Ballardian

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 life [...]

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 [...]

ABOVE: Cokliss/Ballard on YouTube CRASH! Director: Harley Cokliss Writer: J.G. Ballard Starring: J.G. Ballard & Gabrielle Drake This a transcript of the meta-narration and voiceover from the film CRASH!. See here for ‘Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon’, an appraisal of the film. NARRATOR: In slow motion, the test cars moved towards each other on collision courses, unwinding [...]

News of an installation in Oslo… Ann Lislegaard Crystal World ( after J.G Ballard ), 2006; Ann Lislegaard: Science Fiction and other worlds 26 May-26 August 2007 Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Dronningens gt 4, 0107 Oslo, Norway Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art has in recent years presented a series of exhibitions with [...]

Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and JGB’s partner Claire Walsh in September, 2006 (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock). ———————————————— Interview by Mike Holliday ———————————————— Michael Moorcock has been a prolific writer and editor for the last five decades. Born in London, he was editing his first magazine by the age of seventeen, and started writing genre fiction [...]

+ Previously, students from Digital Media Design, St East Lancs, Institute of Higher Education at Blackburn College, gave us the title sequence created for a fictional movie based on JG Ballard’s ‘A Guide To Virtual Death’. Now they’ve come up with this, ‘a title sequence created for a fictional movie based on a short story [...]

While I think Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was successful in its own right, I still believe there’s potential for a version (maybe not a straight adaptation, perhaps an obliquely angled ‘nod and a wink’; maybe even a sequel) that updates the notion of celebrity culture, that takes up the direction hinted [...]

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, directed by Peter Potter, is an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of that name, produced as part of the BBC’s Out of the Unknown series of science-fiction dramatisations. But at that time film and television was just not capable of delivering the frisson that the best SF literature provided (it [...]

Recently I directed your attention to Xander Walker’s no-budget adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s ultra-sardonic short story, ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’. Now we have this, a ‘title sequence created for a fictional movie based on a novel by JG Ballard, ‘A Guide To Virtual Death’.’ As part of this conceit, that ‘Virtual Death’ is actually [...]

There has been a Ballard backlash. Here are two of the more aggressive memes. Ballard vs The Blogosphere Ballard was recently interviewed by the Guardian in a series on writers’ rooms. In this feature he said, ‘The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on [...]

+ IDEAL, RADIANT In his excellent paper, ‘Ballard’s Banlieue Radieuse’, delivered at the Ballard conference, Owen Hatherley locates JGB’s Vermilion Sands stories as a vision at right angles to the dystopian tradition in which Ballard is normally housed — the Vermilion collection posits, Hatherley writes, ‘an actual, liveable future utopia that is eminently possible’. And [...]

Here I present the latest wrapup, not as extensive as I would like as I’m currently in Dubai trying to locate my missing passport, while entertaining the thought of spending a few days, maybe a week in the non-space of the Dubai International Airport until it turns up (hopefully a week; I’m trying to embrace [...]

+ CATALOGUE OF CONTEMPORARY ATROCITIES 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 is Xander Walker’s excellent no-budget film of Ballard’s dark, scathing short story ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (one of the last shorts JGB ever wrote, unfortunately): For reasons amply documented elsewhere, intelligent life on Earth became extinct in the closing hours of the 20th Century. Among the clues left to us, the following schedule [...]

Back in 1986, Kurt Vonnegut (RIP) made an amusing cameo in Rodney Dangerfield’s fake-fart laden masterpiece Back to School. But did you also know that William Gibson appeared in Wild Palms alongside Jim Belushi; that Philip K. Dick guest-starred in a 1971 episode of Bewitched; that Jorge Luis Borges stole the show in an ep [...]

Still from The Business of Strangers (dir. Patrick Stettner; 2002). During my search for ghosted Ballard film productions — vapourware movies based on Ballard books — it struck me that I should instead be continuing my search for what Chris Darke terms the ‘Ballardian poetic’ in cinema, which he defines as: …a valuable resource for [...]

This news is a couple of months old, but I wanted to record it here for posterity, having neglected to do so at the time. Andy Harries, one of the producers of The Queen, has optioned Cocaine Nights for the screen, with Peter Webber (Girl with A Pearl Earring; Hannibal Rising) attached as director. Don’t [...]

French filmmaker Thomas Cazals has onlined a 10-min preview of his film J.G. Ballard: Shepperton’s Oracle. Synopsis: ‘On the occasion of the release of the next novel of the English writer James Ballard, two French reporter Thomas Cazals and Thomas Carter are sent to Shepperton, to interview him. In this town in the middle of [...]

Flyer for Northern Void. Last night I attended the second (and last, for now) screening of Philip Brophy’s 50-minute film Northern Void, billed as a “live cinema performance” accompanied by the real-time sonics of Ph2 (Brophy and Philip Samartzis). Northern Void is set along Plenty Rd, in the northern Melbourne suburb of Preston — specifically [...]

Still from ‘Shepperton’s Oracle’, dir. Thomas Cazals, 2007. 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 [...]

Just catching up on recent news… Eoin over at the prolific group film blog Screenhead ruminates on the process of adaptation at length after reviewing Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. After stating that there are “plenty of dull adaptations of good books (… The Unbearable Bore of Being in a Cinema to Watch This)”, [...]

It’s been a bit quiet around these parts. Sorry. Something’s brewing, though…like a wind from nowhere, sweeping through London Town… …:: Incoming (soonish) + News on next year’s International JG Ballard Conference + More interviews exploring the Ballard continuum across time and space + Guest posts from guest bloggers Subscribe for notification of updates as [...]

Illustration by Rick McGrath. “Television crime series…were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking”. ———————– J.G. Ballard, 2005 ———————– Announcing the winner of our J.G. Ballard Pastiche competition, [...]

This site’s pastiche section has always been one of our most controversial. Some readers see it as an affront to Ballard himself, but no doubt these wet blankets are devotees of theorist Fredric Jameson, the man who described pastiche in the postmodern age as “blank parody…devoid of laughter” — a dead impulse to endlessly recycle [...]

Over at k-punk a few months back, Mark posted a radical thesis that positioned Basic Instinct 2 as the unofficial sequel to Cronenberg/Ballard’s Crash: [Catherine] Tramell returns in the second film as a camp vamp whose persona owes more to Ballard than to film noir. Catherine is a name Ballard has often used, and Basic [...]

If you enjoyed our Sinclair interview and are curious to place a voice to the text, or you just need an entry point into Sinclair’s work, listen to Radio QBSaul, which podcasts “audio theatre, poetry, music and sound by Paul A Green and guests”. Paul is currently featuring a podcast from Mr Sinclair, Lud Heat, [...]

OPENING LINE: “In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’). From the 1996 Harper Collins edition: The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, [...]

Interview by Simon Sellars John Foxx live at Shrewsbury, 1998. © Extreme Voice. This is part 2 of my interview with John Foxx, former lead singer of Ultravox before the band’s Midge Ure era, and an on-and-off solo artist for the past 25 years. Foxx’s Ultravox purveyed a damned, dreamy, paranoid — and often playful [...]

Interview by Tim Chapman 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 [...]

Came across this post from the blog called ‘Postcards from the Future’. Interesting how Dubai pops up yet again in discussions about Ballard… The post says: “Working on the movie about J.G Ballard “The Shepperton’s Oracle”, i’ve found…an extract of General Motors vision for the future in year 56’. “The Shepperton’s Oracle”, the movie about [...]

Thanks to TimC for pointing me towards this very positive review of Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition film, published in Sight & Sound. Interestingly, the fellow who wrote that review, Tim Lucas, also wrote a novel called Throat Sprockets (1994), which was described thusly: “The focused description of scenes, of the medical exactness of throat architecture recalls [...]

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

As part of our Ballardian Music series, Cat Hope looks back at Howard Shore’s soundtrack for the David Cronenberg adaptation of Crash. —————————————————————————————————————- Cat Hope is an Australian musician and academic, based in Perth, Western Australia. Besides performing in the bands Lux Mammmoth and Gata Negra, she also performs solo noise music using bass guitar. [...]

The new book Sweet and Savage: The World Through the Shockumentary Film Lens, by Mark Goodall has just been published by Headpress in the UK. The only blurb comes from Ballard and Goodall conducts a short interview with him on the subject: ‘An Exhibition of Atrocities’ excerpt: Goodall: Can you recall any critical or other [...]

Thanks to Tim C for this link… There’s a most favourable review of Jonathan Weiss‘s Atrocity Exhibition adaptation over at DVD Times. As well as providing some valuable insights into Weiss’s film, the review also intelligently summarises Ballard’s approach: “Jean-Luc Godard was using this same material during this same period in films like Weekend and [...]

Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh has posted a terrific interview with Mike Davis, the man JGB dubbed “the prose laureate of America’s decline”. From BLDGBLOG: ‘I first discovered Mike Davis’s work about a decade ago, through his book City of Quartz, a detailed and poetic look at the social geography of Los Angeles. Perhaps most [...]

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