Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

Samuel L. Jackson is back in the game, soon to work with the best material he’ll ever clap eyes on.

UPDATED. Aside from the films of Empire and Crash, Ballard has had almost all his novels optioned for the screen at some stage. Suitors include Richard Gere, Samuel L. Jackson, Jack Nicholson, David Frost and a trio of scantily-clad cavegirls.

Here’s a tribute to Gabrielle Drake, a co-conspirator of Ballard’s and the undisputed Queen of both outer and inner space. All hail 1971, the Year of the Drake.

Drawing inspiration from J.G. Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars in 1970, the Crashman presents his own festival of Atrocity films: aviation disasters set to musical soundtracks.

This is the second of Dan O’Hara’s re-translations of JGB interviews originally published in German. This one dates from 1976, and in it Ballard provides comment on Russian writers and explains how film technique infiltrates and influences his own writing.

In 1991 Simon Brook made a short film from J.G. Ballard’s obscure 1963 short story, ‘Minus One’. Enjoy this super-rare screening of Simon’s film.

Here are the entries in the 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. Congratulations to the winner, Ben Slater.

Here’s a dossier on presidential candidate Ralph Nader, courtesy of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Entries have closed for the Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. More soon…

The final version of Thomas Cazals’ tribute, ‘J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton’, has been released. It’s one of the stranger JGB ‘adaptations’ around, and is told with considerable flair and skill.

A repost of this tribute to Robbe-Grillet, with the addition of some extra quotes that either illuminate or obfuscate…

A few notes on Steve Severin, the Banshees, and Ballard…

The Guardian’s Danny Leigh gets behind our Ballardian Home Movie competition.

Announcing The 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies, a competition for 1-minute films shot on mobile phones. This is to promote JGB’s forthcoming autobiography, Miracles of Life, and the prize is a copy of Miracles plus 5 Ballard back titles. Presented by ballardian.com and HarperCollins.

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

Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG fame is giving a lecture tonight at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, home of the innovative built-environment module, Unit 15, led by Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy. I’m sure Ballard will pop up somewhere in Geoff’s talk. Not only have I previously interviewed Geoff about the intersections between JGB […]

A review of two academic articles written by Ben Noys on Ballard’s work, both analysing Ballard’s place in contemporary cultural production. This review also considers Mark Fisher’s recent Lacanian analysis of Basic Instinct 2, in an edition of Film-Philosophy edited by Noys, with its unearthing of intriguing Ballardian parallels.

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

A review of Demanding the Impossible, the Third Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction, held at Monash University, Clayton, Melbourne, Australia, Dec 5-7.

Sam Scoggins has finally digitised his ‘lost’ 1983 quasi-doco on Ballard, loosely structured around themes found in The Unlimited Dream Company. There are plans for ballardian.com to interview Sam, but for now, enjoy the film.

How strange is this: Rosanna Arquette, and Crash, popping up in all sorts of places. This film, Ballard’s story, still packs a powerful psychological enema.

Image from Diet Soap #1.
+ Following on from my rapture at discovering the SurveillanceSaver software, here are some more portals onto mediated inner space.
Chris Nakashima-Brown brings news of issue 1 of the fabulous zine, Diet Soap. The theme is Surveillance and there are poems, palindromes, fiction, reportage and lots of excellent collaged art, including (so […]

Annoyed with myself, I set off along the narrow street, past the surveillance cameras that guarded the lacquered doorways, each lens with its own story to tell. Hidden perspectives turned Estrella de Mar into a huge riddle. Trompe-l’oeil corridors beckoned but led nowhere…
J.G. Ballard. Cocaine Nights (1996).
Every good Ballardian needs this: SurveillanceSaver, a screensaver that […]

I’ve just come across this excellent 2005 article from Chris Darke, published in Vertigo magazine, on Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece, Alphaville. It begins with a fascinating anecdote about gated communities in Brazil that are modeled after Godard’s modernist dystopia:
Seven and a half miles from the heart of São Paulo there is a gated community which houses […]

From the New York Post:
David Cronenberg, director of the smash “Eastern Promises,” is still mad at writer-director Paul Haggis for naming his 2005 Oscar-winning racial drama “Crash,” just nine years after Cronenberg had his own movie called “Crash,” about wackos who get sexually excited by car accidents. “I’ve told [him] that he was a [bleep]hole […]

Dom passes on news of yet another Ballard mini-interview, this time in the December 2007 edition of SFX Magazine. It’s just a series of quotes pasted onto the above photo, with the terrible title, ‘Never Mind the Ballards’.
Here’s the full text:
NEVER MIND THE BALLARDS
J.G. Ballard is still fascinated by the future, even though he doesn’t […]

A Melbourne rugby reporter, Ben Davis, is bashed on live TV while giving a report. Unsurprisingly, his attackers are caught, given the attack was broadcast to the entire nation. Ballardian? Absolutely. Let’s count the ways…

I’d previously linked to this Tom McCarthy interview, but missed the bit where he talks about Vincenzo Natali’s film adaptation of High-Rise. McCarthy talks of meeting Natali and looking forward to the film, but that would have been in 2005. Sadly there’s been no industry news on this film for ages, and in fact I […]

Some people get their kicks from braving a mob of blood-crazed shoppers to attack the nearest mannequin. But if that doesn’t appeal, why not exact virtual revenge? Keith emails to inform of one of the very best things online: a little feature over at ConsumerReports.org called the ‘Crash Test Selector’. It’s a series of films […]

The resonance of Crash refuses to dissipate.
Firstly, John emailed to inform me of a new Washington Times interview with David Cronenberg, in which the Baron of Blood makes this rather curious remark:
There’s an eroticism involved, certainly in ‘Crash,’ and I really saw that in the beheading videos. They looked like homosexual gang rapes with […]

&uot

Aida Young, the producer who commissioned J.G. Ballard for perhaps the most bizarre assignment of his life, died on August 12 of this year. According to

Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun (more at YouTube.)

by Pedro Groppo

EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard
Starring: Christian Bale, John Malkovich

Whereas the sensibilities of J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg, who directed Crash (1996), seem to overlap and complement each other, one would be hard-pressed […]

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

ABOVE: Youtube uplink for Shanghai Jim (BBC Bookmark, 1991; produced by James Runcie).

by Pippa Tandy

SHANGHAI JIM (1991)
Director/Producer: James Runcie
Executive Producer: Nigel Williams
Starring: J.G. Ballard, Michael Troughton, Hans Gebruers

See here for a transcript of J.G. Ballard’s commentary from the film.

DOCUMENTARY FILMS about the lives and works of artists have many different functions. They may describe their […]

ABOVE: Youtube uplink for Shanghai Jim (BBC Bookmark, 1991; produced by James Runcie).

NOTE: The following is a transcription taken from J.G. Ballard’s commentary for the documentary Shanghai Jim. It also transcribes the film’s brief interviews with his daughters, Fay and Bea, and the film’s direct quotes from Ballard’s work.
See here for Pippa Tandy’s appraisal […]

Over on BallardoTube, the “China Odyssey” doco on the making of Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun has appeared. Ballard features prominently.
Don’t forget part two.
[ thanks Pedro! ]

The other night at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), I saw Control, Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic. In the first part of the film, before Curtis has met the rest of Joy Division, he’s in his bedroom and the camera focuses on his bookshelf. The shot lingers for a few seconds on the spine […]

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 […]

In 2005 the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) announced a subsection of the event called ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’:
‘Has a festival of Atrocity films ever been held? — JG Ballard, 1990.’
Yes. You are looking at it JG. Welcome to The Atrocity Exhibition our maliciously mad and mischievously misanthropic look at the world around us. Yes […]