After much pushing and prodding from me over a period of months, Sam Scoggins has finally digitised his ‘lost’ quasi-doco on Ballard, loosely structured around themes found in The Unlimited Dream Company. Sam has posted it over at blip.tv, and it’s a special work, with wonderful fictional interventions interpolating passages from The Atrocity Exhibition with close ups of Ballard discussing his fiction.

Great sound design, great effects, and it also features an astounding section in which Ballard responds to “90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient, each of which Ballard answers Yes or No”. Ballard is clearly amused, but also deeply absorbed, and the minimalism of this interrogation is actually quite revealing, saying a lot about the man’s character, as when he’s asked if he “locks the house up at night” — to which the reply is “no”. Sometimes he hesitates, as when asked if manners are important (“yes”); other times he answers quick as a flash, such as when asked if he would dodge taxes if he was sure he wouldn’t be caught (“yes”). The nature of both responses, in different ways, betray the rough grain of Ballard’s anti-establishment bias. There’s a real sense that this format, as minimal as it is, is far more revealing than some of the more recent, overblown and repetitive interviews with Ballard, in which he seems fed up with answering the same biographical questions from journalists over and over again. Stripped to the bone in this fashion, we inhabit Ballard’s psychology in extreme close up…an effect mirrored by the camera, which inches ever closer as Ballard ploughs his way through the questions.

I have tentative plans in the near future to do an interview with Sam about the film, but for now, here’s some info from RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard:

The Unlimited Dream Company, written, edited & directed by Sam Scoggins. 16mm, 24 mins, color, 1983.

“The British science fiction writer J.G. BALLARD talks about his life and work. Meanwhile a crashed pilot stalks the landscapes of his dreams. The film is concerned with what constitutes an adequate picture of a person, the role of the imagination in transforming the world.”

Cast: J.G. Ballard, Tom Pollock. Credits: Camera, Ian Duncan; Assistant Camera, Bryan Morgan; Art Director, Charlotte Humpston; Sound, Tom Pollock..

Scoggins’ own description of the film follows:

“There are two main types of material intercut in the film:

1) A big close-up of Ballard’s face. He talks, looking straight at the camera,

2) Ballard’s alter ego wearing a ragged flying suit wanders through “Ballardian” landscapes and in each makes a portrait of Ballard from things around him.

The landscapes are:

a) The jungle (past). He makes a portrait from feathers.

b) Motorway/Scrapyard (present). He makes a portrait from crashed cars.

c) The Beach (future). He draws a huge spiral in the sand.

These sections were shot in black and white, then printed each in a different monochrome, i.e. a green, b) red, c) blue.

There are other bits of material in the film!

i) Tracking shots through Shepperton ending up on Ballard’s house with him standing outside,

ii) The same repeated but in negative color while Ballard talks about The Unlimited Dream Company in voice-over.

iii) Shots from different sequences of the film cut to the “Captain Kirby” quote.

iv) Single framed images from TV while Ballard talks about the latent and manifest content of TV.

v) A 6 min. duration very slow zoom in from a head and shoulders shot of Ballard to a very large close-up of his right eyeball. Off camera a voice asks the 90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient, each of which Ballard answers Yes or No.

vi) The last sequence of the film is a zoom out from some clouds to a shot of the whole earth, which match dissolves into Ballard’s eye as the zoom out continues until we see the whole of Ballard’s head.

On one level I hope the film is a fairly straightforward introduction to Ballard and his work, but on another level the film (at least for me) is concerned with two things:

1) How can you make an adequate picture of someone;

2) The way in which the imagination/film transforms “reality.”

..:: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN

+ ‘A Home and A Grave’: Mike Holliday explains how to read J.G. Ballard’s 1979 novel The Unlimited Dream Company as a fascistic work.
+ The Unlimited Dream Company: bibliographical entry.

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 to think of someone like Steven Spielberg as the ideal director of a Ballard adaptation. Empire of the Sun (1987) was the first of the more mainstream adaptations of Ballard’s work, and still remains today the most widespread and popular work based on his fiction, even if it is Spielberg’s least successful movie to date in box office terms. It is however, a landmark in the development of Spielberg’s sensibilities as a director and in the popularization of Ballard.

LEFT: Bale, Spielberg, Malkovich.

The novel had met relative success upon its publication in 1984, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winning the Guardian Prize for Best Fiction, and David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago) was at first interested in making a film of it. Spielberg was asked by Lean to acquire the rights and produce the film, which he hoped to direct. Interestingly, after a year of preparation, Lean abandoned the project because he decided the book “lacked sufficient dramatic structure for a film and dropped the project to adapt Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. It was for the better, as Spielberg later admitted he had “secretly wanted to do it himself.” The shadow of Lean hovers over the picture, much like Stanley Kubrick’s would in Spielberg’s later A.I. (2001). Echoes of Oliver Twist, The Bridge on the River Kwai and A Passage to India figure prominently. Ian Freer notes that Spielberg even consciously echoes Lean’s “sense of scope, sweep, and camera stylings — in particular, Lean’s signature crane shot moving from a lone figure to reveal a mass of swarming people.”

Spielberg was, and still is, associated with a particular kind of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking, having directed a number of box office record breakers, such as Jaws, Jurassic Park, and the Indiana Jones series. His work is often seen as naive, ideological, corny, lacking in subtlety, and even uncritical; but it’s almost a fact that he has a superb visual sense and a genuine flair for storytelling. Empire of the Sun shows a marked development of Spielberg’s abilities and range as a filmmaker, being probably one of (if not the) most mature of his films to date.

As Spielberg has noted:

I really had come to terms with what I’ve been tenaciously clinging to, which was a celebration of a kind of naiveté. … But I just reached a saturation point, and I thought Empire was a great way of performing an exorcism on that period. I had never read anything with an adult setting … where a child saw things through a man’s eyes as opposed to a man discovering things through the child in him.

What Spielberg shares most with Ballard is his ability to immerse the viewer in a world of complete subjectivity, adopting the logics and desires of their protagonists in full. There is hardly, if ever, a critical distance between the viewer and the action on screen in a Spielberg film. He or she accepts it and revels on this acceptance of a subjective and even internal world, safe and desirable in its peculiar kind of escapism. The success of many of Ballard’s texts also depend on a similar stance to be taken by the reader, perhaps most notably in the case of Crash.

‘Complete subjectivity’: Ballard’s iconic drained swimming pools make an appearance…

Robert Kolker, in his analysis of American cinema, A Cinema of Loneliness, describes Spielberg’s films as a kind of “encyclopedia of desire, a locus of representations into which audiences wished to be called,” based on their frequency, success, and influence. Spielberg’s success in conveying such subjectivity in such a congenial and influential way has allowed him to become a true mythmaker of the cinema. Ballard is unquestionably a mythmaker in his own right, but Spielberg is in a position, as the most powerful and influential filmmaker of contemporary American cinema, to actually construct and impose his values artistic choices as ideology. In this sense, his films do not present ideology, but become ideology, as it were, a kind of projection of our own desires.

Empire of the Sun is Spielberg’s most realized attempt at a conscious exploration of these ideas. In the recent documentary “Spielberg on Spielberg,” produced for Turner Classic TV, he acknowledged that the novel “made selections of what a child grabs onto with his eyes compared to what an adult chooses to look at,” and that was what caught his interest. He explicitly wanted to make his film very visual, by showing the world through a child’s eyes, and later, the child losing it all because it was a story of “the death of childhood.” Although Tom Stoppard’s screenplay is very clever and literate, with uniformly excellent excellent dialogue, Spielberg tells his story primarily through visual means, and many of the key scenes do not feature any dialogue — and no narrator. Janet Maslin, on her 1987 New York Times review, said even that the film’s “first half hour, for example, could exist as a silent film — an extraordinarily sharp evocation of Shanghai’s last prewar days, richly detailed and colored by an exquisite foreboding.” In a number of instances, this keen visual sense helps to heighten the drama and translate implicit notions of Ballard’s source very effectively without having to resort to language.

Take for instance the scene where Jim (Christian Bale) is separated from his parents, during the attack on the Petrel (parallel with chapter 4). The panic-stricken crowd at Shanghai is so dense and chaotic that Jim and his mother quickly find themselves separated from Jim’s father, who is going on a different direction, warning him not to let go of her hand. They struggle to get to safety, but in a poignant moment, Jim is distracted by the Japanese fighters flying over his head. He stops to admire them and drops his silver toy plane, and at that point lets go of his mother to retrieve the toy: almost immediately he realizes he’s lost her. In the novel, Jim gets separated from his father after he has been taken to a hospital after the attack. Jim assumes he’s on another floor and never sees him again until the last chapter. Mainly through visuals, Spielberg manages to condense and intensify the sense that Jim is quite able to choose and pursue his own desires over what is responsible, even if he’s not completely aware of the consequences. It foreshadows the air raid on the camp, where he stands on the roof of a tall building, oblivious of the danger of doing so. It also makes explicit the notion that somehow Jim has chosen his individuality, even if that has forced him to abandon the security of his family. These are all ideas from Ballard’s novel, but that are compressed in this single sequence.

ABOVE: The China Odyssey on YouTube.

Spielberg’s understanding of the novel is clearly stated in the China Odyssey documentary on the making of the production: he believes “half of what happened, happened [in Ballard's head]“. The middle portion of the film, parallel to part 2 of the novel, takes place in Lunghua Camp (Soochow in the film). Ballard’s narrative condenses all the action in a single day, beginning with Jim going under the wire (“The Pheasant Hunt”), getting food, doing homework, watching the air raid, burying the dead, and helping out Dr. Ransome (Rawlins in the film). Because they are condensed into a continuous action, these events seem to take place on a different level. The way one event leads to another is of an unnatural fluidity, as if this is Ballard’s artificial dramatization and selection of what would happen in a given day at Lunghua, rather than a faithful account. It suggests in a structural level that much of what happens is informed by Jim’s imagination.

This portion of the film is unfortunately its weakest, as it is greatly expanded, probably to give more screen time to many of the secondary characters, especially Basie (John Malkovich). The action, instead of being continuous and condensed, is put in a conventional narrative frame, losing perhaps too much of its force and rhythm. This is a concern also voiced by the film’s screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, who believed the camp scenes lacked the “compression” and “density” of the first hour, which he thought were “somewhere in the masterpiece class … The balance for me there just seemed to be perfect.” The notion that Jim’s imagination is in full gear, however, is maintained: during the air raid, Jim is on the roof of a tall building at Lunghua, observing with delight the American planes. As he identifies his favorite, a P-51 Mustang, everything stops. In slow motion, the fighter flies in front of him: Jim is ecstatic as the pilot looks directly at him and waves. It’s a powerful moment, and although it doesn’t happen quite like this in the novel, it translates well the concept that what we are seeing is not concrete reality, and that Jim finds liberation and mental nourishment in this hostile but fervent environment.

The ecstasy of the P-51: mental nourishment in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

It is worth mentioning that the most Ballardian character in Spielberg’s entire body of work is Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). In this pivotal film, Spielberg shows a man obsessed with an image that he can’t quite articulate — it’s a vague feeling and is supposed to be a sign of a site (a peak in Wyoming) where aliens (who communicated the image) will be landing. One of the most memorable moments is when he builds a huge model of the peak inside his living room, his obsession making him oblivious to his wife and children — who end up abandoning him. In the end, he is chosen by the aliens to leave Earth and go up on their spaceship with them — Roy leaves his family and responsibilities behind to actively pursue his obsession and doesn’t look back. In the TCM documentary, though, Spielberg says he wouldn’t have this ending if he made the movie today, and that maybe his sensibility has changed since 77. Looking at his recent films it’s clear that for him, the importance of redemption by love, camaraderie, and especially the family unit is paramount. Empire of the Sun may be transitional in this shift in sensibilities, as its ending is untypical for Spielberg, although it softens the dread of Ballard’s vision.

Ballard’s last chapter is titled “The Terrible City.” Jim is leaving Shanghai, perhaps forever, and is already estranged from his family and his home. The chapter is about the future, but for Jim, the future is foreboding and perhaps even unimaginable. He has lost his innocence not at Lunghua, but in the seemingly endless last stages of the war (part 3 in the novel) where he couldn’t tell if it had ended or not, and all sense of security had been taken away from him, much more so than when the war began. In a sense it is at this point that the hard times begin: he’s reunited with his family and is safe from harm, yes, but spiritually, he’s dead:

He stepped on to the gangway, conscious that he was probably leaving Shanghai for the last time, setting out for a small, strange country on the other side of the world which he had never visited, but which was nominally “home”. Yet only part of his mind would leave Shanghai. The rest would remain there forever, returning on the tide like the coffins launched from the funeral piers at Nantao.

J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun.

The image of the coffins, symbolizing the part of his mind that is lost forever in Shanghai, is not only one of death, but an echo of the opening paragraph of the novel: “Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.” It suggests that while “dead”, his mind will be always coming back to this place, his memories haunting him. The last shot of the film is a fine visual equivalent of Ballard’s penultimate paragraph (quoted above), as we see Jim’s suitcase floating in the river in Shanghai (which he had thrown in the water during the march to Nantao stadium). We know that inside are Jim’s cherished cutouts of American magazines, the closest thing he has to memories, and aptly echoes the opening shot of a coffin floating in the same river. Ballard’s bookends are maintained, even if with a somewhat different flavor.

LEFT: Wishing he’d never left the camp… Christian Bale in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

The final scene shows Jim’s parents looking for him among other children that supposedly were collected from other camps. Jim is aloof, not interested or it’s as if he has no hope of ever seeing his parents again. As his mother spots him, it takes Jim a moment or two to recognize her. They embrace, and the last we see of him are his tired eyes, closing finally in (a sort of) tranquility. There is a sense that he’ll never be the same again — but Spielberg refuses to look past this moment and consider any kind of closure for Jim other than rejoining his parents and recovering the security of the family unit. It’s ambiguous and circumspect, as if Spielberg didn’t want to commit to the bleakness of Ballard’s original vision or an all-out “happy” ending. It overstates the importance of family, as if what Jim had been through was only consequence of them being separated. It’s the death of childhood, whereas Spielberg’s earlier films were all about a rediscovery of childhood or its celebration, and he even acknowledged that Empire was the opposite of Peter Pan.

Unfortunately Empire is probably the most undervalued of Spielberg’s more serious outings, and it is by far his least successful film commercially. When it was released, it had to compete with the public’s attention with two other films about boys in WWII or Oriental backdrops: John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (about the London Blitz) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (which got the most attention). The general impression is that the film was panned by the critics, but it was nominated for six Oscars, and won the National Board of Review award for Best Picture, Best Direction and Best Juvenile Performance (Christian Bale’s acting is indeed astonishing). Perhaps most importantly, Ballard himself responded quite well to it. In a 2006 interview conducted by Travis Elborough (included in the Harper Perennial 2006 edition of Empire), he said:

I liked the film. I think it is a very impressive piece of work. I see it once every couple of years. … It seems to have got richer and more interesting as the years pass. I see it not as the film of my book but a film in its own right.

He further elaborated his feelings for the film in an excellent article for the Guardian, in which he shared his memories of the writing process and his reception to the film:

I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn’t help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else’s. … Actors of another kind play out our memories, performing on a stage inside our heads whenever we think of childhood, our first day at school, courtship and marriage. The longer we live — and it’s now 60 years since I reluctantly walked out of Lunghua camp — the more our repertory company emerges from the shadows and moves to the front of the stage. Spielberg’s film seems more truthful as the years pass. Christian Bale and John Malkovich join hands by the footlights with my real parents and my younger self, with the Japanese soldiers and American pilots, as a boy runs forever across a peaceful lawn towards the coming war. But perhaps, in the end, it’s all only a movie.

Empire of the Sun being a novel that is a mixture of memories, facts, and imagination, represents Ballard’s attempt to come to terms with his wartime experience. The film adaptation is a reimagining of the same material by someone else, and it can’t possibly fulfill the same purpose for Ballard as the book does. But for everyone else, Spielberg’s film remains a powerful cinematic adaptation of Ballard’s work, unusually clever and subtle for a Hollywood production. It benefits greatly from repeated viewings, as previously unnoticed details suddenly throw new light on Spielberg’s treatment. Although some may feel it’s a little too saccharine or somewhat pasteurized for mass consumption, the film is never cheap and the emotions are all genuine, as great a film as could have been made in mainstream American cinema in 1987.

Pedro Groppo, 2007.

..:: REFERENCES

+ Ballard, J. G. Empire of the Sun. London: Harper Collins, 2006.
—. “Look Back at Empire.” The Guardian. March 2006.
+ Friedman, Lester B. Citizen Spielberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
+ Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness. London: Oxford University Press, 2000.
+ Maslin, Janet. “Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.” The New York Times.
+ McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

..:: MORE INFO

Shanghai Jim: Form Dictated by Time.

It’s divided into six channels: (1) J.G. Ballard Interviews; (2) J.G. Ballard Documentaries; (3) J.G. Ballard Adaptations; (4) J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten Science Fiction Films; (5) Ballardiana; and (6) Ballardian Sound Art/Music. Access them via these links or the players below.

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

Thanks to the YouTube community for the uploads.

J.G. BALLARD INTERVIEWS
Ballard interviews.

J.G. BALLARD DOCUMENTARIES
Ballard docos.

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

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

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

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

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 private lives and relationships, expose scandals, and revise or reinforce received myths. They may celebrate or promote the artist. They may commemorate a centenary or whip up interest in new work.

The most successful, however, use the conventions and devices of film to add something to the work. They show how the artist works by simple critical demonstration. Martin Scorsese’s television documentaries about music and film are good examples. They combine autobiography with critical homage. Successful documentaries always include statements by the artist, but never rely on them, since they are notoriously inaccurate. They collage them together with imagery, spoken texts, re-enactments, file footage and visual, aural or written quotation from the artist’s oeuvre, so that we learn by seeing and hearing. They will often be reiterative, repeating motifs, phrases, images and fragments in new contexts so that the artist’s work and experience revolves in front of us.

Shanghai Jim is rather British and apparently modest in manner. Interestingly, no one is credited with the direction of this film. One assumes it is a ‘chappish’ collaboration between Runcie, Ballard and the crew (possibly a mix of East Asian freelancers and BBC artisans). The settings of Shanghai and Shepperton also provide direction. It succeeds brilliantly by allowing Ballard to talk as he would to a friend. It also takes its cues from his fiction. It completely eschews the usual unhelpful academic talking heads and their desiccated third hand commentary in favour of his first person, first hand moments. The only other interviews are with Ballard’s sweet round-faced daughters. Neither does Shanghai Jim ‘dramatise’ events. It uses actors set in scenes from Ballard’s life and work, not to reenact the past or to illustrate his fiction, but to indicate that this is how it might be or have been, but the viewer cannot go there.

Its form is dictated entirely by time, one of the preoccupations of Ballard’s writing. Since it only has 48 minutes to say what it has to say, it uses cinematic narrative conventions to open up the work, to expand time. Crossovers in time, achieved by montages of Ballard’s monologue, plus re-enactments and archival footage, amplify moments in his life and art. They show how his work brings the two together and propose ways of reading it, new entrances to the space of his fiction.

To make my case it is necessary to describe some sequences from the film.

ABOVE: The Bund, Shanghai, circa 1930, the year Ballard was born.

ABOVE: The Bund in 1991, the year Ballard returned to Shanghai (screenshot from Shanghai Jim; 1991).

The strategy of Shanghai Jim is already clear in its opening sequence: a panoramic view of Chinese ships sailing in front of a view of the old Shanghai skyline, and a reading by John Shrapnel from The Kindness of Women:

Some six hundred former internees, mostly women and children, sailed for England in a converted meat carrier. My father and other Britons staying behind in Shanghai stood on the pier at Hongkew, waving to us as the Arrawa drew away from them across the slow brown tide. When we reached the middle of the channel, working our way through the scores of American destroyers and landing craft, I left my mother and walked to the stern of the ship. The relatives on the pier were still waving to us, and my father saw me and raised his arm, but I found it impossible to wave back to him, something I regretted for many years. Perhaps I blamed him for sending me away from this mysterious and exhilarating city.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (1991; 60).

What we see, however, is clearly not the Arawa (the official spelling of the ship appears to be ‘Arawa’), nor post-war Shanghai, but rather a boy at a railing looking out from under a Chinese flag, on a boat of some kind, presumably in Shanghai. There is no attempt to illustrate the quotation; the boy is not in costume. A child from the present is placed into the imagined past that is Ballard’s fiction in Kindness, in what is, to use Ballard’s term, a recapitulation. (At the end of the film the present day adult Ballard replaces this child.) A dissolve to Eduardo Paolozzi’s title graphics follows: a collage resembling a turning Taoist wheel with ‘Shanghai Jim‘ written in Mandarin, the title in English superimposed at its centre.

The Paolozzi wheel (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

We then see Ballard packing a slightly battered suitcase, a meticulously folded shirt, a guidebook to Shanghai, a Sony video camera and an old style British passport on top. They are grouped neatly like the collections of objects seen in Ballard’s writing. Surely no one puts their passport in their suitcase. We are being invited to look at these things curiously for a moment, as though they make up some kind of Kim’s Game. Ballard closes and picks up the suitcase, walks to the door and turns to view the room. The camera adopts his viewpoint. We see his houseplants and his copy of his favourite Delvaux, and hear his voice:

Many people have said to me, ‘What an extraordinary life you’ve had’, but of course my childhood in Shanghai was far closer to the way the majority of people on this planet, in previous centuries and in the 20th century, have lived than, say, life in the Western Europe and the United States. It’s we here, in our quiet suburbs and our comparatively peaceful cities, who are the anomalies.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

In the last sentence Ballard, in one of the film’s manifest anomalies, closes the door on the room and we join him on the road to Heathrow, which dissolves to black and white archival film of the Japanese naval ensign and wartime footage of the Japanese in China as Ballard drives beneath a motorway overpass. A voiceover begins: ‘On the day he publishes the sequel to Empire of the Sun, a highly personal book, The Kindness of Women, Bookmark takes Ballard back to Shanghai for the first time in 45 years.’

Archival footage from Shanghai Jim, the kind that’s clearly the source for a number of scenes in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

The first two and a half minutes of the film contain a densely packed sequence of images and quotations, a collage of Ballard’s writing, his accounts of it, and of his personal and fictional landscapes — the temporal and spatial situations of his work. The film then tracks Ballard through sites of key memories in Shanghai, and recapitulates passages from Kindness in China and England. There is a double purpose here, to trace earlier passages in the fictional life of Kindness, and to show Ballard’s return to the Shanghai he has not seen for nearly fifty years. Accordingly, Shanghai Jim shows writer and writing to have a common cause, not to explain the writing by the writer’s experiences, but to show how his life gave rise to his work.

Although his Shanghai experience is explicit in ‘Too Bad’, from ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ (1969), his return to the experiences of his childhood in his longer works is relatively late. The film allows Ballard to talk about his past, to walk the streets of Shanghai, to sit in a club and watch a Chinese jazz band, and to visit his Shanghai homes at Amherst Avenue and at Lunghua Camp. These scenes are montaged with archival film, and with scenes of the boy (Hans Gebruers) re-enacting Ballard’s bicycle journeys around Shanghai and some of Jim’s actions in Empire.

Ballard’s voyage to Shanghai is framed as atavistic, something that he touches on at the end of the film as he sits in the room said to be his family’s quarters during their internment. He speaks of ‘coming to terms’ with his past, but this reckoning does not lead to comfortable closure. The images of the boy and Ballard (dressed like a film noir expat in a cream linen sports-coat) as they move through the setting of Shanghai make them look dislocated. These scenes are set against archival films of Shanghai, both of war and day-to-day city life, from which Ballard and the boy are patently absent. Neither Ballard nor the boy who stands in for him has returned to wartime Shanghai. It is a strength of the film that there is no such pretence. The effect is to emphasise the importance of both memory and imagery, key aspects of Ballard’s writing.

Ballard appears to be quite breathlessly moved as he stands in front of his old family house and discusses his memories of the place. He describes his entry into his old room at 31 Amherst Avenue with its blue ceiling and childhood bookshelf as being ‘like a sort of time capsule, really, that I’d stepped into after all these years’. And this happens after he has written of his childhood in Empire and Kindness:

This is 31 Amherst Avenue – the house in Shanghai where I spent my childhood. Coming back to Shanghai for the first time since 1946 has been a very strange experience, and of course the house is the strangest of all. I spent my entire childhood here, and I really came something close to adult life here.

So it is a strange experience. I keep trying to think what would have happened had the war not taken place. I would have gone on living here, and probably would have gone on living in Shanghai. So I see around me here a kind of alternate life that I never actually managed to live because of the war.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

‘A strange experience’: Ballard in front of 31 Amherst Avenue (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

A sequence follows, showing the interior of the house, shots of the boy mounting the steps, presumably to Ballard’s childhood room, and then looking out of the window. This is intercut with a shot of Ballard looking out of a window, but not the same window; rather, a window on the ground floor. Later in the film, a shot of the windows of Lunghua echoes these.

Other shots show an empty room, presumably Jamie’s blue room, with standard fans blowing. It was apparently a hot day, and at one point Ballard seems to wipe sweat — surely not a tear — from his face. We do not see him in his room. Was it too hot to use cameras up there for very long? Had there been someone working at the desk who was politely waiting on the stairs for the film crew to leave? The gaps in this film show us the difficulties faced by the film-makers, but a critical virtue is made of necessity. Just as the Ken Burns effect is the result of Burns’ reliance on still photographs in his remarkable documentary series on the American Civil War, so in Shanghai Jim the difficulties of filming a return to the past strengthen the film’s account of the artist and his work. Shanghai remains potent in memory and in the writing.

ABOVE: ‘Time had stopped in Amherst Avenue’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

ABOVE: Jamie Ballard’s Blue Room (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

In Shanghai Jim I believe we have a rare, if not the only recording of J.G. Ballard reading his own prose. He stands adjacent to the subject of the passage, and reads from what looks like a proof copy of The Kindness of Women:

Of all the places of wonder, the Great World Amusement Park on the Avenue Edward VII most amazed me, and contained the magnetic heart of Shanghai within its six floors. … A vast warehouse of light and noise, the Amusement park was filled with magicians and fireworks, slot machines and sing-song girls. A haze of frying fat gleamed in the air, and formed a greasy film on my face, mingling with the smell of joss-sticks and incense. Stunned by the din, I would follow Yang as he slipped through the acrobats and Chinese actors striking their gongs. (KW, 18)

There is something disturbing about hearing this fictional version of Ballard’s experience delivered in his first-person, by-now-familiar voice. He could be describing an actual event, but not necessarily so. The authority and formal distance of his reading distinguishes his delivery from that of his spoken responses, which contain the stresses and pauses of recollection. Artifice and memory combine to reveal the texture of his life and work. More archival film follows, this time of the amusement park, as Ballard’s voice tells us:

All my characters spend their time constructing personal mythologies which can sustain their inner lives. My characters tend to be solitary, which is an unfortunate trait I think inherited from me, and they are experimenting with themselves as if they were…dreams.

As we hear this the boy cycles obliquely towards the camera, then Ballard walks in the same direction among a Shanghai crowd. He looks just a little flustered, perhaps by the heat. He mutters something. We hear what sounds like a bicycle bell and the last of Ballard’s voiceover coincides with his face coming almost to fill the screen.

His expression, slightly worried or thoughtful, matches the voiceover. Rising strings in the background carry over into a particularly compelling example of the use of archival footage, and one of the most interesting sequences in the film: a night scene of burning ruins and water. From slightly above we see a boat with a machine gun mounted on its prow. Armed soldiers aim warily at the shore as the boat moves through water, a Japanese sentry scans the area, a searchlight is rhymed with a shot of the moon emerging from clouds, followed by a return to the burning ruins at the water’s edge. Over this the opening passage from Empire of the Sun is read, and at either side of it we see the hot and bothered looking Ballard, in cream coat and open necked shirt, and Ballard the boy, walking among the crowds in Shanghai. The effect of this is particularly surreal, as the imagery of destruction is countered with its tragic contrary forces, art and youth, in the form of Ballard and an imagined boy-self.

Later we see Ballard (now in panama hat) enter through the gates of Lunghua, the wartime Civilian Assembly Centre where the Japanese interned European civilians. He sits and describes the room that was his family’s home from 1942-45. There has been no attempt to tidy away mess in the room before shooting, but while this might suggest the chaos of camp life it is unlikely that these spaces would have been anything other than neatly ordered. Nonetheless, the mess gives the room the dereliction that Ballard admires in abandoned objects and spaces and helps furnish the mise en scène of his writing.

ABOVE: ‘In a strange way I quite enjoyed my life here’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

Other perspectives of Lunghua are more prosaic. When Ballard stands on the roof of F-Block, ‘the main administrative building’, and identifies the various parts of Lunghua, disappointingly there is no pagoda. What looks like the Shanghai skyline may be seen in the hazy distance, however, rather like the view of Heathrow from parts of Shepperton.

Ballard’s young adult self is re-enacted by actor Michael Troughton, whom we see wandering around Shepperton, engrossed in newsreels and crash tests in the cinema and on television, watching a fighter plane landing at Lakenheath, and dissecting corpses at Cambridge. One sequence shows the real Ballard standing in front of machinery at a gravel quarry. The camera slowly moves from left to right across his thoughtful face, and as he turns and looks across the gravel lake it picks up Troughton, who stands on a small promontory at the water’s edge and returns Ballard’s gaze for a moment. There is a cut to a mid-shot of Troughton who then turns away. The voiceover through this sequence, which follows a shot of Troughton under a willow, and one of a railway worker in Shanghai, is another reading of an edited passage from Kindness:

The past had slipped away, taking with it my memories of Cambridge and Canada, of the dissecting room and … even of Shanghai. The warm light over Shepperton reminded me of the illuminated air that I had seen over the empty paddy fields of Lunghua as I walked along the railway line, but the light that filled the splash-meadow came from a kinder and more gentle sun. The children … who played by the stream had taken the place of the dead Chinese lying in the Lunghua creeks and canals. For the first time I was living in an endless present that owed nothing to the past. (KW, 126-7)

The result is paradoxical, in that memory is countered at the same time as it is invoked. One wonders what it might have been like for Ballard to stand in front of the camera and turn to view a version of his younger self. On the whole, and despite the courteous diffidence he displays so often, he is remarkably unselfconscious in front of a camera, as Simon Sellars points out in his essay on Cokliss’ Crash!. He is doing this for the same reason that he has done so many interviews, because he takes his work seriously. In front of the Shepperton Film Studios, Ballard speaks of how ‘Shepperton has insinuated itself into my fiction over the years’. We are shown images of gravel pits accompanied by a reading from Vermilion Sands. From these sequences we can see the ways in which the terrors and wonders of the modern world may be present in its apparently most banal settings. Shepperton’s specific location in space and time makes it an exemplar of this effect, but reading Ballard’s work allows us to see it in our own environments. From the juxtapositions in these sequences we can see that the mental landscape of Ballard’s life and art is clearly around him at all times, as it is around us if we care to look at it. In other words, the main achievement of Shanghai Jim is the way that it images the ‘Ballardian’ for us.

‘Living in an endless present’: Ballard turns to look at his younger self (screenshots from Shanghai Jim).

One of the most interesting sequences is that of Ballard’s visit to the scene dock at Shepperton studios. This sequence follows a re-enactment of a younger Ballard watching footage of crash-testing, and is framed by Ballard speaking to interviewer:

In a psychiatric case history one’s getting to a mythic core of what makes up human nature, and this is what I was interested in. My characters are all driven by the need to find some sort of truth. They may have to construct this truth for themselves. They resort to a set of desperate stratagems, I think that’s a common to so many of my characters. I mean, the characters may choose strange ways of finding salvation, but its salvation they’re all after. They’re obsessed with the need to find the sustaining mythology of their lives, to pursue that mythology to its logical end whatever the cost. They’re all embarked on these strange quests.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

Ballard’s voiceover continues as he walks into the Shepperton scene-dock, his gait familiar by now: head slightly tilted to see what is around him and arms loosely by his side, thoughtful, slightly anxious, purposeful, but no harm meant to anyone:

In a psychiatric case history one’s getting to a mythic core of what makes up human nature, and this is what I was interested in.

My characters are all driven by the end to find some sort of truth. They may have to construct this truth for themselves. They resort to a set of desperate stratagems, I think that’s a common to so many of my characters. I mean, the characters may choose strange ways of finding salvation, but its salvation they’re all after. They’re obsessed with the need to find the sustaining mythology of their lives, to pursue that mythology to its logical end whatever the cost. They’re all embarked on these strange quests.

J.G. Ballard, Shanghai Jim.

The camera scans the area and then returns to Ballard. Whether by accident or design, a number of Ballard’s preoccupations come together here. The scene dock is like an arcade of visual memory, a coalescence of Aragon’s Paris Peasant, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and Ballard’s The Crystal World, in which Ballard stages some events in a setting of arcades and a market place where Christian and pagan fetishes are sold, and where the light and the dark may be divided in the architectural spaces of the French colonial streetscape.

As he paused by the boat, feeling the crystals along its sides, a huge four-legged creature half-embedded in the surface lurched forward through the crust, the loosened pieces of lattice attached to its snout and shoulders shaking like a transparent cuirass. Its jaws mouthed the air silently as it struggled on its hooked legs, unable to clamber more than a few inches from the hollow trough in its own outline now filling with a thin trickle of water. Invested by the glittering light that poured from its body, the crocodile resembled a fabulous armorial beast. Its blind eyes had been transformed into immense crystalline rubies.

J.G. Ballard. The Crystal World (1966; 96-7).

As he rounds a corner, two crocodiles appear, one stacked on top of another larger one.

‘The crocodile of memory’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

In speaking of the amphibian life of The Drowned World, Ballard also recalls an alligator in Shanghai Zoo:

Among the characteristic fauna of the Triassic age were both crocodiles and alligators, amphibian creatures at home in both the aquatic and terrestrial worlds, who symbolize for the hero of the novel the submerged dangers of his quest. Even now I can vividly remember the enormous ancient alligator housed in a narrow concrete pit, half-filled with cigarette packets and ice-cream cartons in the reptile house at the Shanghai Zoo, who seemed to have been jerked forward reluctantly, so many tens of millions of years into the 20th century.

J.G. Ballard. ‘Time Memory and Inner Space’, in The Woman Journalist, Spring 1963, repr. in V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 100-101, 100.

The crocodiles in the scene-dock are exemplars of all the other objects there. They are stage properties, like those used in Ballard’s fiction, objects in and through which we image our relations with the world. Whoever chose to include this sequence in Shanghai Jim is making visible to us an aspect of Ballard’s method. Ballard approaches the crocodiles, almost cautiously walks around them and turns to look at them. As he does, he stands in front of a large map of the ‘far-East’, the world of Lord Jim, of Ballard’s youth and the Pacific War. Above him is a pub sign, ‘The George’:

‘Lord Jim’ (screenshot from Shanghai Jim).

Ballard then walks to the other side of the crocodiles, and is here flanked by a piece of scenery, a panel of windows from a passenger jet. As he views the crocodiles and then turns to descend a set of stairs into sunlight, Shrapnel reads an edited passage from The Crystal World:

He strolled through the deserted arcades, noticing, as he did each morning, the strange contrasts between light and shadow despite the apparent absence of direct sunlight in Port Matarre…. Somewhere in the crystalline streets of Mont Royal were the missing fragments of himself, living in their own prismatic medium.

This sequence is another example of the way this film uses documentary conventions to show us how Ballard works. Rather than a dramatisation of a passage from The Crystal World, this film gives us a performance by Ballard in a museum of his writing and memory and of the media landscape. We go backstage, as it were, into the dressing room of Ballard’s imagination, and that of our times.

This seems strange because it appears to be quite separate from the theme of return to Shanghai, and draws particular attention to The Crystal World. Not so strange however, if one considers what the sequence achieves in less than two minutes. It adds to the film by deploying the metaphor of stage properties, drawing attention to the ways in which Ballard makes use of objects and images in the sets of exhibits that he is constantly shuffling and reordering in his writing. The Kindness of Women might be seen as a catalogue of the objects of Ballard’s memory, a dangerously deceptive guide to his creative life and a milder form of the catalogue of experiments in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard’s visit to a particular object in what is effectively a museum of his place and time seems not so strange if we consider it as a counterweight to the journey into an irrecoverable past. The plenitude of the scene dock ironically mocks the relative emptiness of the room at 31 Amherst Avenue, a room which looks as though it has just been vacated for the camera by its usual inhabitants.

It would be easy to get a documentary film about Ballard wrong. The readings of the texts from Ballard’s collages might have been more effective as voiceovers to a scene of a Shepperton supermarket, rather than the gyrations of a nude dancer. The acid trip visuals are a bit cheesy. A lot of the archival footage is not credited. It would be good to see a shooting script for the film, a full list of credits, and to find out how the whole thing was designed and put together.

Shanghai Jim succeeds, however. It avoids reductive explanations of the work and uses the medium of television well, although most viewers will now see it on their laptop screens via Youtube. It illuminates, and is at times moving. Importantly, it amplifies Ballard’s fiction for us and allows us to recognise the Ballardian nature of our own lives

Pippa Tandy, August 2007

Many thanks to Susanna and Stephanie Shen for their Mandarin Chinese translation, to Liz Harding for scans, and to David Bromfield for editorial suggestions.

..:: APPENDIX
+ Transcript of J.G. Ballard’s commentary from the film.

..:: MORE IN THIS SERIES
+ Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon
+ Thirteen to Centaurus

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 of Shanghai Jim.

A week after Christmas I left Shanghai for ever. Some six hundred former internees, mostly women and children, sailed for England in the converted meat carrier. My father and the other Britons staying behind in Shanghai stood on the pier at Hongkew, waving to us as the Arrawa drew away from them across the slow brown tide. When we reached the middle of the channel, working our way through scores of American destroyers and landing craft, I left my mother and walked to the stern of the ship. The relatives on the pier were still waving to us, and my father saw me and raised his arm, but I found it impossible to wave back to him, something I regretted for many years. Perhaps I blamed him for sending me away from this mysterious and exhilarating city.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (71-2).

J.G. BALLARD: Many people have said to me, ‘What an extraordinary life you’ve had’, but of course my childhood in Shanghai was far closer to the way the majority of people on this planet, in previous centuries and in the 20th century, have lived than, say, life in Western Europe and the United States. It’s we here, in our quiet suburbs and our comparatively peaceful cities, who are the anomalies.

I described Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women as ‘semi-autobiographical’, which they are. Many of the events which took place are straightforward transcriptions of what actually happened to me. My first intact memories really date from 1937 when the Japanese invaded China, and all of Shanghai except for the International Settlement, and there was tremendously bitter fighting in and around the city.

Hans Gebruers as young Jim in Shanghai Jim.

I don’t ever remember being frightened. I think it was because we lived very protected lives as the children of Westerners in Shanghai. I was moving around the city, as it were, officially: I travelled everywhere in my parents’ car with a chauffeur. And unofficially, of course, I was always pretending to go and see a friend who lived in Amherst Avenue. And I’d ride on my little bike, I’d ride all over Shanghai in the most extraordinary way. I don’t know whether it was the magic of childhood that gave me safe passage, or the sort of a built-in arrogance of a Westerner who took for granted that he wouldn’t be harmed.

I felt a surge of excitement on entering Shanghai. To my child’s eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme. The garish billboards and nightclub neon signs, the young Chinese gangsters and violent beggars … were part of an overlit realm more exhilarating than the American comics and radio serials I so adored. … My father called Shanghai the most advanced city in the world.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (18, 19).

J.G. BALLARD: This is 31 Amherst Avenue, as it was — the house in Shanghai where I spent my childhood. Coming back to Shanghai for the first time since 1946 has been a very strange experience and of course the house is the strangest of all. I spent my entire childhood here, and I really came something close to adult life here. So it is a strange experience. I keep trying to think what would have happened had the war not taken place. I would have gone on living here, and probably would have gone on living in Shanghai. So I see around me here a sort of alternate life that I never actually managed to live because of the war.

Time had stopped in Amherst Avenue, as motionless as the wall of dust that hung across the rooms, briefly folding itself around Jim when he walked through the deserted house. Almost forgotten scents, a faint taste of carpet, reminded him of the period before the war. For three days he waited for his mother and father to return. Every morning he climbed onto the sloping roof above his bedroom window and gazed over the residential streets in the western suburbs of Shanghai. He watched the columns of Japanese tanks move into the city…

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (45).

J.G. BALLARD: It was very strange walking into my old bedroom on the top floor of the house because that still has its original blue paintwork, and I recognised the little bookshelves where I kept my books, my copies of Chums’ Annual, and Boy’s Own Paper, and all my American comics, and the bathroom attached to it. It was like a sort of time capsule, really, that I’d stepped into after all these years.

So much of ordinary life today is driven by the most peculiar psychological forces. In the case of my own fiction, there is an attempt as well to try to understand the changed nature of fiction and reality that constitutes our world.

Of all the places of wonder, the Great World Amusement Park on the Avenue Edward VII most amazed me, and contained the magic heart of Shanghai within its six floors. … A vast warehouse of light and noise, the Amusement Park was filled with magicians and fireworks, slot machines and sing-song girls. A haze of frying fat gleamed in the air, and formed a greasy film on my face, mingling with the smell of joss-sticks and incense. Stunned by the din, I would follow Yang as he slipped through the acrobats and Chinese actors striking their gongs.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (18).

J.G. BALLARD: All my characters spend their time constructing personal mythologies which can sustain their inner lives. My characters tend to be solitary, which is an unfortunate trait I think inherited from me, and they are experimenting with themselves as if they were…dreams.

Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adruft from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.

Jim had begun to dream of wars. At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, and transformed his mind into a deserted newsreel theater. … Fragments of his dreams followed Jim around the city…

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (3).

J.G. BALLARD: Our sense of security in Shanghai came to an end without any doubt after Pearl Harbour, when the Japanese seized the International Settlement. Then it was quite clear that Western power had vanished, to all intents and purposes, and that the Japanese were masters now. I admit I admired the Japanese for their strength. I couldn’t help but compare the Japanese soldiers, and all boys’ hero worship, with the English officers, who surrendered without firing a shot in Singapore even though the British forces outnumbered the Japanese by three to one. I thought of these formative experiences all the time, sometimes without being aware of it, and it certainly filtered through into my fiction, and it’s only in Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women that I’ve written directly about my experiences here.

‘This Chinese high school…’; Jim Ballard re-enters Lunghua Camp almost 50 years on.

This Chinese high school, about eight miles south of Shanghai, was known during the Second World War as Lunghua Camp. And here, after Pearl Harbour, when the Japanese entered the war against the Allies, about 2000 British nationals, all of them civilians — a few Belgians, and about 50 American merchant seamen — were interned for nearly three years.

ABOVE: The roof of F Block: JGB shows us the way…

ABOVE: …to the old assembly hall at Lunghua Camp.

We’re standing on the roof of what used to be F Block, the main administrative building in Lunghua Camp. Over on the left you can just see G Block, where I lived with my family. That was one of the small family blocks in the camp. Every room had a family of four people.

This was the assembly hall, the old teacher training college in the 1930s. It was converted to an open-plan dormitory with a maze of cubicles of old sheets hung on bits of string. And I think probably about 100 people lived in there, all bachelors. Just through the trees you can catch a glimpse of one of the dining halls, which were in use for the first two years. Then to the right, the camp water tower. And over here is D Block, which is a larger version of the block in which I lived. That again is another family block.

This building, which housed on the third floor the Japanese Commandants offices, was a whole set of dormitories in which married couples lived. Again, it was a maze of cubicles made out of sheets and old blankets and heaven knows what.

I can remember the day we arrived, brought here in buses with our suitcases, and we brought our own bedding. This room was the room that my mother and father, sister and I shared for nearly three years. It was so crowded, in fact, that during the day my father, who slept there, raised his mattress against the wall so that we had a little space where we’d put up a card table and eat our meals. Otherwise there was just a door’s width between the beds. I slept over there, my mother there and my sister there. In a strange way I quite enjoyed my life here because I had so much freedom, and I was part of this very large nuclear family of 2000 people.

We got on very friendly terms with them. I remember wearing their kendo armour and duelling with them, hanging around their staff quarters, trying to look at their weapons which they were very careful not to let me handle. There was a certain sort of protocol for dealing with the Japanese; you never provoked them in any way.

I know that when the war ended there was an uncertain period of about two weeks when no one knew — the Japanese didn’t know — if the war had ended after the Emperor’s broadcast, or at least for a few days. And I remember deciding to walk to Shanghai, and I climbed through the wire and I set off northwards towards the western suburbs and Amherst Ave and reached a railway line, where I came across a tragic incident in which some Japanese soldiers were tormenting a Chinese to death.

On the concrete platform were four Japanese soldiers… Sitting with his back to a telephone pole, hands tied behind him, was a Chinese youth in a white shirt and dark trousers. Bands of wire circled his chest, and he breathed in empty gasps. … He seemed out of place on this rural railway platform, unlike the soldiers and myself. … The corporal worked swiftly, coiling lengths of wire around the Chinese and knotting them with efficient snatches of his wrists. … The railway line hummed in the heat, a sound like pain.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (55, 56, 61, 59).

J.G. BALLARD: We lived through very dangerous times. I think had not the atom bombs been dropped, there were plans, so we heard afterwards, for the Japanese to evacuate the camp and march us all up the country, to where they would dispose of us before they made their last stand against the Americans at the mouth of the Yangtze. In fact, this didn’t happen because of the sudden end of the war.

In Europe there’d been enormous cruelty during the Second World War, but in a sense it was explicable in terms of the evil of Nazi ideology; it all flowed from that. But in the Far East, where I was brought up, there was no explanation, and this was the curious thing. Enormous cruelty had taken place there. Millions of people had been murdered for no real reason other than an innate streak of violence in human nature. I think when I came to England I had this unfinished baggage. I wanted to make sense of my past life which I’d left behind. By 1949, when I went up to Cambridge, to university, and the Communists had taken over China, I knew I would never go back. But I had this huge, unresolved set of questions.

Originally I wanted to become a psychiatrist and I think it was a case, really, of ‘physician, heal thyself’. Psychiatry seemed one way of coming to terms, of merely understanding what all this was, and to become a psychiatrist I had to first become a doctor. So I spent two years as a medical student, cutting up cadavers. I think every medical student can remember the first moment, walking into the dissecting room: a strange cross between a butcher’s shop and a nightclub. It was quite jolting, even though I’d seen a great number of dead bodies, to see them actually laid out under this strange light in this rather theatrical way on these glass tables. In those days they were a faintly green colour, as a result of the formaline.

The strange thing to me, and I think this is true, they don’t actually look like the dead — they look like visitors from another planet. As you begin the process of dissection, you enter literally, and mentally and imaginatively, into the bodies of these dead men and women. I mean, as you separate the nerves and blood vessels and dissect muscles away from the bone, you are getting as close a look at another human being, in the physical sense and to some extent the imaginative sense, as you can ever do. I think it’s an enriching and powerful experience.

Dissection is a kind of erotic autopsy. … I imagined a strange act of love performed by an obsessed surgeon on a living woman, in a deserted operating theatre in one of those sinister clinics in the Cambridge suburbs. I would kiss the linings of her lungs, run my tongue along her bronchi, press my face to the moist membranes of her heart as it pulsed against my lips.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (91, 92).

Michael Troughton, playing a post-Shanghai Jim, prepares to get to the basic truth about humans.

J.G. BALLARD: It seemed to me that by dissecting the body, by understanding how all its various biological systems function, you were getting to some sort of basic truth about human beings. Of course, the brain lay beyond, but at least it was a start, particularly as the human body was surrounded with so many taboos — and still is — and of course in 1951 was surrounded by infinitely more taboos than it is now. It seemed a start, but after two years I’d had enough, and I still hadn’t found myself in England, which seemed to be a very very strange place, so for a few years I embarked on a kind of ‘catch as catch can’ existence, working for an advertising agency for a brief while; I went to Canada with the RAF as a trainee pilot for a while.

I left after about seven or eight months and decided I’d had enough of the air force. Flying had been interesting, and it had given me another set of myths to live by, all of which, oddly enough, fed into my fiction. Flying has always been a very important part of my fiction. I think it stems from my childhood and in particular the air war over Shanghai. I think the first sight of the American B29s, which began to bomb Shanghai in 1944, and then the fighter attacks by Mustangs that flew so low over our camp that I remember looking down at them from the second and third floor of our building during the air raids, flying within ten feet of paddy fields. I accept this idea that flight is a symbol of escape, but I think more than escape, of transcendence. It’s played a very important role in my fiction. My characters are forever dreaming of runways and looking into those skies, where they can transcend themselves, and from which, of course, in the mid- and late 20th century, life and death come in terms of nuclear weapons.

I think I’m assembling a kind of mythology for myself, a kind of substitute. I’d deliberately forgotten my China background by then; I never mentioned it to anybody. My wife, when I married her in 1954 or 55, I don’t think I ever told her that I was born and brought up in Shanghai, or if I did it was only in passing, and I hardly ever described it to my children.

The past had slipped away, taking with it my memories of Cambridge and Canada, of the dissecting room and … even of Shanghai. The warm light over Shepperton reminded me of the illuminated air that I had seen over the empty paddy fields of Lunghua as I walked along the railway line, but the light that filled the splash-meadow came from a kinder and more gentle sun. The children … who played by the stream had taken the place of the dead Chinese lying in the Lunghua creeks and canals. For the first time I was living in an endless present that owed nothing to the past.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (126-7).

J.G. BALLARD: We came here, my wife and I, in 1960. We had three very young children and we were looking for a house where we could bring them up, really in a sort of quiet suburb, so we saw there was a house advertised here, had a look around Shepperton, and found that in many ways it was a sort of tranquil and quite mysterious place. The river, which winds through Shepperton like a sort of great snake, all the gravel lakes here and the great reservoirs of the Metropolitan Water Board — you realise when you fly from Heathrow and look down on the place, this is a marine world. I think it was the right choice at the time, because Shepperton has insinuated itself into my fiction over the years.

I’d arrived at Vermilion Sands three months earlier. … Driving into the desert one day, I stopped near the coral towers on the highway to Lagoon West. As I gazed at these immense pagodas stranded on the floor of this fossil sea, I heard music coming from a sand-reef two hundred yards away … where sonic statues had run to seed beside a ruined studio. The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-like building to the sand-rays and the desert.

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D’, in The Complete Short-Stories of J.G. Ballard (744).

J.G. BALLARD: When I started reading science fiction for the first time in 1954, I was unusual in that I started writing it at almost the same time. Science fiction I think was dominated by its sociological speculation. It was really interested in the present rather than the very far future, and it struck me that science fiction had the right vocabulary with which to explore the world in which we found ourselves living in the mid-1950s. It seemed to me a new kind of Britain was emerging, the first motorways, and above all the TV landscape that was being imposed on all this.

I mean, all the great issues of the day, at that time — the threat of nuclear war, the development of modern communication systems, in particular television, and the role computers were going to play, the transformation of the whole planet into a media landscape, the changing nature of fiction ad reality within that media landscape — all these were topics that were not covered in any way by, say, the English mainstream novel of the day. It struck me that here was an interesting field ripe for takeover, I felt.

In this overlit realm ruled by images of the space race and the Viet Nam war, the Kennedy assassination and the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, a unique alchemy of the imagination was taking place. … The brutalising news-reels of civil wars and assassinations, the stylisation of televised violence into an anthology of design statements, were matched by a pornography of science that took its materials, not from nature, but from the deviant curiosity of the scientist.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (190).

J.G. BALLARD: After I got married, and children began to appear, I needed some kind of much more settled life, so that I could write in the evenings and weekends so I took a job on a chemical society journal called Chemistry & industry, a weekly scientific journal. I was assistant editor of it. It was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It’s the ultimate information crossroads. Most of it went straight into the wastepaper basket, but en route I was filtering it like some sort of sea creature sailing with its jaws open through a great sea of delicious plankton. I was filtering all this extraordinary material. I certainly remember reading with great interest the first scientific papers on the chemistry of hallucinogenic drugs — that was very interesting to me.

In The Kindness of Women I describe the central character, the narrator Jim, taking LSD as I did myself at about the same time in this house, something we all had to do, I think, in the mid 60s. It was a piece of real foolishness on my part — I wasn’t expecting the total derailment of my mind that LSD brought about.

They were soon within the body of the forest, and had entered an enchanted world. The crystal trees around them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. … The long arc of trees hanging over the water seemed to drip and glitter with myriads of prisms, the trunks and branches sheathed by bars of yellow and carmine light that bled away across the surface of the water, as if the whole scene were being reproduced by some over-active Technicolor process. The entire length of the opposite shore glittered with this blurred kaleidoscope…

J.G. Ballard. The Crystal World (75, 68).

J.G. BALLARD: Domestic life, and family life, provided the background to what must have seemed to outsiders a very strange group of novels. But I think that background of domesticity, all the excitement of young children, is the anchor pinning my imagination to the real world.

LEFT: Fay Ballard. RIGHT: Bea Ballard.

FAY BALLARD: I think part of Daddy’s writing is all about how normal everything looks, but actually under the surface it’s not at all normal.

BEA BALLARD: I remember him doing the odd strange thing, like I remember he sprayed his shoes with silver paint one day, and then strolled around Shepperton, and Shepperton being a very kind of bourgeois, boring town, you know, all the local residents, you can imagine, were looking and thinking, ‘how weird’.

FAY BALLARD: When it was hot, I remember Daddy once stripping off and walking around the garden naked, which he thought was quite normal, but of course the neighbours all started looking and thinking, ‘Gosh, who’s that crazy guy next door?’

J.G. BALLARD: I’m very glad I was able to bring up the children myself. And I often say they brought me up. I imagine I had a kind of second childhood — I was able to relive my own lost childhood through them.

FAY BALLARD: I remember one particular point, which was when he obviously remembered a very very bright light in Shanghai, because even on a really hot, beautiful summer day he would have all the electric lights on in the house. And I sometimes used to say, ‘We don’t need the light on’, and he’d say, ‘Oh yes, we do, it’s got to be bright’.

J.G. BALLARD: In fact my wife caught pneumonia and died in Spain in a matter of hours, tragically. It was certainly something that no young father, or young mother for that matter, with two or three children, expects — the spouse to suddenly die without any warning. I mean, I felt at the time that nature had committed a terrible crime against my wife and my children. I think the death of my wife provided me with a sort of renewed impetus to, again, make sense of the arbitrary cruelty of the world.

A gentle conspiracy existed among my friends and publishing acquaintances, as they feigned not to notice that Miriam had vanished through a window of time and space. This silence reminded me of the cruel childhood game in which we pretended, without telling him, that one of our friends no longer existed — the poor victim would be ignored, stared through, excluded from any games.
…
Watching the national mourning of a stricken America after the assassination of President Kennedy, I almost envied his bereaved wife. Every moment of her grief was endlessly replayed and anatomised on television. Her husband’s death, like the murder of his assassin, was recapitulated in slow motion, frame by numbered Zapruder frame. She wore her blood-spattered skirt like a scream of rage at the world that had widowed her.

J.G. Ballard. The Kindness of Women (174, 175).

J.G. BALLARD: I think it’s true that a lot of the machine-like, alienated sex that takes place in books like Crash or High-Rise is a reflection of my own sort of despair after the death of my wife and the peculiar, affectless quality of life the late 60s began to have, when I think it all began to come apart at the seams.

Each afternoon she would take me into the garden of the trailer park. Undressing herself, she made me memorise the trajectories of her body.

‘Placental Insufficiency’. Advertiser’s Announcement: A J.G. Ballard Production. Ambit magazine, no. 45, 1970.

After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised.

‘A Neural Interval’. Advertiser’s Announcement: A J.G. Ballard Production. Ambit magazine, no. 36, 1968.

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’. Advertiser’s Announcement: Sex : Inner Space : J.G. Ballard. Ambit magazine, no. 33, 1967.

J.G. BALLARD: Sensation ruled the late 60s. It was like firing an electric current into the leg of a dead frog — all you were looking for was a larger and larger kick, and this kick could be provided by drugs, or films of car crashes, or pure sensation transmitted through television. People who worry about the violence that’s shown on television now have obviously forgotten the sort of commonplace scenes of dreadful violence that were shown on British television during, say, the civil war in the Congo, and the Vietnam War, and all this had a sort of deadening of the emotions, and it seemed to me that one needed to perhaps embrace this world, to see what would happen, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, in Conrad’s words, and see if one could swim in this new realm.

I discovered the true significance of the automobile crash, the meaning of whiplash injuries and roll-over, the ecstasies of head-on collisions. Together we visited the Road Research Laboratory twenty miles to the west of London, and watched the calibrated vehicles crashing into the concrete target blocks. Later, in his apartment, Vaughan screened slow-motion films of test collisions that he had photographed with his cinecamera. Sitting in the darkness … we watched the silent impacts flicker… The repeated sequences of crashing cars first calmed and then aroused me. Cruising alone on the motorway … I thought of myself at the controls of these impacting vehicles.

J.G. Ballard. Crash (1973; 10).

J.G. BALLARD: In my early fiction I was always much more interested in psychological roles than in what we conventionally think of as novelistic characterisation, because I was always interested in psychiatric case histories. They seemed to be closer to the truth about human nature than the kind of fully fleshed-up, so-called characters that you find in the conventional mainstream novel. In a psychiatric case history one’s getting to a mythic core of what makes up human nature — this is what I was interested in.

My characters are all driven by the need to find some sort of truth. They may have to construct this truth for themselves. They resort to a set of desperate stratagems, I think that’s common to so many of my characters. I mean, the characters may choose strange ways of finding salvation, but it’s salvation they’re all after. They’re obsessed with the need to find the sustaining mythology of their lives, to pursue that mythology to its logical end whatever the cost. They’re all embarked on these strange quests.

He strolled through the … arcades, noticing, as he did each morning, the strange contrasts between light and shadow… Somewhere in the crystalline streets of Mont Royal were the missing fragments of himself, living on in their own prismatic medium.

J.G. Ballard. The Crystal World (174).

J.G. BALLARD: People have said that my fiction has a strong negative strain but of course it’s a matter of perspective. I remember when I wrote my first novel, The Drowned World, the American publisher said, ‘Fascinating novel, Jim, but you have your hero at the end going south towards the sun and certain death, and these primeval swamps that he’s obsessed with. Why not have him going north towards safety, and finding fulfilment there.’ I refused, of course, and I said at the time, ‘Well, of course, he does find fulfilment. He’s living out the logic of his own mythology, of his own dreams. He wants to go south into self-annihilation. This is what the book is about, and what perhaps human psychology on one level or another is about.’ And I think most of my novels, in fact all my fiction, is a fiction of psychological fulfilment.

In front of Jim was Lunghua Camp, his home and universe for the past three years, and the suffocating prison of nearly two thousand Allied nationals. The shabby barrack huts, the cement dormitory blocks, the worn parade ground and the guard house with its leaning watch tower lay together under the June sun, a rendezvous for every fly and mosquito in the Yangtze basin. But once he stepped through the wire fence, Jim felt the air steady around him.

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (167).

J.G. BALLARD: I started writing about it in, I think, 1983, at that time something like 40 years after the events I was describing, which is, I often reflect, an extraordinary long time to wait to describe a crucial experience, a crucial period in one’s life. I think the explanation is that when I left China in 1946 I virtually repressed all memory of my childhood for all sorts of reasons, and gradually I think I realised by the end of the 70s that so many of the moments in my novels and short stories only made sense if they were seen in terms of an attempt to recreate Shanghai.

‘This little room…’

This little room is in fact probably as close as I’ll ever come to home, surprisingly. Since arriving in Shanghai a couple of days ago, we’ve had quite a struggle finding the camp. It’s extremely well hidden now, and of course I’ve really spent 45 years looking for the place, and in many ways this is the most important place in my life, there’s no question about it. I came to puberty here; I left the camp when I was about 15, and I came to something close to an adult mind in this camp. I saw, of course, adults under a great deal of stress, which was an education in itself. But there’s no doubt that this is a kind of settling of account for me, coming here. It is a coming to terms with the past and the sort of dreams that to some extent have sustained me during the last 45 years in England, where I’ve never really been all that at home.

And in fact I certainly, and to some extent, this camp has been my real home, to which I’ve always referred in my imagination.

He stepped onto the gangway, conscious that he was probably leaving Shanghai for the last time, setting out for a small, strange country on the other side of the world… Yet only part of his mind would leave Shanghai. The rest would remain there forever…

J.G. Ballard. Empire of the Sun (351).

J.G. Ballard, 1991.

Transcribed by Simon Sellars, with thanks to Mike Bonsall. Please be in touch with corrections.

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

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 behind them the coils that ran to the metering devices by the impact zone. As they collided the debris of wings and fender floated into the air. The cars rocked against each as they continued on their disintegrating courses. In the passenger seats the plastic models transcribed graceful arcs into the buckling roofs and windshields. Here and there a passing fender severed a torso. The air behind the cars was a carnival of arms and legs.

J.G. BALLARD: I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.

We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.

The styling of motor cars, and of the American motor car in particular, has always struck me as incredibly important, bringing together all sorts of visual and psychological factors. As an engineering structure, the car is totally uninteresting to me. 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 — and the whole system of expectations contained in the design of the car, expectations about our freedom to move through time and space, about the identities of our own bodies, our own musculatures, the complex relationships between ourselves and the world of objects around us. These highly potent visual codes can be seen repeatedly in every aspect of the 20th century landscape. What do they mean? Have we reached a point now in the 70s where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself, and that it is the vital job of the writer to try to analyse and understand the huge significance of this metallised dream.

I’m interested in the automobile as a narrative structure, as a scenario that describes our real lives and our real fantasies. If every member of the human race were to vanish overnight, I think it would be possible to reconstitute almost every element of human psychology from the design of a vehicle like this. As a writer I feel I must try to understand the real meaning of a lot of commonplace but tremendously complicated events. I’ve always been fascinated by the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car.

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.

J.G. BALLARD: The close relationship between our own bodies and the body of the motor car is obvious. American automobile stylists have been exploring for years the relationship between sexuality and the motor car body, the primitive algebra of recognition which we use in our perception of all organic forms. If the man in the motor car is the key image of the 20th century, then the automobile crash is the most significant trauma. 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? Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed in car crashes all over the world. Millions are injured. 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? It’s always struck me that people’s attitudes towards the car crash are very confused, that they assume an attitude that in fact is very different from their real response. If we really feared the car crash, none of us would ever be able to drive a car.

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

I know that my own attitudes to the crashed car are just as confused. The distorted geometry of this tremendously stylised object: let’s face it, the most powerful symbol of our civilisation. It seems to pull at all sorts of concealed triggers in the mind: the postures of people in crashed vehicles; deformed manufacturer’s styling devices (crashed General Motors cars look very different from crashed Fords); the stylisation of the instrument panel, which after all is the model for our own wounds. Driving around, each of us knows what is literally the shape of our own death.

NARRATOR: Regaining consciousness, 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. She sat up, lifting herself from the broken steering wheel, uncertain for a moment whether the car windshield had been fractured. Against her forehead the strands of blood formed a torn veil. Above her knees, her hand moved towards the door lever. As she watched, the door opened and she fell out. Lifting herself, she held tightly to the car, feeling the pressure of the door slip against her hand. Turning, she stared at the waiting figure of the man she knew to be Dr Tallis.

J.G. BALLARD: 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. Metering coils trailed out of the windows and they had dummies sitting in them. They were beautifully filmed. They filmed them beautifully because they wanted to know what was happening. They weren’t interested in the aesthetics of the thing. These cars were in head-on collisions, right-angled collisions and sideswipes. And ploughing into other structures like utility poles. One could see four feet of metal suddenly become one foot. Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace. The power and weight of these cars gave them an immense classical dignity. It was like some strange technological ballet.

I remember looking at these films and thinking about the strange psychological dimensions they seemed to touch. They seemed to say something about the way everything becomes more and more stylised, more and more cut off from ordinary feeling. It seems to me that we have to regard everything in the world around us as fiction, as if we were living in an enormous novel, and that the kind of distinction that Freud made about the inner world of the mind, between, say, what dreams appeared to be and what they really meant, now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. All the structures in it, flyovers and motorways, office blocks and factories, are all part of this enormous novel.

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?

More exactly, I think that new emotions and new feelings are being created, that modern technology is beginning to reach into our dreams and change our whole way of looking at things, and perceiving reality, that more and more it is drawing us away from contemplating ourselves to contemplating its world.

J.G. Ballard, 1971.

Transcribed by Simon Sellars. Please be in touch with corrections.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon: an appraisal of the film.

‘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 would be arguably six years into the future before that could occur, with the dawn of Kubrick’s 2001), and Ballard’s suave imagination was clearly leaps and bounds ahead — as this adaptation demonstrates.

In Ballard’s story, we are introduced to a space station with a crew of thirteen, including the 16-year-old wunderkind, Abel, a boy given to questioning every facet of his existence. Abel is aware that there’s something beyond the limits of his perception, some vital key of knowledge that will explode the received worldview controlling life on the station. Yet every time he’s on the verge of a cognitive breakthrough, his logic blurs and fades, held back by the ‘conditioning’ that each crew member must undergo. This involves being subjected to ‘subsonic’ instruction — brainwashing — as the crew are kept in stasis, their minds preoccupied purely with the present and the working ritual of maintaining the station. Their conditioning ensures that the past, and indeed the future, is forever out of reach.

Yet Abel perseveres, conducting various experiments. He tells the onboard psychologist, Dr Francis, that he’s worked out the station is actually revolving, but he just can’t make that final mental leap to determine what that actually means as ‘his mind always fogged at a question like that, as the conditioning blocks fell like bulkheads across his thought trains (logic was a dangerous tool at the Station).’

Donald Houston as Dr Francis (still from Thirteen to Centaurus; dir. Peter Potter, 1965).

At this stage Dr Francis has no choice but to reveal to Abel the ‘truth’: the Station is actually a ‘multi-generation space vehicle’ on its way to Alpha Centauri. He tells him that generations have lived and died aboard the ship on a voyage that will take hundreds of years to complete, with only the remnants of the last generation living to see their destination. The coverup, that the space ship is in the guise of a space station, is presented to Abel as a necessary psychological safeguard to ensure the crew does not go mad with the knowledge that they will never live to see Alpha Centauri.

Ballard then introduces a rather clever double twist, a further layer to be unpeeled: we come to understand that the ‘space ship’ is actually a self-contained dome on Earth, an experiment conducted to test the psychological effects of space travel before an actual mission to Alpha Centauri is sent. The ‘conditioned’ crew of course are blissfully unaware of this, simply believing that they are on a ‘station’ of some kind out in space, with their sole purpose simply being to maintain it. This is not really a spoiler: it’s a necessary detail revealed at the beginning of the story, as the narrative switches to the government nabobs outside the ‘ship’. As they endlessly discuss the merits of the experiment, which has been going on for 50 years, and whether it should be discontinued, Dr Francis comes in and out of the ‘ship’ as he pleases, unbeknownst to the crew. He’s in on the experiment, which is being followed closely by the public, who, Ballard writes, are beginning to ‘feel that there’s something obscene about this human zoo’. There are further twists in the tale, which I won’t spoil for those who want to watch the adaptation or read the story for the first time. However, it should be clear that the notion of a group of people living and working together under the public glare is remarkably prescient with regards to the current reality TV/Big Brother phenomenon.

The story also puts me in mind of Philip K Dick. The very idea of an artificial world presided over by god-like technicians and featuring a protagonist slowly becoming aware that his perception is a construct — all of it beamed to the world at large — is of course a feature of Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint (1959) and the film that ripped it off, The Truman Show (1998). But more than that, a spaceship crew immersed in artificial stimuli is the conceit of one of Dick’s most corrosive, darkest visions, the 1970 novel A Maze of Death. In all of these sources, potent philosophical debates — free will; the illusion of choice — are always whirling around the narrative core.

‘Centaurus’ is a curious entry in Ballard’s career because on one level it seems generic; then when further layers are unpeeled, its narrative texture feels a little derivative, in a Phildickian manner of speaking. Yet like a fragment of a hologram, encoded within this seemingly minor entry in the Ballardian canon is the data that would inform Ballard’s entire career right through to the present day. Ultimately it is unmistakably, undeniably Ballardian.

Ballard has often spoken of how his childhood in Shanghai was ripped asunder by the advent of war and his family’s incarceration under the Japanese, an experience that taught him that ‘reality is little more than a stage set, whose cast and scenery can be swept aside and replaced overnight, and that our belief in the permanence of appearances is an illusion’. This faith in illusion — or rather, this willingness to accept the logic of illusion — is the subject matter of ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’. Another thing: when Abel chooses to write an essay on the station, entitled ‘The Closed Community’, the resonances with the gated communities of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes echo throughout the decades.

James Hunter as Abel (still from Thirteen to Centaurus; dir. Peter Potter, 1965).

But the kicker is when Dr Francis willingly becomes an astronaut of inner space. Defying his superiors’ orders, he re-enters the ‘spaceship’, having made the decision to live and work with the crew for ever more (he won’t be able to leave again, as the penalty for unauthorised entry into the station is 20 years in jail). When Colonel Chalmers tells Francis he’ll be ‘deliberately withdrawing into a nightmare, sending yourself off on a non-stop journey to nowhere’, Francis replies, ‘Not nowhere, Colonel: Alpha Centauri’. Francis, therefore, is the classic Ballardian protagonist, deliberately immersing himself into the realm of the mind, casting off the restraints of reality and authority, in order to see what brand of human emerges on the other side. However, he discovers there’s far more to Abel than he ever thought…

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ was published in the same year as Ballard’s classic novel The Drowned World. They are very different in subject matter, of course, but there is one startling similarity: both Kerans in The Drowned World and Abel are haunted by dreams of a beating, burning, amniotic sun that threatens to overwhelm their senses and, indeed, reality.

We’ll come back to that burning sun, but now let’s move on to the TV adaptation. Scriptwise, it’s a very faithful translation of the story, although the sets have about as much imagination as a caravan site. Still, there are some campy thrills to be had from the slightly spooky scene in the recreation room, where the crew relax and work out on ‘futuristic’ gym equipment while a spooky authorial voice intones maxims like ‘There is no other world than this. There are no other creatures but the Chosen Ones’. It seems a conscious Orwellian reference that wasn’t there in the original (the brainwashing occurs on a subsonic, subliminal level in Ballard’s story).

‘There are no other creatures but the Chosen Ones…’ (still from Thirteen to Centaurus; dir. Peter Potter, 1965).

James Hunter, who plays Abel, looks good — he’s so pretty as to be unearthly — but over eggs the pudding with his stiff facial expressions and wooden bodily movements. I would have thought a little more subtlety would have been required to play such a complex creature as Abel. Plus he flubs his lines on occasion, prompting me to wonder whether the show was shot live — does anyone know? Meanwhile, Donald Houston plays Dr Francis with a drunken, shouty bluster, whereas the Francis of Ballard’s story is more thoughtful and low key. There are also some funny moments where you can just tell an actor is waiting around the corner to walk on and speak their line; at one stage Hunter blunders into a scene a second or two before cue.

There’s also some heavy-handed religious symbolism glued onto the dialogue that wasn’t there in the short story. At one stage, Abel refers to himself in the third person, saying the burning disc of his dreams is ‘the Eye of God and Abel is his servant’. In actual fact there’s a good deal of secular weirdness in Ballard’s slow-burn original, and it’s tempting to imagine what contemporary American science-fiction series like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits might have done with the story in terms of lighting, set design and even acting.

All the same there’s some very effective ambient sound design throughout, and an abstract-jazz score by Norman Kay over the striking pop-art credit sequences — the music is redolent of Krzysztof Komeda’s scores for the early Polanski films and that’s high praise indeed. There are also a few narrative nips and tucks in Stanley Miller’s script that actually improve on Ballard’s story. In the source material, Francis lets slip that there are 14 on their ‘way’ to Centauri, prompting Chalmers to wonder aloud if Francis is adding himself to the original crew of 13. In the adaptation there are 12 crew members, with Francis’s slip of the tongue making it 13; this of course adds far more gravitas, more ambiguity, to the story’s title, ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’. There’s also more material linking Abel’s first incarnation as the questioning, naive innocent to his metamorphosis as the driving force behind the virtual world of the ship; in the story Ballard jumped from one to the other with little regard for continuity (but maybe this was the literary equivalent of the Godard jump-cut, and thus forgiven…). Abel is much more messianic in the TV version, and in this regard James Hunter’s acting is far more effective as his Abel gleefully turns the tables on Dr Francis than it is portraying the young innocent.

Staring at the sun: scene from Sunshine (dir. Danny Boyle, 2006).

There are some hyper-current resonances in both adaptation and source that are worth noting. I was struck for example by the scenes in Danny Boyle’s 2006 film Sunshine, where a couple of crew members are haunted by dreams of the sun. This seems more than a coincidence and more like a homage to Ballard, especially since elements of Sunshine have been lifted and stitched together, Frankenstein style, from various SF influences (Solaris, Dark Star, Alien, 2001). And especially since the screenwriter is Alex Garland, an avowed Ballard acolyte. Garland has said that the idea for his previous script — for Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) — came from Ballard, while his 1998 novel The Beach is virtually a rewrite of Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise. You’d think, given the sun dreams, that the obvious reference point would be the more well-known source — The Drowned World. But what I want to know is this: since Sunshine is set on a spaceship peopled with a psychologically damaged crew, haunted by dreams of the sun, is it actually a homage to ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’? If so that’s the most obscure Ballard nod I’ve ever seen. Kudos to Mr Garland!

Finally, let’s make like Dr Francis and step back into the real world, where we learn that:

The European Space Agency (Esa) is after volunteers for a simulated human trip to Mars, in which six crewmembers spend 17 months in an isolation tank. They will live and work in a series of interlocked modules at a research institute in Moscow. Once the hatches are closed, the crew’s only contact with the outside world is a radio link to “Earth” with a realistic delay of 40 minutes.

But, while Esa says it will do nothing that puts the lives of the simulation crew at unnecessary risk, officials running the experiment have made it clear they would need a convincing reason to let someone out of the modules once the experiment had begun.

“The idea behind this experiment is simply to put six people in a very close environment and see how they behave,” Bruno Gardini, project manager for Esa’s Aurora space exploration programme, told BBC News.”

That sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it? Might I suggest that Mr Gardini reads ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (not to mention the mind-blowing A Maze of Death) before the project gets underway?

It might just come in handy when things go pear-shaped.

Simon Sellars

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..:: MORE INFO
+ ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ — BBC site.
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