really, no.’ But a quick web check of Cokliss’s career reveals some interesting tidbits that aren’t in the Sinclair book. Yes, Cokliss was ‘on the verge of making it as an exploitation director’, as Petit terms it. But he was also studio second-unit director on The Empire Strikes Back, so his stocks must have been reasonably high at some point. And he’s forged a successful latter-day career as a director of children’s fantasy adventure. But most importantly, for the time frame under discussion, Harley Cokliss actually had form; he had the inclination. Just after ‘Crash!’, he made a documentary on Eduardo Paolozzi, an important figure in the Ballardian universe, and he filmed and interviewed Philip K Dick, too.

Admittedly, on a technical level some of the pacing in ‘Crash!’ seems a bit off, as in the moments after we’ve submitted to the dramatic tension of the rather effective sound design and the charged interplay between Ballard and the woman, only to be shoehorned into, well, something else: a clumsy jolt into Ballard’s voiceover and a scene of spaghetti junctions. But aside from that, conceptually, either Cokliss has done his homework (and, yes, read the books) and has absorbed Ballard’s texts thoroughly, or Ballard is the invisible guiding hand behind the camera. Either way the film deserves serious appraisal, rather than languishing as a footnote to a ‘failed exploitation’ career.

The film was based on my interest in the car crash — as it emerged through the pages of The Atrocity Exhibition. It was made in the early 70s. With Gabrielle Drake. She was quite a serious actress in her early days, but then she moved off into Crossroads or something. She was very sweet. I met her a few times on the set, as it were, chasing around multi-storey car parks in Watford.”

J.G. Ballard, quoted in Sinclair’s Crash (1999).

My thoughts are that Ballard is in control. It’s very much his film and he knows it. His voice takes command. His body language dominates. As I said before, here Ballard was testing riffs (‘routines’, as Sinclair calls them, after Burroughs) that would, in time, become familiar. Don’t treat this phase of Ballard’s career lightly: it contains the seeds of what we’ve come to know and understand as ‘Ballardian’. There are fragments of quotes that we now recognise from Ballard’s famous introduction to Crash, regarding Freud and the distinction between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality. His evocation of an ‘elaborately signalled landscape’ would later be recycled into the 1994 introduction to Concrete Island. Elsewhere in the film, Ballard spits out his by-now familiar assertion that if all human life on the planet was to vanish overnight, the psychology of the human race could be reconstituted from the technological detritus. (Yes, spits. As before, Ballard’s voiceover verges on disgust; there’s a rather large bee in his bonnet, it seems). The subtext is: to visiting aliens, stumbling across our discarded playthings, we’d be pegged as a band of proto-cyborgs.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (dir. Harley Cokliss, 1971): ‘the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car’.

ABOVE: Rosanna Arquette as Gabrielle in Crash (1996; dir. David Cronenberg).

Ballard’s voiceover tells us he’s ‘fascinated with the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car’ and you can see the fruits of that complexity, the literalisation of an obsession, in the character Gabrielle in the book Crash, and in Cronenberg’s Crash. This severely crippled character, her every movement a complex cryptogram of prosthetics, flesh and leather that isolate her body parts into a perverse geometric grid, was, according to Sinclair, named by Ballard after Gabrielle Drake, the woman in Cokliss’s film.

And it makes sense, especially as Ballard’s voiceover, that eulogy to the complexity of the woman/car, gives way once more to the meta-narration, the plummy Englishman, who verbalises another Atrocity text, this time the list-paragraph entitled ‘Elements of an Orgasm’. It’s found in Ballard’s 1969 piece, ‘The Summer Cannibals’, and it’s actually an inventory, a sex kit, a focus on a woman decommissioned, fragmented, magnified, then reordered by technology:

NARRATOR: Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door. The overlay of her knees with the metal door flank. The conjunction of the aluminized gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs. The crushing of her left breast by the door frame, and its self extension as she continued to rise. The movement of her left hand across the chromium trim of the right headlamp assembly. Her movements distorted in the projecting carapace of the bonnet. The jut and rake of her pubis as she sits in the driver’s seat. The soft pressure of her thighs against the rim of the steering wheel.

The sequence is overlaid with an ascending sound design, with staccato percussion fills, and there are some disorientating slow-motion close ups of knees, a breast, her hand on the gear stick. It’s phallic, yes, and obvious, but actually subtle in contrast to the remarkably similar, though overcranked scene in Mike Hodge’s Get Carter (released in the same year, 1971), in which Carter’s female rescuer changes gears with increasing speed and furtiveness while Michael Caine silently watches with smouldering lasciviousness in the passenger seat. Is Cokliss sending up Hodge’s macho anti-hero — Caine’s Carter? Is the parody an intentional counterpoint to Ballard’s more cerebral dissection of the cheap sex of the automobile?

Again Ballard is driving solo. He pulls into a car wash, gets out, stares unblinkingly as the vaginal parting of the brushes slowly come together to engulf the vehicle. Sinclair writes that Cokliss’s film subverts Cronenberg’s, that there are ‘disquieting parallels’, and nowhere is that more so than here (there are also ‘disquieting parallels’ with Weiss’s Atrocity film, but I’m saving that for another essay). In the Cronenberg there is of course a supercharged carwash scene, in which Vaughan fucks Ballard/Spader’s wife in the back seat while Spader/Ballard drives. Vaughan brutalises her, rearranging her body into death-driven accident postures: cracking her neck sideways, in weird angles, violently splaying her body across the seat as if she’s just been crushed by a car accident. She’s a living crash-test dummy and Vaughan literally fucks the life out of her.

ABOVE: The empty car-wash scene in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

ABOVE: Brutalised sex in Cronenberg’s car wash (Crash, 1996; dir. David Cronenberg).

But Cokliss (the ‘interestingly named Harley Cokliss’, as Sinclair calls him) sexually frustrates this earlier Ballard. The woman is of course glimpsed subliminally once again, but the focus is more on Ballard, who glares, fuming, wordless, until the brushes wipe the window and block him from view. He literally sees sex in the motor car, yet he’s frustratingly displaced from it, as his voiceover links the ‘relationship between sexuality and the motor car body’. Cut to a long, voyeuristic shot of Ms Drake taking a shower. Graphic matches pit her body parts with various automobile parts: the point of her nipple, for example, fading to reveal the tip of a manufacturer’s medallion. It’s a bit obvious but it’s nicely shot, and Gabrielle Drake writhes nakedly, and in the end it makes the point well.

Now we’re on the home stretch, as Ballard walks through a junkyard, admiring the car wrecks, the ominous sigils of consumerism representing what his voiceover tells us are our ‘arranged deaths’. As an aside, I like how Ballard, although jaded, disdainful, offers his own opinion as if it’s just that: his own. The point is never forceful (although the tone may appear to be): ‘Have we reached a point now in the 70s,’ his voiceover asks, ‘where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself…’

‘I think so myself.’

(Under all circumstances, no matter how taxing — in person, in interview, in this film — Ballard is never less than unfailingly polite and generous with his time. Truly, it’s the mark of the man.)

Then there’s that long oscillating tone again and it signals Gabrielle, bloody in the car, her head smashed on the steering wheel. Just as there was no sex in the car wash, Cokliss here denies us the car crash, the real money shot, which Cronenberg supplies in spades of course (oh, and in Spader, if only in dry humps). She opens the door, falls out, and the meta-narrative intones the third and final passage from Atrocity. As before, it’s taken from ‘The Summer Cannibals’ (or at least the first half is; the second half appears to have been written exclusively for the film).

‘Regaining consciousness,’ the meta-narrator tell us, ‘she stared at the blood on her legs. The heavy liquid pulled at her skirt. The bruise under her left breast reached behind her sternum, seizing like a hand at her heart.’

In shock, perhaps close to death, she turns and stares ‘at the waiting figure of the man she knew to be Dr Tallis’.

Ballard is Tallis. She turns to look at him, at JGB.

Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

This detail is a curious inclusion. The ‘T’ figure in Atrocity, variously known as Tallis, Traven, Talbot and so on, is a psychiatrist suffering a mental breakdown; the fractured narrative is delivered via his fractured psyche. But up until now the narration in this film has been divested of its context in the book. Ballard, and perhaps Cokliss, have simply chosen the most evocative passages to do with the car and the role of the car crash (and in that sense, it’s more of a prototype for the Cronenberg film than the Weiss film, as Sinclair correctly identifies). There’s been no mention of character names, no anchoring to a world outside the film. Why mention Tallis, then, at this late stage? This would make no sense to an audience — a mainstream BBC audience — unfamiliar with one of Ballard’s least commercial works.

Never mind. There’s more test crash footage and a sound design of tortuously slowed down metallic crunching to go with it, like a contact mic lowered into the depths of hell. Ballard offers a summation: ‘Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace’. Yes, we realise, they’re important because they show us how ‘everything becomes more stylised, cut off from ordinary feeling’. Of course, both Cronenberg and Weiss also make effective use of test-crash footage; the motif is an important key to Ballard’s work, and worthy of an essay in its own right (which I am working on; stay tuned).

Crash-test footage in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

There are an enormous number of multi-storey car parks in Watford, I discovered. It’s the Mecca of the multi-storey car park. And they’re quite ornate, some of them. They played a special role in The Atrocity Exhibition. They were iconic structures. I was interested in the gauge of psychoarchitectonics and its canted floors, as a depository for cars, seemed to let one into a new dimension. They obviously decided they had to beautify these structures. They covered them in strange trellises. It was a bizarre time.”

J.G. Ballard, quoted in Sinclair’s Crash (1999).

Finally Ballard’s car ascends up the ramp of that wonderful multi-storey car park, truly a work of art, in a sequence that’s again strangely similar to a parallel scene in Get Carter (which of course makes great use of its ‘grim up north’ Newcastle urbanism). But in Cokliss/Ballard, the car park becomes psychogeography, not merely ominous mise-en-scene like in the Carter/Caine, but a mapping of the affective behaviour of the structure — of the fiction of the world around us, this ‘enormous novel’, as Ballard calls it.

‘One of the most mysterious buildings ever built’… (‘Crash!’; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Ballard, in voiceover, asks us to:

Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?

Then at last he emerges onto the rooftop into daylight, out from the dank cavernous bowels, as he watches the woman down below, who walks away, while his voiceover intones a scenario of ‘modern technology reaching into our dreams and [changing] our whole way of looking at things: forcing us to contemplate its world instead of ourselves’.

And that’s it — the film’s over.

What to make of it? Well, can we say that Ballard was obsessed at this time? Losing himself in the mantra of repetition? Hypnotising himself with the ritual significance of automobile trauma? Exploring it from every conceivable angle in theatre, exhibitions, visual art, film? (In anything but straight writing, it seemed, at least between Atrocity and Crash.) And isn’t it often the case that such artists — or mediators between worlds, if you like — lose themselves in the glare and (excuse the cliché) fly far too close to the sun? As Sinclair asks in the Crash book, regarding the uncanny similarities between the death of Princess Di and Ballard’s work: ‘Had he activated a demonic psychopathology that could only be appeased by regular sacrifices?’

For incantations of this kind, repeated often enough, sometimes bring something back with them when the voyager, the cosmonaut of inner space, re-enters the world. There are ruptures in space-time. Matter collides and there is fallout, like a Sumerian demon woken from the dead and hungry for souls.

Refer back to the film, where Ballard tells us that:

The car crash is the most dramatic event in most people’s lives, apart from their own deaths, and in many cases the two will coincide. Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? … Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality?”

LEFT: J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

And so it happened that shortly after the publication of the book, Crash, in 1973 — two years after the Cokliss film — James Graham Ballard rolled his Ford Zephyr on a divided motorway after a blow out forced the vehicle into oncoming traffic. The car landed upside down with petrol leaking everywhere and Ballard was trapped: the roof had jammed down and the doors wouldn’t budge. Panicked and frozen, with the apocalyptic scent of fuel filling his nostrils, the shouts of ‘Petrol! Petrol!’ from onlookers filling his ears, and the realisation that the car could explode any second swamping his mind, he managed to reach deep within himself, eventually pulling body and mind together to somehow force down a window and escape before he was engulfed in the heat-death of full-tilt autogeddon.

POSTSCRIPT: In a neat Ballardian trick that moment would be immortalised in Cronenberg’s Crash, where the director, digging deep into JGB’s own real-life mythology, fashioned a scene in which the film’s Ballard, played by James Spader, suffered that same scenario and that same subsequent swerve into oncoming traffic. Except this time Holly Hunter playing Helen Remington slammed into James Spader/’James Ballard’. Hunter/Remington’s husband was killed, and Ballard/Spader took his place, and the cycle began again. For J.G. Ballard’s sins we were given a new crash (a new ‘Crash’), a new ‘Ballard’, a new director, a new film, and a reiteration of circular time, as Ballard and his ghastly obsession became reborn in the heat-death of repetition. As Sinclair says: ‘The same crashes happen over and over as new victims are initiated into the vision.’

Simon Sellars, 2007.

APPENDIX
+ Crash! Voiceover Transcription (1971)

REFERENCES
+ Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).
—————- Crash (1973).

+ Ford, Simon. ‘A Psychopathic Hymn: J.G. Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ Exhibition of 1970′ (2005). /seconds magazine.

+ Juno, Andrea & Vale. ‘J.G. Ballard: Interview by A. Juno and Vale’. RE/Search 8/9: J.G. Ballard (1984). In which Ballard relates the circumstances of his car crash, alongside accompanying photos of his ruined car.

+ Sinclair, Iain. Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’ (BFI Modern Classics; 1999).

MORE INFO
+ Harley Cokeliss Filmography

The princess, as a largely self-invented figure, is a gift to fiction, not least because the reasons she might have been killed are finally less arresting than speculation on her untimely death: the swansong of the last century and a black fairytale for the surveillance age, captured in those final smeared security-camera pictures of her leaving the Ritz, reduced in that moment to a walk-on extra in her own unfolding tragedy.

Much of this is material forecast by JG Ballard’s autopsies on celebrity and desire, The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash. McNamee moves through a similar world of airports and underpasses, alert to emerging technologies, the cadences of modernism and to the terminology of stalking, before arriving at that pathological space where crash and violent death become the fulfilment of collective fantasy, satisfying the need for sacrifice on the altar of celebrity.”

[thanks, Tim]

Jeannette Baxter, organiser of this weekend’s J.G. Ballard Conference at the University of East Anglia, delivers a challenging examination of Surrealist influences in Ballard’s Running Wild for Issue 5 of the online journal, Papers of Surrealism.

‘The Surrealist Fait-Divers: Uncovering Violent Histories in J. G. Ballard’s Running Wild’: Abstract

In this paper I read J.G. Ballard’s illustrated novella, Running Wild (1984), as a subversive example of the surrealist fait divers. One of the most ethically challenging fragments in Ballard’s often controversial oeuvre, this modified detective fiction presents the reader with a catalogue of contemporary atrocities – parricide, political assassination and terrorism, acts of random violence – and challenges us, the readers, to get our hands dirty. I explore how Ballard negotiates the cultural and historical consequences of global capitalism in Running Wild, and how he tests, through fiction, the controversial theory that moral and social transgressions are legitimate correctives to psychological and social inertia. In this context, Ballard incorporates a variety of surrealist texts (paintings, photographs, collages) into his fait divers, I suggest, in order to open up moments of critical and ethical reflection, and to provoke the reader into a confrontation with the deviant logics and violent psychopathologies which operate below the polite surface of contemporary history and culture.

[ Thanks, Gwyn ]

——————————————————————————————————-

+ AUTOEROTIC

The Guardian newspaper, picking up on our breaking news about the forthcoming Ballard World attraction, says this:

A new theme park – Dickens World – is to open in England. Not to be outdone, the sardonic fansite, www.ballardian.com, announces “Ballard World”. It will, we are told, open in 2008 … the site reports, with the straightest of faces … And, down the line, there’s “Burroughs World”, with rumpus rooms where customers can hang out (literally) and experience the novel pleasures of autoerotic asphyxiation, before joining the mugwumps in the slime pool.

Hmmm. Even though this is ostensibly a Ballard site, I must say Burroughs World sounds like the most fun.

——————————————————————————————————-

+ BALLARD CONCORDANCE

The indefatigable Mike Bonsall, the man behind the generative Another Atrocity mash up on this site, has been at it again. Mike, who teaches new technologies at Sheffield Hallam University, is ‘exploring the use of corpus linguistics analysis on Ballard’s uniquely resonant use of language’.

For his latest project, which takes a scalpel to Ballard’s Complete Short Stories volumes, he tells us:

“I’ve made a concordance of (nearly) all of JGB’s short works. Perhaps the best way to understand it is to have a play with it (you can for example see the whole of the wordlist in the left panel in one go by clicking ‘show undivided list’). Example of use; in the short works JGB mentions Ernst 12 times, and his ‘Garden Airplane Traps’ is mentioned in the shorts; Notes Towards…, Atrocity Exhibition and The Assassination Weapon.

I had to sacrifice second-hand copies of the short stories and AE to the scalpel, the scanner, the OCR and the text-editor. About two thousand pages in all, a real labour of love. I’ve held back from making the full text visible as I think JGB deserves every penny of his royalties and it would be an obvious breach of his copyright – though I think the concordance itself is fair use.

I’m now working on the novels – Enjoy!”

Not content with that, Mike also reports that he’s ‘been immersed in my latest project on Ballardian psychogeography. This is a mash-up of all the places JG mentions in the complete short works, displayed on a GoogleMap. I’ve only done A to C so far but you can already see the man’s imagination is global.’

Finally, Mr Bonsall will be delivering a paper at the JGB Conference, which explores the ‘obsessions and archetypes that echo through Ballard’s work’ deriving from Ballard’s time as assistant editor at the journal Chemistry and Industry, from 1958-64, a period when Ballard was ‘working on his first novels, a number of short stories and a series of collages he called ‘Project for a New Novel’, partly inspired by the typography of his sister journal Chemical & Engineering News.’

[ via the JGB Mailing list ]

——————————————————————————————————-

+ SAINT PETIT BALLARD

Still from Radio On (1980; dir. Chris Petit).

Chris Petit reviews Tony Saint’s book, The Asbo Show, with ‘obligatory Ballard references’:

The result … remains an interesting mix: of Ballard’s global suburbia, with its interzones watched by security cameras; a dash of Buñuel, in its gleeful loathing of the bourgeoisie; and something more parochial and English, in its understanding of humour as a reactionary force.

[ thanks, Ben ]

As a filmmaker and novelist, of course, Petit has never been backward about the influence of Ballard on his own work; his Robinson remains the best book JGB never wrote. And Petit’s film, Radio On, has at last been given a DVD release; set among England’s motorways and service stations, you just know it will be Ballardian – and rather good, as well. See Lyle Hopwood’s excellent, evocative review of the DVD.

——————————————————————————————————-

+ SELF-HEALING HOUSE STRAIGHT OUT OF VERMILION SANDS

Researchers are working towards building a ‘self healing’ house that repairs itself during an earthquake. According to the research team, the house is on the lines of the story ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ by British writer J.G. Ballard, where the author describes a psychotropic house that changes its shape, protects itself and even heals itself, reports Livescience.

The house walls are made of nano polymer particles. When squeezed under pressure during an earthquake, the nano polymer particles flow into cracks and harden to form a solid material. This apart, the walls also boast of unique load bearing steel frames and contain wireless, battery less sensors and RFID tags that help collect data about stresses and vibration, temperature and humidity over time.

NMI chief executive Professor Terry Wilkins said: “What we’re trying to achieve here is very exciting; we’re looking to use polymers in much tougher situations than ever before on a larger scale. If there are any problems, the intelligent sensor network will alert residents straightaway so they have time to escape”.”

[ via Yahoo News India ]

Ballardiana, Part 1
Via Podcast Pickle, I found a rendition of ‘The Ballad of J.G. Ballard’, Kevin Patrick Mahoney’s ‘iconoclastic homage to the great author’:

Oh Jim,
We can’t get enough of him
In Empire of the Sun
He was on the run
Captured by the Japanese
For far more than a year and a day.

Oh Jim,
Please tell me your secret:
How did you become the pet
Of so many women?
Was it their kindness?
Or just sheer blindness?

Oh Jim,
Please invite me to your next bash.
We could have a car crash
Together. (I’ve always seen the erotic potential of that).

Jim,
Please let me visit your Concrete Island
It’s much better than Thailand
At this time of year.
Please let me be the one
To share your Empire of the Sun.”

—————————————————————————-
Kevin Patrick Mahoney, ‘The Ballad of J.G. Ballard’.
—————————————————————————-

Cheeky bugger… Here’s the audio version, and here’s the ‘video’ version with suitably dodgy, compressed graphics.

Mahoney’s half pisstake/half tribute highlights the cliches of Ballard’s public image, the hypercompressed Shanghai-Shepperton-Empire-Crash timeline perpetuated by the media in every single JGB profile, a profile that, as I’ve argued before, erects a serious barrier to a deeper understanding of the man’s work. But Mahoney’s good for mild laughs, too: the delivery puts me in mind of the sketch in (the largely mediocre) Little Britain where Ray McCooney is loath to divulge the secret of his tomato soup to his guests.

Ballardiana, Part 2
Playing a straighter bat, Rick McGrath reports that in 1988, “Canada’s national radio corporation broadcast a series of 30-minute radio dramas, based on seven short stories of JG Ballard, for its long-running program, “The Vanishing Point”. The series was produced by Bill Lane in the CBC’s Toronto studios. … Lauded at the time, these forgotten gems explore the dramatic aspects of JGB’s early short stories within an auditory medium.”

Now, the indefatigable Rick has encoded all seven into mp3 format: ‘A Question of Re-entry’, ‘The Dead Astronaut’, ‘The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D’, ‘Low Flying Aircraft’, ‘News From The Sun’, ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ and ‘Escapement’.

These are perfect for whacking into the iPod and cruising your local shopping mall, airport terminal, satellite array, local high street, or motorway underpass (or prisoner-of-war internment camp, Mr Mahoney) for true heightened consciousness and unpeeling of the layers of deep time buried under the surface. There’s some interesting, dark-ambient sound design there, too. I still reckon it would be interesting to hear a British voice utter Ballard’s dialogue, not because I’m an Anglophile, but for reasons I’ve already banged on about elsewhere: there’s a statement buried somewhere that Ballard’s making about Britain, however obliquely. It’s a bit like hearing Barry Nelson, the first man to play James Bond, threaten Peter Lorre’s Le Chiffre in his American voice. But to be fair, as Ballard’s career progressed, his characters and situations became more and more ‘placeless’, flattened cyphers able to be slotted into Western society interchangeably. Still, I reckon Chris Petit would argue the toss on this one, but that entire argument is for another post…

Ballardiana, Part 3
Finally, I previously posted about ‘Shepperton’s Oracle’, the film that French filmmaker Thomas Cazals was making about Ballard, and about Shepperton. It sounded a hybrid doco/faction type deal, but from this latest news appears to be mostly fiction/faction. It sounds intriguing, and should be online around February.

The Amis/Self/Sinclair/Petit forward line is the standard attack — Ballard’s regular cheer squad, no less (missing only Alex Garland) — but personally I’d like to see these TV homages stretch out a bit more. Why not Ballard discussed by domantrices, RAF pilots, mechanics, architects, doctors, rugger players with stevedore arms, football hooligans, shopping mall general managers?

In any case, Ballard’s South Bank appearance was a bit of a surprise to long-time fans. In 1999, JGB was quoted in the Guardian as follows:

Most television is remarkably good, bearing in mind that it is a popular entertainment medium, but Melvyn Bragg poses a problem of his own making. The South Bank Show is a classic example of dumbing down: most television trivialises the already trivial, but the South Bank Show trivialises the serious, which is far more dangerous”.

To which Melvyn Bragg replied:

JG Ballard says that “The South Bank Show trivialises the serious”. I find this snobbish, offensive and depressing, particularly as I admire Ballard’s work and thought better of him. It’s also wrong. I think that a programme on UB40 is every bit as serious as a programme on Harold Pinter. We did both last season and neither was trivial.

If he has not seen them I would be happy to send him tapes of those two programmes, and from the same season, the programmes on Tony Harrison, John Tomlinson, Anish Kapoor, Lucy Gannon and the new South African choreographers. I am genuinely interested to know if he can tell me how any of those programmes fit his lazy smear. In Tony Harrison, for instance, there was a very long and detailed interview with the poet about his work: he read a great number of his poems and his verse film was also examined. Unless JG Ballard can prove his point, his comment stands as no more than a sad and sour little swipe”.

I’ve never liked UB40, myself…

Iain Sinclair at the Barbican. Photo: Tim Chapman, © 2006.

Iain Sinclair has been acclaimed as one of Britain’s most visionary writers and as an incomparable prose stylist. His early writing, notably Lud Heat (1975) and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), was rooted in his adopted home of East London. It did much to popularise ideas of psychogeography in Britain, and inspired such works as Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor and Alan Moore’s From Hell. His non-fiction Lights Out for the Territories (1997), based around a series of walks through some darker corners of London life and history, brought his vision to a wider audience.

I met Sinclair in the Barbican, the City of London Corporation’s modernist complex of high-class municipal housing and cultural facilities, which hosted the London Orbital theatrical event in October 2002. On the empty, third-floor Sculpture Court, we discussed JG Ballard and more, surrounded by high rises and interrupted only by the sounds of aircraft flying to and from London’s terrorised airports.

– Tim Chapman

NOTE: Video stills of Ballard are taken from the short film Crash! (1971), directed by Harley Cokliss, filmed among the multistorey carparks of Watford and referenced by Sinclair in the BFI book.

Tim Chapman is a writer and journalist based in Halifax, Yorkshire. See www.2ubh.com for more.

When did you first start reading Ballard?

In the 1960s. I think the first book I read was The Terminal Beach, and I kept picking up on him through things like New Worlds magazine. I was a bit at arm’s length at that time — I was very involved with the American Beat writers, and I saw Ballard in the lineage of William Burroughs. The whole notion of English suburbia, Shepperton, was so strange to my experience that I didn’t really engage that closely with it but I admired him very much as a pared-down stylist.

It was probably with The Atrocity Exhibition that I really recognised him as an English master. I think that’s still the book that affects me most — its use of this American material that I was interested in, and the way it puts it under such incredible pressure to achieve this astonishing paranoiac poetic, is still an example to us all.

Would you say he’s been an influence on your own writing?

Not really. I think my own writing is at absolutely the opposite extreme from Ballard’s. It’s singularly failed to be pared down and accurate and precise in physical details as his is, where you always know exactly what’s going on. My writing tends to be much baggier with more clauses tacked on. It’s more related to the kind of writing that his early partner Michael Moorcock was doing.

I started out as a film-maker in the 60s and came back to it much later on in the late 80s and 90s, getting together to make films with Chris Petit. At that time, I really came back strongly to Ballard and I think he was an influence more on the film-making than the writing. Chris himself was clearly and directly influenced by Ballard. His book Robinson is like an aftershock based on Crash. He made a film with Ballard for The Moving Picture Show at that time. By the time we were making films together, Ballard was one of the people we looked to.

I think then when I got to do a short book for the BFI on Crash, my interest was more in Ballard than in Cronenberg. Having met him, we became friendly. My book London Orbital was one that interested him because it was dealing with borderlands, liminal spaces, the motorway corridor, and all the things he’s written about for years. At that point, he really was a direct influence — not in the style of how I write, but more in the way that his vision of England was something that I was extremely drawn to.

You said in the acknowledgements to the BFI book that it was proposed at the strategic moment when you wanted an excuse to meet Ballard.

Exactly. I thought he’d really got it right. It never was science fiction, it was hyper-sharp reportage. His reality of the 60s had now come into place in the English landscape. That kind of world he’s endlessly talked about — retail parks and marinas and executive homes, and this list that pours out of him on ticker tape — all of that was now the landscape of England. I think we are a motorway culture, and he was the prophet of that. I really did want an excuse, if that was the word, to meet him and talk to him. Of course, when you do talk to him, what you get is almost exactly what you know from having read the books and the previous interviews. He’s quite a guarded person, quite contained and very much a solitary voyager. He’s lived in this time capsule and seen everything, and is now in his later career becoming a kind of stoic comedian. I think he’s getting quite funny in the last books — the satire is beginning to bite.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

I’d been reading your books for a while when the BFI book came out, and thought it wasn’t an obvious combination.

Funnily enough, the first actual physical connection was in a film from Mary Harron, who’s now a well-known Hollywood film-maker. She was working for the BBC Late Show and she was commissioned to make a film about Docklands and Canary Wharf as it was being built. I was invited to be one of the voices with Ballard. As the author of High-Rise, he was seen to be prophetic of this landscape, and he was saying that this is a future that he quite looks forward to. He liked the idea of Docklands. I was being quite apocalyptic and gloomy about it, looking at it from a more social and political perspective, and so curiously we were placed side by side in this now obscure and lost film. As the years went on, probably I’ve shifted more to his position.

Harron filmed American Psycho with Christian Bale, who was young Jim in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

Yes, she’s an interesting woman. The interesting thing about it was most of these films for the Late Show were made in about two days. But she was tough enough that she had a proper length of time to do this. She was out in this landscape filming for weeks at a time, and persuading Ballard to appear, which is not necessarily always easy either.

I dug out a review of the BFI book by John Gray at the London School of Economics, where he said “the juxtaposition of JG Ballard and Iain Sinclair is far from obvious. Their views on the political and cultural scene from which they are equally estranged are quite different, even opposed”.

I don’t know that they are opposed. Maybe it would have seemed like that at that time, but I think now they would be seen to be quite similar in some ways. I think they’re quite interesting to juxtapose because he’s stayed out in Shepperton since the 1960s and he’s written essentially the same coded arrangements — every single book is a repetition, an extension of the same riff — in the same way that I’ve been in Hackney in the inner city since the 1960s and have also essentially written the same paradigms over and over. Except I kind of felt I’d reached a dead end — the city centre was becoming so heritaged and corrupted, I thought the interesting move was out to the margin, to the motorway, to the M25. As soon as that happened, it’s invading his territory. I certainly felt homage had to be paid. I was walking around the M25 and it was very necessary to stop off at Shepperton and see him, to visit this place of reservoirs and aircraft and future terror.

What was the genesis of the London Orbital project?

I felt quite strongly that with the kind of complicated dense fictions that I’d been writing, there was no place for them in the market. Lights Out for the Territory, which was centred on walks and explorations within London, had been much more successful. I needed to do another book which appeared to be a documentary but went off in other directions. One day when I was out walking up the River Lea to the point where it hit the M25 at Waltham Abbey, I thought this is it. This is the future England. London itself, by being completely enclosed in a motorway, has become a kind of concrete island. The obvious space to explore is this, with this pilgrim journey. It’s a book you can describe in a single sentence — a walk around the M25 — so everything clicked into place. Once I’d taken that decision, the book was there waiting to be written.

The Seer of Shepperton: “I was interested in the gauge of psychoarchitectonics” (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Was Ballard always part of that plan?

Yeah. I thought the main figures I could see emerging from this landscape were Bram Stoker to the east, because of Carfax Abbey and Purfleet which is the point where the M25 crosses the Thames with the QEII bridge; HG Wells’ War of the Worlds out on the other side in Woking in Surrey, where the Martian invasion takes place; and Ballard himself at Shepperton. That was always my triangulation of the three energy points, the three great metaphors that described that topography. Ballard in a sense is reprising and working over Wells, in this sense of terrorism and viral invasion. In War of the Worlds, the invaders come in through Shepperton — they actually cross the river at that point — and the river turns into this red weed which is very much like the atmosphere of The Drought.

Wells is often seen as primarily a science fiction writer, but he did a lot of political and social comment which is often overlooked.

Ballard’s politics are quite curious. I don’t know whether you could call him conservative, with a small ‘c’, because he celebrates the nature of the bourgeois in its exile: the people that live in these kinds of flats that surround us now, who are anonymous and separated from the mob. Whereas his early partner, Michael Moorcock, said he was a man of the urban mob, who celebrates the crowds and smells of cafes and markets and all of that stuff, which is totally alien to Ballard. He’d like to chuck away all the old buildings, pull them down, get rid of all that heavy 19th-century furniture and have everything straight out of an Ikea catalogue. In that sense, I think there’s something conservative, but in other senses there’s something incredibly anarchic and furious about what he does, which doesn’t fit with any contemporary sense of politics. He doesn’t belong, he’s completely an outsider, although when you meet him he appears to be quite an Establishment person. He’s got a very fruity voice and genial persona, and would fit into the colonial society in which he grew up.

He did declare in the late 70s and 80s that he was a great admirer of Mrs Thatcher, but whether that was the politics or the charisma of it…

I think maybe the sort of psychosexual politics of Thatcher, in the same way that John Gray was a member of the Thatcher thinktanks. He was a significant Thatcher admirer and advocate at that period, but had a complete change of heart and is now violently opposed to American policy and all these things she was supportive of in the ’80s. He’s rather embarrassed about it. There’s interesting things happening there politically.

Ballard said a few years ago that he’s getting more left-wing as he gets older.

It’s quite interesting, because usually it’s the other way around. Someone like Kingsley Amis, who was an early supporter of Ballard, supposedly started off as quite socialist but gradually moved to extreme right to become this kind of Blimpish drunk at the end of his career. His feeling about Ballard’s writing also shifts with the years to become much more uncomfortable about where it’s going, as he’s obviously not the science fiction writer that Amis thought he was at the beginning.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

Could you talk about the London Orbital event here at the Barbican?

London Orbital was never just a book. It was also a TV film made with Chris Petit. The fact of it being a film meant that it couldn’t follow the procedures of walking, which is what I’d done in the book. The whole point was to walk the motorway spaces, and thereby to suck out information slowly and gradually from the ground. Chris is famous as a maker of road movies, and he couldn’t cope with filming the walking aspect because by the time he’d set up his camera the walkers had gone over the horizon. He shifted it all into the car. Once you were in the car, you were much closer to entering a Ballardian space. We accumulated all this road footage. Chris, in the end, discovered the only way to do it was never to switch the camera off. The only way to make sense of the road was to keep the camera running right the way round the whole thing.

It became obvious that maybe the meeting place between the book and the film would be to do a theatre event here at the Barbican, at which a number of people who appeared in the book would appear as themselves. There would be music, there would be three screens for which Chris went out and shot new footage of continual M25 progression. Ballard was supposed to appear here as the star of the show. He agreed to do that, which was surprising. We were just going to have a little discussion, a conversation, he wouldn’t have to read or do anything else. But on the day the phone rang and he said he wasn’t feeling well and wasn’t going to come. I wasn’t altogether surprised because he really doesn’t like doing these things very much.

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

Excerpted from ‘What I Believe’ by J.G. Ballard, first published in Interzone #8, 1984

What happened was we made a photographic life-size cut-out of Ballard — there’d been a piece in one of the Sunday newspapers about us and we just blew up that photograph. Chris and I recited alternately this Ballardian screed, ‘What I Believe’, which I think is a terrific take on Ballard. In a sense, his presence was there perfectly. It was not actually necessary to have him physically, and of course he appeared in the London Orbital film as well. At the end of the film there’s this nice moment where he’s saying “Iain, I want you to go out and blow up the Bentall Centre, I want you to destroy Bluewater“, which has now become the subject of his new book Kingdom Come. It’s also been invoked by the present terror alerts at Heathrow Airport which seem to stem in part from places like High Wycombe which is exactly in this Ballardian Thames corridor.

How was the event received?

It wasn’t really received at all — it was an invisible event. As far as I know, practically no one wrote about it. Those that did were kind of uncomfortable because they liked the music, or certain aspects of the music, but didn’t like other stuff, so it was one of those invisible events. The interesting thing was the Barbican was expecting to sell 400 or 500 seats, which is what they’d allowed for, and it completely sold out. It took 2000 seats.

One of the stranger things was within it: there was a whole thing about Essex criminals who were involved in ecstasy and drug wars and Range Rover murders. Some of these figures were in the audience and took a deep objection to the stuff I was reading out about them, and tried to get round the back to kill me. There was a kind of interesting subtext of drama going on. It was almost a Ballardian event in which he was pulling the strings without being there at all. It was actually quite funny.

There’s going to be a repeat of this event here for a book called London: City of Disappearances, for which Ballard has contributed a piece about the Westway. I’ll certainly try and go out and interview him on film, and have a film to show rather than expect him to turn up this time.

The Barbican. Photo: Tim Chapman.

It was said at the time that Ballard had never actually been to the Barbican before.

He said that, which was very surprising, but in a sense he doesn’t need to because it’s almost like his mental landscape. He did say to me he’d never really been to the East End of London — he had no real interest or desire in seeing it. He’d done a car trip once to go and have a look at the Millennium Dome but he never got out of the car — just drove past it and went back again to Shepperton.

It’s probably the best way to see it.

It probably is, but this is the absolute opposite of what I feel. Always, the way is that you walk. You start from wherever you are and you walk slowly through the city, and your narrative is revealed. He just doesn’t feel the need to work in that way at all. He fillets from magazines, watches random TV, and looks at technical reports, scientific journals, and just cuts up and accumulates this material. In the 60s, he was using it fairly straight in a fragmented way, and now it’s become finessed into something that’s almost like a standard literary novel, but once you look below the surface it’s something else.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

Walking and driving is something you riff on in Dining on Stones: pods versus peds.

I had this insight when I was walking down the A13 when I walked into this Travelodge. I was amazed to see that what I thought was this food dispenser giving you pies was actually filled with books. I looked at this and thought god, all of these writers are either walking writers or driving writers. Most people fit into one or the other of these categories. Moorcock I think would be very much a walking writer, even though his foot has gone now and he’s in a wheelchair. His novels are walking novels, and he never did learn to drive. Whereas Ballard, you can’t really see him getting out of the car. Everything is there in this car journey between Shepperton and West London, where he comes in on a regular basis. I thought most people could be put one way or the other.

With Ballard, it’s not so much driving I’d associate with him as flying — aeroplanes, low-flying aircraft.

There’s a lot of flying — he was a pilot. I think he does have a god’s-eye view of things, he’s able to be right up there. You can see him in this building here, the man on the balcony. He’s very much that, sometimes with a camera. There’s a photograph I used in the BFI book with the woman on the balcony, by Helmut Newton who he admires. It’s looking from inside a flat out to the woman who’s maybe naked from behind on the balcony, and looking down into the street. I thought that foreground-middleground-distance is exactly the Ballardian perspective, which is reprised in the Cronenberg film of Crash, quite near the beginning. That’s why I think he was very happy to see the film move to Canada, to Toronto. That was fine, because to him it doesn’t have to be specific to London, whereas the way that Chris Petit and I think about it is: it’s very much a London book, about the Heathrow gas stations and the backroads between Shepperton and Heathrow. He doesn’t need that.

Since the BFI book, most of your work seems to have been stuffed full of Ballard references. As you say in Dining on Stones: “When in doubt, quote Ballard.”

Yeah — he’s so sharp. I’ve been reading back through the interviews in the Re/Search book, and every little aphorism that was very savage and strange at that moment seems incredibly pertinent to this one. Once I was writing about the edges of London, the A13 corridor, down there his voice is playing in your ear the whole time as you have the queues of low-flying aircraft and the reservoirs, and the idea that you could be blown out of the sky or fly straight into a towerblock at any moment. All of that is his world. And the death of Diana — all the journalists rung him up because it was exactly the kind of thing he’d always been describing or thinking about in terms of James Dean or Jayne Mansfield.

You said in the film of London Orbital that he is an icon now, with his own credo. Is it just the fact that he’s been around so long?

I think it’s partly that. It’s quite interesting that in the 60s he’s very much a marginal figure. He’s got a cult following but he doesn’t really register in the mainstream apart from with one or two writers who support him very strongly. In the ’70s, he’s actually become a kind of pariah — Cape, who were publishing Crash, were wearing gloves to do it. Then everything changes with Empire of the Sun — it’s the moment he becomes supremely visible. There’s a Spielberg version of Ballard, which would have been unthinkable.

Then the general middlebrow consensus swerves round and thinks of him as a different kind of writer to what he actually is. He’s seen as a great guru of the West, but the people who are doing that very rarely refer back to the earlier books. They go back maybe to Crash, because they know it’s a film, and they think that’s shocking, but Crash is only a version of what’s in The Atrocity Exhibition which is very rarely referred to, or any of those earlier pieces.

I think he’s been reinvented — not by himself, because he’s carried on doing what he’s always done — but by the literary consensus who have reinvented him and think of him as being something really that he isn’t: this sort of genial but provocative figure sitting out there writing about the Metro Centre and shopping malls and stuff. I can see the reviews even now. But the real early energy and madness is still not appreciated.

James Graham Ballard: “…transcending death, charming motorways, integrating
with birds, enlisting the confidences of madmen” (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss)

I think the problem is it’s almost too easy to reduce him to a set of icons — the car crash, the concrete flyover.

That is obviously what’s happened. You see him constantly quoted or brought into catalogues at the Tate Modern and glossy magazines. He’s the first name you think of to underwrite these sorts of things. There was an event at the Serpentine a couple of weeks back with Rem Koolhaas, the architect, doing a 24-hour interview with different people. I was one of the people there. I said I assume you’ve got JG Ballard. He said well, he wouldn’t come here, but he was there as a presence on tape. And yet he’s not really interested in the city, there’s this polemic on the city but the city doesn’t mean anything to him. I don’t think he could describe it, he hardly knows the city. Maybe he comes in to see his publishers or have a meal or go to the Tate, but really it’s of no importance to him and his mental universe.

It’s interesting you mention Koolhaas. At the architecture exhibition here at the Barbican, Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture [1956-2006], there’s an installation of a theoretical work by Koolhaas, Exodus [1972], which is about placing a great strip of ultra-luxury accommodation across London so it divides it in two, and seeing what’ll happen. I thought that’s an unwritten Ballard story.

Absolutely. While other writers were just not thinking about those kinds of things, he was. He didn’t discriminate, he didn’t have this snobbery of being a literary writer. He felt that there were things he could take from the most debased forms of public culture. He would come out and say I think everyone should watch television for eight hours a day in random fashion — there’s no good or bad, you just jump about and let it flow over you, with your glass of whisky. It just meshes together and creates its own strange poetic. Nobody else was saying that at that time. Nobody else liked roads, nobody else liked petrol stations, apart from a few nouveau-pop artists in America. So he’s gone from a position of being right out there and advocating hateful stuff and disliking Ralph Nader and not being politically correct and not being green or ecologically sound, and suddenly here he is as a nice old man.

It’s rather like what happened with Kafka, who was very much a fringe character in his lifetime but later became this iconic figure with his own adjective.

Obviously Ballard has his own adjective in the same way, so he’s very similar to Kafka. Except Kafka was probably even more extreme and much more invisible than Ballard. I mean, Ballard has been there for a very long time in various ways. The interesting thing is that by doing exactly the same things all the time, his status and position have shifted significantly. He’s gone from one extreme to the other. Whereas — and I keep coming back to Moorcock — I think Moorcock was a lot more populist in the 60s, but because his books now are large and unwieldy and complex they’re much less read now than Ballard. They’ve drifted off somewhere where the fans are following him but the general readership just don’t acknowledge him any more. That’s quite a curious thing.

As you say, Ballard’s been doing the same thing all along. Maybe it’s just taken this long for the rest of the world to catch up?

He has done the same thing, but the mode in which it’s done has shifted from something that’s manufactured or tooled to fit in magazines where there was a market for these short sharp pieces, to something that now sits and pretends to be a mainstream literary novel. It comes out looking like a literary novel — Cocaine Nights has almost the form of an Agatha Christie novel, it’s comfortable — except that they’re doing stranger things. There’s a much darker kick in it.

Cocaine Nights was promoted as summer beach reading.

Exactly, which is good too. And things like Alex Garland’s The Beach clearly derive from Ballard. There is a line now from Ballard through Martin Amis and Will Self and Alex Garland – young, hip writers who have taken their tricks from Ballard. And yet I don’t think any of them have what he had to start with.

Garland also scripted the British zombie movie 28 Days Later — he said that large parts of that were a deliberate homage to Ballard. Alan Warner’s another one.

Sure. He’s one of the generators of this new kind of literature.

Ballard’s also doing a lot of work with newspaper columns and book reviews. In Landor’s Tower, you have a mock book review for one of your characters which you attribute to Ballard.

Right! I’d forgotten that.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

“In the canted floors of these multistorey carparks, rephotographed from surveillance tapes…”

Ah yes. That was written in parallel with making a film called Asylum. In the same way the London Orbital book and film were going on together, this film of Asylum had a very strongly Ballardian presence without Ballard being in it, although Moorcock was in it. It finishes up in the Heathrow motorway corridor with planes flying low with a desperate sense of threat — also the shimmering landscapes of those reservoirs and all of that. So, in a sense, by physically invading this territory to make this film my mind was totally set on Ballard. When I was writing the book at the same time, which criss-crosses its inspiration from the film, obviously Ballard was in mind and I came up with this riff in homage to him.

Did you find he was an easy writer to pastiche?

He’s a very easy writer to pastiche badly. I think he’s there with someone like Graham Greene as a stylist. There used to be a New Statesman competition to parody Greene’s style, and Greene came second when he entered.

You mentioned The Atrocity Exhibition as one of the most important books for you. In the BFI book you mention the film of that which was then a work in progress.

Has that finished now?

It has. It’s out on DVD.

I look forward to seeing that. I saw it at the ICA or somewhere as a work in progress. It struck me as probably the most Ballardian of the various films. It worked on his own terms and is therefore likely to be the least popular. I saw Empire of the Sun again the other day, and it’s sort of Spielberg more than Ballard though it’s reasonably close to the book. The Cronenberg is interesting but it’s not remotely in the spirit or the time of the book. But The Atrocity Exhibition I thought was pretty fair.

Simon interviewed the director, Jonathan Weiss. He seems quite an angry man — angry about the film’s mention in the BFI book, and about various things you’d written.

Well, I don’t know. When I saw it, it was certainly a work in progress. It wasn’t finished, and it was announced as such.

You did say in the BFI book that from what you’d seen you thought it was almost too faithful to the book.

I think there was a sense of that. It’s a bit inverted commas, a bit in aspic. They’re treating these literary classics from another era as if they were heritage Dickens. Probably that’s a mistake — you’ve got to really get down and hack it to pieces and find something that really works in film terms, something that honours the spirit of the original book. You can’t just make the film of the book — it doesn’t work.

One thing I find interesting about how you write and how Ballard writes is the way identity is used in a fictional context: particularly in your earlier novels, and with Ballard in Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women and, in a very different way, Crash.

None of them are him, and none of them are me. Crash is interesting because there’s this extreme character and he gives him his own name. It’s not him but it represents some avatar of him. When I met Claire Walsh, who he calls his girlfriend, he said here’s Claire, she’s the woman in Crash. It’s quite hard to move beyond that, it’s just a shocking idea. And yet it doesn’t actually mean this is the woman in Crash or this is JG Ballard. It’s just a device, a kind of honest device in a way, and also a convenience. That’s really what I’ve done. When you’re writing fiction, you’re creating a kind of theatre of the world and you push some element of yourself that’s convenient into it.

How much do you distinguish between your books which are sold as fiction and the ones that are sold as documentary or travel?

I don’t at all in terms of writing them, but in terms of presenting or marketing them. The ones that are called travel or whatever now have a kind of market. They can be sold, but the ones that are supposedly just straight fiction really don’t have much of a market any more. I would tend to shape anything I do to pretend to be document or travel even though it probably won’t be. Whereas I suppose most of what Jim has done appears to be fiction, but you could make a pretty good case for it being travel or art criticism or social criticism or polemic — all of these things can be absorbed within what seems to be a fiction. Kingdom Come could have been stripped down to be a series of savage essays or presentations about the motorway corridor with dramatised events happening in the middle.

“Crushed breasts on door handles”: Fiction as a branch of neurology (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Ballard has said in the past that if he had his time again he’d be a painter. It seems now that he almost wants to be a sociologist.

Maybe not so much a painter as a very good art critic — not in an academic sense, but as someone with the language and the eye to break an image down. That takes in being a form of social critic or geographer, an essayist in the sense that someone like Paul Virilio is. There is an interface between the world of the catalogue and copywriting for Mercedes cars and the film script for a porn movie — all of these things intersect in something that he’s not embarrassed to cut together.

Talking about geography, you’re very much associated with the psychogeography movement…

Have you seen this book that’s just come out on psychogeography that tries to incorporate Ballard into that group? You make of him what you will, but I don’t think he’s in any way a psychogeographer, and I don’t think he’d use those terms himself at all. I think the aspect of him they’ve drawn on is the notion of a spatial geography, of particular lines and movements that you make in describing a city’s geometry, which he does with the multistorey carparks and bridges and motorways and all of that.

Which is maybe closer to Debord’s original ideas.

Much closer than to the London occult versions that have appeared.

There’s another quote from Ballard in the BFI book, on the Watford car parks: “I was quite interested in the gauge of psychoarchitectonics.”

Wonderful. He must have been one of the very first people to get interested in Watford.

The more recent books — Millennium People and Kingdom Come — are more explicitly concerned with London and its environs.

A kind of London. The London that Millennium People is concerned with, and the bits of the centre that appear in Kingdom Come, are so very strange, they’re completely surreal and unlike actual London. He talks about a character in Kingdom Come living in Chelsea and his address is given as Chelsea Harbour, which isn’t even in Chelsea — it’s not a harbour either. It’s an unplaced London, a generic catalogue London that he uses as a shorthand, but it’s not an inhabited city. It’s got no landmarks, nothing fixed, and I don’t think he wants it to be fixed. I think he wants it to be fluid, and he wants a sense of alienation, almost like being in this estranged movie at the edge of things.

Whereas your work is very site specific.

It starts with that, and then it pushes through into whatever’s on the other side of it. But it usually starts with something very very specific and concrete.

Millennium People, and the basic idea behind all this middle-class anomie, seems quite specifically London. I think he said he got the idea from his own daughters’ problems in finding affordable living and maintaining that lifestyle.

Funnily enough, after this I’m seeing someone who lives in the Barbican who’s writing a strange thesis. In it I saw something he quoted from Siegfried Kracauer, who was part of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, talking about how the revolt will come from the middle classes, from the anomie of the middle classes. In a way, that idea is exactly what Ballard’s talking about in Millennium People.

In the context of early 1930s Germany, it seems quite different.

It’s a very different thing, but now Ballard sees fascism arising out of the shopping mall and the airport satellite cities — a fascism based on an advocacy of sport; football hooligans — and blending into that, a very strange picture.

It’s interesting he’s writing that at a time when there’s been a resurgence of BNP support in the eastern fringes of London.

Geographically, in the 70s and early 80s, all of it was based in places like Brick Lane and Bethnal Green at the centre. Those people have now moved out into Essex, and it’s an Essex phenomenon. I don’t think in actuality you’d find any trace of it in those Heathrow satellite towns, but there’s no reason you can’t have it as a literary conceit.

Drowned Barbican. Photo by Tim Chapman.

Do you see Ballard as a London writer? Some of the early novels like The Drowned World were very specifically about the parts of west London where he used to work.

I don’t, no. Obviously London has been one of the locations of his imaginative world, but it just seems like it’s a convenient set. He could just as well have been writing about Lisbon or anywhere else he happened to find himself. He doesn’t thirst for the particulars of the city — he’s not interested in the dust and the detail. It is just a manipulated set, and I think it’s not to do with London but very much to do with being an observer on the edge of things, with the motorways that take you away somewhere else, and the anonymous tower blocks which are a kind of nowhere. He’s a great writer of these nowheres — he’s a defender of them.

With Kingdom Come, as you say, you were given this assignment to destroy Bluewater. Did you fail him? Does he have to do it himself?

I did my best — I gave it a good kicking in the book. Bluewater I thought was one of the most de-energising places on the face of the earth. It’s down in this chalk quarry, which makes it different from any other huge mall. Essentially it’s just a car park — the convenience is that it’s somewhere you can put your car. Shopping is completely separate from it. In fact I’ve never met anyone who could shop there at all — all they can do is walk round the galleries and use one of the many many coffee shops.

He’s never visited, obviously. The Bentall Centre has got these dancing bears which appear in Kingdom Come — I think that’s one of the few places he does go to on a regular basis. In a sense, the specifics of that do re-emerge in this fictional universe he’s created.

Is London: City of Disappearances an edited anthology?

No, it’s a bit more than that. What I did was to feel — in a very opposite way to Ballard, who couldn’t get this idea at all — that London at the moment is somewhere with endless erasures and reinventions and disappearances and amnesia. A lot of important cultural stories and figures were wiped out, buildings would disappear and something else is put up in their places. There’s a constantly shifting landscape, but it’s still very solid and tangible.

I wanted to do a book about that and, rather than me writing a novel or a document from A to Z, it would be much more interesting to invite a whole bunch of quite disparate people to send in their reports. They might take the form of fiction or a document. I had this wad of material and I divided it up partly topographically by zone and partly by theme, and at the end of each section there were gazetteer entries so it’s like a sort of mock guidebook. I tried to shape it like a novel so you could read it right the way through. Where I felt I needed to shift things I’d write a piece myself. I do feel at the end that it makes a new kind of novel, a sort of communal novel which I was editing more in the sense of editing a film rather than editing a book. The result isn’t something I could have prophesied, but it is a new form I think.

“Iain, I want you to blow up Bluewater.” (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Ballard is in there more as a presence rather than with the piece he wrote himself, which is very short; it has actually appeared somewhere obscure once before, anyway. He describes the Westway so that in a sense the landscape around the Westway is what disappears. He’s just interested in this fragment that could have been the beginning of a new city but which was never followed up. It was just left, like the ruins of an Inca monument.

I think I know what you mean about disappearances — I lived down here, close to the old Gainsborough Studios in Hoxton. I went by this morning and didn’t recognise it.

It’s very smart and modernist flats. The whole of the canal has now undergone this Ballardian process whereby all the warehouses have been turned into loft living for city folk. It is actually a city, a water city, even though the canal is decaying into a drought-like condition, undergoing hideous transformation and being choked with weed, but along it is somewhere that is nowhere. People who live there don’t really know where they are, they just get on the canal bank on their bicycles and commute between the City and Docklands. It actually is a new city — I think it should be called Ballard eventually, or Neo-Shepperton.

“Bring Me the Head of Alfred Hitchcock”. Photo: Tim Chapman.

The flats themselves at the Gainsborough are fairly generic — you could see them in Manchester or Leeds — but at the middle of it there’s this huge semi-submerged head of Alfred Hitchcock.

Fantastic. Of course, he made his early silent films in those studios and grew up not far away. Maybe we should have a submerged head of Ballard out in the middle of this, to go with John Milton in the church down there.

Psychogeography is quite a buzzword now; Will Self’s got his column in the Independent…

Which to me has absolutely no connection whatsoever to whatever psychogeography was originally, or in its second incarnation. It was something very specific in Paris in the 50s and 60s — the Lettrists and Situationists had this politicised conceptual movement called Psychogeography. Then it was reinvented into London with people like Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association, who mixed those ideas with ideas of ley lines and Earth mysteries and cobbled it together as a provocation, and I took it on from that point. Now it’s just become this brand name for more or less anything that’s vaguely to do with walking or vaguely to do with the city. It’s a new form of tourism.

Is there any mileage left in it?

No, I don’t think so, other than if someone can brand it and promote it, which they are doing. Once these little pocket books appear with an easy readers’ guide which can take you back to Ballard or de Quincey or Debord or wherever you want to go, it’s a route map where everything’s laid out for you. It’s very strange. I’m not quite sure why that happened.

What other writers at the moment do you think are worth reading?

Unfortunately I tend to be reading older material that’s related to whatever projects I’m working on. As I’m working on a book about Hackney, where I’ve lived for so long without ever really thinking about it, I’m reading books by forgotten or half-forgotten Hackney writers like Alexander Baron and Roland Camberton, and Harold Pinter’s book The Dwarfs.

Are you working on anything else?

No, that’s all consuming. In the light of having done the Disappearances book, I’m working in a new way, which is going out and carrying out huge numbers of interview. I’m leading the people I’m interviewing to some extent into particular locations and particular figures who I think represent whatever Hackney was in this period before it started to disappear, which I think it will on the back of the Olympic thing. I’m not sure how that’s going to work. It’s going to be partly memoir, partly a series of edited transcripts, partly in essay form — it’ll take its own form as it goes on. After that, for the first time ever, I’ll have reached the end of a contract. I’ll have to stop and think what I can do next, if not back to bookdealing.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

Are you planning anything more on the film side?

There’s one thing on the distant horizon. It’s called Beijing Orbital. When I was in Stavangar in Norway at one of these strange conferences, I saw a presentation by an assistant of Rem Koolhaas which was about the China TV building he’d built. He showed this virtual version of a city with seven orbital motorways just spreading out from the centre of this very traditional city into the desert, and the incredible pieces that were going up. I thought my god, it will be amazing to travel around these seven orbital motorways. Of course, that is relatively attractive to be made into a film. I think it will be reasonably possible to get a commission for that, which may also become a book. It will also involve me doing a lot of other things — circling round China as to what China means to different places in Europe, in the sense of Fu Manchu or people being drowned in Morecombe, all these stories, before I even embark on a journey to the place itself.

Have you thought of doing more comics? You worked with Dave McKean on Slow Chocolate Autopsy.

I’d like to. With Dave McKean it was just starting to get interesting. I was just beginning to understand what the form can do. Apart from the comic itself, he’s a terrific designer of a whole book — you’ve got his typography and the way he plays with images. It’d be great to do another one, but I don’t know if the opportunity will ever come up.

Any final thoughts?

I think we’ve covered the ground pretty thoroughly.

..:: LINKS
+ Iain Sinclair at Granta
+ Michael Moorcock
+ The Barbican
+ Bluewater
+ Bentall Centre
+ Chris Petit
+ Stewart Home
+ London Psychogeographical Association
+ RE/Search Publications

Previously in this series:
+ Child of the Diaspora: Bruce Sterling on JG Ballard
+ Seductive Whirlpools: The John Foxx Interview
+ No One Dances in Ballard: An Interview with Mike Ryan (RE/Search Publications)

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

——————————————————————————————————-
..:: 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.

Petit, Sinclair, Moorcock and Ballard in the one place is A-OK by me.

“SINCLAIR: I take great delight in the apparently forgotten. As Ed Dorn said, ‘just because you don’t see something, it doesn’t mean that it’s not there’. I’m editing a fat book for Hamish Hamilton called London: City of Disappearances. An ironic concept: producing the mounds to prove that they no longer exist. Along with vanished buildings, books, people, there are accounts written by the re-forgotten themselves. One unfashionable writer will often lead us to another. Certain names, promoted from time to time, make up a spectral establishment: Patrick Hamilton, Gerald Kersh, Jean Rhys, J. Maclaren-Ross, W Pett Ridge, Arthur Morrison, Mary Butts. I’m happy that I have been able, at one level, to make the Disappearances book into a sequel to Conductors of Chaos.

Contributors include: Jeff Nuttall, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth, Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, John Seed, Brian Catling, Vahni Capildeo, Alexis Lykiard, Paul Buck, Stewart Home, Ben Watson, Tony Rudolf, John Welch. Alongside: Marina Warner, JG Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Derek Raymond, Jim Sallis, Will Self, Alan Moore, Sarah Wise, Rachel Lichtenstein, Tibor Fischer ­ and the film-makers, Patrick Keiller, Andrew Kötting, Chris Petit.”