Archive for the ‘film’ Category
By
Simon Sellars •
May 15th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, CCTV, celebrity culture, film, gated communities, surveillance
Samuel L. Jackson is back in the game, soon to work with the best material he’ll ever clap eyes on.
By
Simon Sellars •
May 7th, 2008 •
Category:
Australia, Ballardosphere, David Cronenberg, Philip K. Dick, Steven Spielberg, alternate worlds, film, surrealism, television, theatre
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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Apr 19th, 2008 •
Category:
David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Lead Story, YouTube, fashion, features, film, science fiction
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.
By
Crashman •
Apr 8th, 2008 •
Category:
David Cronenberg, Freud, Lead Story, Michael Moorcock, WWII, YouTube, censorship, death of affect, features, film, flying, humour, media landscape, music, psychopathology, speed & violence, sport, war
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.
By
Dan O'Hara •
Mar 23rd, 2008 •
Category:
Freud, Germany, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shanghai, William Burroughs, archival, dystopia, film, psychology, science fiction, sexual politics, short stories, surrealism, utopia
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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Mar 8th, 2008 •
Category:
David Cronenberg, Steven Spielberg, alternate worlds, film, humour, medical procedure, psychiatry, reviews, short stories, the middle classes
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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Mar 2nd, 2008 •
Category:
YouTube, dystopia, entropy, features, film, gated communities, humour, psychopathology, speed & violence, suburbia, suicide, surveillance, technology, television, urban decay
Here are the entries in the 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. Congratulations to the winner, Ben Slater.
By
Simon Sellars •
Feb 27th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, consumerism, film, speed & violence
Here’s a dossier on presidential candidate Ralph Nader, courtesy of The Atrocity Exhibition.
By
Simon Sellars •
Feb 26th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, film, technology
Entries have closed for the Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. More soon…
By
Simon Sellars •
Feb 26th, 2008 •
Category:
Shepperton, alternate worlds, autobiography, dystopia, film, inner space, reviews, science fiction, suburbia
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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Feb 22nd, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, academia, film, inner space, science fiction
A repost of this tribute to Robbe-Grillet, with the addition of some extra quotes that either illuminate or obfuscate…
By
Simon Sellars •
Feb 6th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Jean Baudrillard, audio, film, gated communities
A few notes on Steve Severin, the Banshees, and Ballard…
By
Simon Sellars •
Feb 2nd, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, David Cronenberg, film
The Guardian’s Danny Leigh gets behind our Ballardian Home Movie competition.
By
Simon Sellars •
Jan 26th, 2008 •
Category:
Lead Story, film, surveillance, technology
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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Jan 25th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, New Worlds, film, inner space, science fiction
I am delighted to report that the book of Chris Marker’s La Jetée is back in print through Zone Books — and in hardcover, too. It will be out in (US) Spring 2008. Thank you, thank you: for years, second-hand copies were changing hands via Amazon and eBay for anything up to $400.
Unable to […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Jan 23rd, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, architecture, film
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Jan 17th, 2008 •
Category:
David Cronenberg, Jean Baudrillard, academia, film, politics, reviews
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.
By
Dan O'Hara •
Jan 9th, 2008 •
Category:
David Cronenberg, Steven Spielberg, WWII, architecture, audio, dystopia, entropy, fascism, film, gated communities, interviews, urban decay, urban revolt, urban ruins, utopia
Dan O’Hara interviews the creators of Hochhaus, a German mixed-media radio play based on High-Rise. Transposing the novel to Berlin in 2013, it references Nazism, notably Speer’s social engineering through architecture, on its way to exploring Ballard’s relevance to speculative models of German life.
By
Simon Sellars •
Dec 23rd, 2007 •
Category:
Australia, Iain Sinclair, Jean Baudrillard, Lead Story, Pacific, academia, alternate worlds, dystopia, enviro-disaster, film, literature, reviews, science fiction, terrorism, utopia
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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Dec 22nd, 2007 •
Category:
Lead Story, Shepperton, features, film, filmography, science fiction, surrealism
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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Dec 14th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, David Cronenberg, body horror, celebrity culture, censorship, death of affect, film, sexual politics, speed & violence
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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Nov 21st, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, CCTV, alternate worlds, film, inner space, paranormal, surveillance, technology
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Nov 10th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, CCTV, alternate worlds, boredom, crime, film, inner space, surveillance, technology
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Oct 31st, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, alternate worlds, dystopia, film, gated communities, science fiction, utopia
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Oct 31st, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, David Cronenberg, film
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Oct 30th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Philip K. Dick, film, science fiction, terrorism
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Oct 19th, 2007 •
Category:
Australia, Ballardosphere, Jean Baudrillard, YouTube, celebrity culture, consumerism, crime, death of affect, dystopia, fascism, features, film, media landscape, politics, speed & violence, sport, suburbia, urban revolt
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…
By
Simon Sellars •
Oct 17th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, film
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Oct 9th, 2007 •
Category:
David Cronenberg, body horror, death of affect, features, film, speed & violence
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Sep 26th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, David Cronenberg, film, speed & violence, terrorism, theatre
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Sep 26th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, film
&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
By
Pedro Groppo •
Sep 14th, 2007 •
Category:
David Cronenberg, Shanghai, Steven Spielberg, WWII, YouTube, autobiography, features, film, filmography, flying
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Sep 8th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, William Burroughs, YouTube, archival, audio, film, filmography, television
I’ve created a YouTube outpost for this site, divided into six channels: (1) J.G. Ballard Interviews; (2) J.G. Ballard Documentaries; (3) J.G. Ballard Adaptations; (4) J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten Science Fiction Films; (5) Ballardiana; and (6) Ballardian Sound Art/Music.
By
Pippa Tandy •
Aug 27th, 2007 •
Category:
Shanghai, Steven Spielberg, WWII, deep time, features, film, filmography
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 […]
By
Ballardian •
Aug 27th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Shepperton, WWII, archival, deep time, film, filmography, flying
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Aug 18th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Shanghai, Steven Spielberg, WWII, YouTube, autobiography, film
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! ]
By
Simon Sellars •
Aug 18th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, audio, film
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Aug 18th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Chris Petit, David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, film, psychogeography
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Aug 18th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, film, psychopathology
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 […]