Michael Butterworth in the Savoy office, 1998 (photo by Ben Blackall).

Interview by Mike Holliday.

This is the first of a proposed 3-interview series. Parts 2 and 3, featuring David Britton and John Coulthart, will discuss Savoy’s musical, spoken word and visual/comics/graphics output. To coincide with this series, please enter the Savoy Books Microfiction competition! Win super-rare Savoy books, comic books and CDs by writing a short story of 100 words or less on ‘Savoyesque’ or ‘Ballardian’ themes. Details here.

Savoy Books, which bills itself as “England’s only truly alternative and autotelic publishing company”, was started by David Britton and Michael Butterworth in 1976. For more than 30 years, Savoy have published books based on the sole criterion of admiration for the content or the author, and their roster includes many writers who appeared alongside Ballard in the heady days of New Worlds magazine — Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Charles Platt, Samuel R. Delany, Langdon Jones, and M. John Harrison.

By 1980, Savoy were publishing almost 20 titles a year and would surely have been a good match as a publisher of Ballard, but alas it was not to be. Savoy had the bad luck to be based in Manchester, whose Chief Constable — ‘God’s Cop’, James Anderton — had the looks of a biblical prophet and was prone to righteous denunciation of what he saw as good, old fashioned sin. Helping to fund Savoy’s publishing were a string of bookshops, and these quickly became a target for Manchester’s Vice Squad, suffering more than fifty raids over a period of 20 years, during which time David Britton served two sentences in Strangeways prison for selling obscene publications. By 1981 the combined effect of the police raids and the collapse of a distribution agreement had forced Savoy’s publishing business into liquidation, just as they were planning a U.K. paperback edition of William Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night.

LEFT: David Britton.

Whilst Ballard was being embraced by the mainstream following Empire of the Sun, Savoy were moving in the opposite direction, becoming near-untouchable mavericks of the publishing world. By 1984, Britton and Butterworth had entered what they termed their ‘moral ambiguity’ phase, and Savoy had transmuted into a rather different creature, concentrating for the next ten years or so on records — many featuring vocals by P. J. Proby — and comics rather than books, although there was, of course, Lord Horror (1989), written by Britton with assistance from Butterworth, an extreme and deliberately distasteful novel about fascism and those aspects of the twentieth century that contributed to it. Lord Horror was the last novel to be successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Acts as likely to corrupt and deprave those who read it (the decision was finally overturned on appeal). In addition, over the years Savoy have re-published the likes of A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, Henry Treece’s Celtic fantasy novels, Ken Reid’s ‘Fudge and Speck’ cartoons from the Manchester Evening News and Maurice Richardson’s compendium of light-hearted surrealist tales The Exploits of Engelbrecht (one of Ballard’s favourite books)

The links between Savoy and Ballard are not immediately obvious, but run deep. In this interview, Michael Butterworth discusses Savoy’s adventures in book publishing, starting with the late 1960s, when both he and Ballard wrote for New Worlds. Later interviews will look at Savoy’s musical and spoken word recordings, and at their visual/comics/graphics output, especially the work of the illustrators Kris Guidio and John Coulthart, who joined forces with Britton and Butterworth during the 1980s.

Savoy’s books, comics and records/CDs are available directly from the publishers.

Mike Holliday.

J.G. Ballard, 1974. Photo from Corridor magazine (#5), published and edited by Michael Butterworth.

MIKE HOLLIDAY: Michael, several of your own short stories appeared in New Worlds between 1966 and 1970: to what extent did Ballard influence you at that early stage?

MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH: It’s more a question of how he didn’t influence me! Coming across his work for the first time in the mid-60’s, I remember thinking, ‘He’s saying what I didn’t know I wanted to say!’ I read ‘The Voices of Time’, and ‘Mr F is Mr F’ and other stories, which led me to discovering The Wind From Nowhere and The Drowned World, and later his ‘fractured’ narratives: ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ and ‘The Terminal Beach’. These stories crossed the blood-brain barrier. They seemed to step right inside me, to be totally relevant to my experiences as an individual and what I was striving after as a writer. Between Ballard and Burroughs, and Moorcock (his Elric short stories), and small amounts of Borges, I was ‘catered’ for, and looking back it did lessen the imperative to find a vehicle of my own, perhaps inducing a kind of complacency.

The things in Ballard’s work with which I identify are the ‘psychological landscapes’ – the deserted swimming pools and lagoons – and the outgrowths of time in The Crystal World. But what makes him compelling is the fact that despite the cataclysms, people are still able to lead recognisable lives. His stories mirrored my own obsession with post-atomic fantasy landscapes, in which the narrator is freed from the humdrum world. The backdrop of nearly all my New Worlds stories, mostly written when I was seventeen or eighteen at a time when you went to sleep at night wondering whether you would wake up to World War Three, were concerned with just this kind of survival and the resulting creative possibilities. They were written very coolly, very detachedly, very sardonically – saying, well if this is what you, mankind want to do with the world, then this is how it will be.

As a writer I was strongly attracted to what I call ’simplified emotional landscapes’, end-scenarios where there is the opportunity for clarity of feeling and thought and picaresque happenings; or, as in Ballard’s stories, where you can just sit and stare into the setting sun above a flooded basin, becoming increasingly internalised. Reading Ballard and Burroughs, and entering into these landscapes myself, was a way of freeing the mind of complexity.

I first heard about Burroughs’ cut-ups about the same time as Ballard’s ‘fragmented’ stories began appearing. Cut-up became terribly exciting for me: it was a new way of ‘breaking out’, a way of actually embracing complexity instead of fleeing it. There seemed to be a correlation with the emergence of South American concrete poetry, which I had also just discovered. As Jim pointed out, writing was now beginning to catch up with art. A post-Duchamp New Wave of conceptual art was happening in the late 60’s and early 70’s … and probably we were all running off the same energies and currents. But there was little conscious interaction between all these practices, and looking back the New Wave of SF could have had more of an influence on the mainstream at that point. Ballard’s advertisements and crashed car exhibition at the ICA in the late 60s pointed to it.

Letter from Ballard (1967), discussing the editing of Butterworth’s stories (click to enlarge).

I believe there was collaboration with Ballard whilst you were writing your ‘Concentrate’ stories. How did that come about?

I was Ambit’s Manchester and Salford distributor for quite a few years until I got fed up tramping round, and I knew Jim was the Prose Editor, and I sent some pieces to him. Through appearing in New Worlds I’d met him at least once, at one of the New Worlds parties, where he had urged me just to be ‘more prolific’. He responded very positively to my work. A correspondence began, and he took the time to edit some of the longer pieces I had sent him. He was generally very kind to me, showing how Burroughs ’subbed down’ his work from much longer pieces. He went through my manuscripts with a pen, underlining the sentences he thought ‘worked’. No one of his competence had taken this time with me before, and we ended up with half a dozen pieces. Martin Bax, the editor of Ambit, didn’t like them enough to publish them, and they ended up appearing in New Worlds instead, in three parts.

By the early 1970s, both yourself and David Britton were publishing amateur or semi-professional magazines under a variety of titles — Corridor, Weird Fantasy, Crucified Toad, and so on. To what extent were you aiming to fill the gap left by the demise of New Worlds as a large-format magazine in 1970? Presumably it was a strong influence at this stage — you had written for the magazine, and several of the first books that Savoy published were by authors who had appeared in its pages – Charles Platt’s The Gas, Langdon Jones’ The Eye of the Lens, Delany’s Tides of Lust, and several titles by Michael Moorcock.

We weren’t consciously trying to fill a gap — some of the contributors were the same because I knew many of the New Worlds writers and artists. Rather, we were inspired by New Worlds, and had started the zines when it was still in its prime — I published Concentrate in 1968, and David published Weird Fantasy in 1969. Concentrate was distributed inside New Worlds and Ambit, as a give away. All things Moorcock were in our blood. I first encountered his work in Science Fantasy magazine in the early 1960s, but it was through Charles Platt (who I met at school) that I was introduced to him. David was a reader from even earlier, from Michael’s own amateur press days, and had met him to speak to at early science fiction conventions.

ABOVE: The first (and only) issue of Michael Butterworth’s magazine Concentrate (1968).

The second issue of David Britton’s ‘Weird Fantasy’ (1971).

What was it that brought yourself and David together as book publishers? Or did you start the bookshops before going into publishing?

The publishing came first. Then, around 1972 David started the House on the Borderland bookshop in Manchester. This was down a back street in central Manchester, and happened to be close to where I worked as a copywriter. I became in the habit of spending my lunch breaks in the shop, although we didn’t know each other personally until our printer, the printer-publisher John Muir, introduced us. When David moved to a busier location in 1974, changing the name of the shop to Orbit Books, turnover increased and more serious publishing became a possibility. For the fourth issue of Corridor, in 1972, I had got hold of an original Jerry Cornelius story from Michael Moorcock, ‘The Swastika Set-Up’, which David illustrated. David published #4 of his magazine and then became the Art Editor of Corridor. By Corridor #7, in 1976, we had become co-publishers. Around the same time, David published an oversized graphic work, Stormbringer. Adapted by James Cawthorn from Moorcock’s story, this was the first Savoy book, and led to us doing The Jewel in the Skull, the first UK graphic novel, in 1978.

Poster (1972) for David Britton’s first shop, House on the Borderland.

So we became full partners around 1976/77. David had the Stormbringer title under his belt, a very productive cash-generator in the form of a bookshop, and he had the beginnings of a publishing ideology worked out. I had a name, and knew Michael Moorcock and the New Worlds writers. As a single parent, having started a career as a freelance writer so I could work from home, I also had some experience of the mainstream publishing world, and had made a few business connections. From the outset we were both of one mind; we wanted to publish books, and wanted to see how far we could go.

The bookshops were a lot more than just books and magazines, weren’t they? You also stocked records, tapes, and videos, especially hard-to-find material. How did running the shops influence the way you went about the publishing business?

To pay for Savoy, the bookshop had to be expanded, and as Savoy grew, we opened more of them, until we had a string of bookshops across the North West of England, selling comics, science fiction, horror, rock books, back issues, rare books, adult mags, bootleg records and all the perennially cult works and authors like A Clockwork Orange, the Illuminatus trilogy, the NEL Richard Allen Skinhead books, and so on. David operated a ‘part-exchange’ policy as well as selling new titles, so across the counter came a very wide mixture of things. Seeing all this material gave us ideas, of course, especially in the way we packaged our books, but the shops’ main purpose was to provide for Savoy financially, which they did right up until the final one closed around 2005 in Leeds. They also acted as shop windows for our titles and for authors we admired.

Basement Books in Manchester, one of the shops which helped fund Savoy’s publishing.

What lessons had you taken from Savoy’s difficulties of the early 80s? And what drove the two of you to keep going?

Savoy went into liquidation in 1981. I was bankrupted the same year. David was jailed in 1982. With those events, the first phase of Savoy was over. After a period spent packaging books for other publishers, in the year of Orwell’s Big Brother we published Savoy Dreams, which unconsciously signposted the way forwards for us. Looking back, it is a watershed book, half catalogue, half anthology, that provided a résumé of what we had achieved and, at the same time, by reprinting Kris Guidio’s comic strips of the Cramps and introducing P J Proby, we sounded our intentions for the future. This was also the book that contained the last stand-alone piece of fiction I published.

The second Savoy anthology, Savoy Dreams (1984), which included a selection of the letters which Michael Moorcock wrote to J G Ballard from Los Angeles (later published as Letters from Hollywood), with the drug references left in.

David’s term of imprisonment had been for 21 days, but the real aim of the police raids was books such as Charles Platt’s The Gas, Samuel Delany’s The Tides of Lust and Jack Trevor Story’s Screwrape Lettuce, a satirical story about the police that Jack had written (and David had illustrated) following a terrible ordeal Jack had at the hands of the London police during the Christmas of 1968. The police used ‘back door’ tactics against us, so that while making it plain that it was Savoy material they were concerned about (by seizing it and eventually destroying it after due process of law), they actually prosecuted us for other material we had on sale in the shops, a series of Grove Press ‘readers’ that had long passed their sell-by date, which the police had seized from us on numerous different occasions and returned — but after we had published The Gas they needed to make something stick. These were American books, so could be made to look like clandestine imports. The police were convinced we were major publishers of erotica, that they had stumbled on an international distribution network of pornography.

Savoy erotica: The Gas by Charles Platt (1980).

The main lesson we took from David’s imprisonment was really taken by him. He used the opportunity to rein in and focus down on the people and things that really mattered to him. Before this, I think, the publishing direction had largely been left open, as I attempted to build something he wasn’t really happy with — a mainstream publishing house. We had assembled a raft of writers and genres, ranging from science fiction, historical fiction, erotica — even a Savoy cookery line — to my real interests, Burroughs and Gysin. But these all got lost in the reorganisation. In our insolvency we lost control of our published titles, and the main lesson we learned was to, in future, own the copyright on everything we did, even if it meant creating the books ourselves. We have always regarded ourselves as creative publishers, and the direction we then embarked on saw David’s blossoming as a writer. Being in prison had also helped; in some ways, the experience had done him a favour, as it made him realise he didn’t want to waste more of his life on ‘inconsequences’, as he saw it.

Hours passed.

A sickly light, errant and pellucid, thrilled above him. In a drama close to somnia turbula, ganglias of cables and wires, nerve fibres and raunchy buzzing lights radiated down at him from a ceiling, meshed together in a flue. His body felt tropical, infusing him with a chimerical dread.

He woke fitfully, his limbs heavy and somnambulant. He was back in his room. During the long night the hotel’s central heating had switched itself on. The heat was terrific. His head throbbed, full of virulent stuffs and old memories. He thought he could hear the sound of boiling broth close by. Sulphurous fumes filled the room, and a bittersweet almond taste prevailed in his mouth.

He peered from a single drained eye. His room at the Chelsea looked as though the mad hand of a god had transposed it into an everglade sarcophagus. He lay on his side, his head awkwardly positioned on a once-white pillow. Stuck next to him was a single hank of hair that pushed an umber stain into the cotton. He tried to lift his left hand to remove the hair. The hand moved slowly, as though pulling through treacle, then stopped. He raised his head slightly and peered over his naked white shoulders down the length of the bed. Despite an intense light, he could not see clearly. From his chest downwards he appeared to be encased inside a blackish nitrate crust similar to a moth’s chrysalis. Beneath this dark surface he could feel a moist second layer that pressed warmly against his skin, snugly cocooning him.

Futilely, Horror tried to rise up from his bed of excrement. The chrysalis skin broke, and the smell almost made him faint. From his neck he retched a yellow waxen glue. Defeated, he lapsed back in his warm prison.

During the night, monstrously huge poppies, torture-coloured roses and pain-white petunias had grown around him. At his feet, nettles had sprouted from the dark skein. Weeds muffled the metallic clicking of shite flies. Dung beetles scurried everywhere over the crust’s surface.

Neon tubes wrapped in bald flex pushed through the shite and added their burning light to the room. Myriad phalanxes of wasps had taken possession of the upper cornices. They swarmed about the ceiling like dense waves of black hair. For a moment, he thought he was mad, lying with fallen soldiers in the fields of Flanders, Ypres or the Somme.

The bed giggled and sighed. It heaved with an almost sentient life. It let off a series of swaggering farts that echoed ominously round the room in search of an exit.

The lights shook, and a swell of steam rose from the bed. Back it came to him. He remembered packing the enema bags tightly about his body before falling asleep. In the hothouse of the night, they had burst.

Excerpt from David Britton’s novel Lord Horror, published in 1989 by Savoy Books of Manchester, England.

The (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek map of influences leading up to Britton and Butterworth’s Lord Horror (click to enlarge)

Can I move on to Lord Horror, which in a way was a response to the police raids and David’s first spell in prison. This is a novel whose subject matter includes Nazism and racism, yet I was struck by the lack of any explicit moral position within the book. This reminded me of Ballard’s comment that Crash would have been meaningless if he had incorporated some sort of explicit moral justification: the whole point of Crash was to get the reader to consider for themselves tendencies that already exist within the world that we live in, and therefore any moral framework has to be provided by the reader. And in fact Crash appears in the map of influences for Lord Horror.

As soon as you define something, it becomes that thing. We wanted to write something that wasn’t definable, and in a weird way more true. Although, like Crash, Lord Horror is composed in conventional narrative, it is not what it seems; it is an intricate tableau, or rather a series of tableaux, a florescence from a central idea, which we expanded into picaresque forms that really make no overall narrative sense. It was also David’s first novel. He isn’t, any more than I am, a natural storyteller. He would hand me very dense pages of text, together with dislocated dialogue, actually descriptions of ‘pictures’ that he was seeing in his head. I had to open this up, and make it run in sequence. Lord Horror took four years and twelve rewrites on a portable manual typewriter to get it exactly as we wanted it.

The stories I wrote for New Worlds leave the reader to deduce how the post-disaster deserts came about. They are ironic metaphor, in the sense that the first person narrator accepts the devastation as a given, and by being so cool he is actually conveying the opposite of what he really feels. This ‘double distancing’ protects from the horror, but it also enables the reader to interpret what is really being said. In Lord Horror, morally, it’s crucial that what results from the actions of its characters is presented in a similar way, as a given — and on top of this to keep an ironic or sardonic tone. The characters themselves aren’t morally defined, as they are in a work like, say, Maus. Making it clear that Lord Horror is ‘bad’ would have lost the possibility of empathy, and therefore the point of the novel. It would have perpetuated the image of Hitler-as-universal-scapegoat. Of course, it might also have appeased the judges and prevented much angst for David and I.

The faith in reason and rationality that dominated post war thinking struck me as hopelessly idealistic, like the belief that the German people had been led astray by Hitler and the Nazis. I was sure that the countless atrocities in eastern Europe had taken place because the Germans involved had enjoyed the act of mass murder, just as the Japanese had enjoyed tormenting the Chinese. Reason and rationality failed to explain human behaviour. Human beings were often irrational and dangerous

J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008).

John Coulthart’s portrayal of the death camps in Hard Core Horror #5. The text panels are deliberately left blank … words are superfluous.

I’d like to mention here Brian Stableford’s suggestion that Lord Horror is actually designed ‘to excite revulsion and anxiety’. In effect, it’s an invitation to the reader to reflect on just what it is in the book that causes those feelings. For example, when I asked myself some months after first reading the novel what it was that I found repulsive about it, the thing I recalled was the use of racist epithets… Which is really rather strange, I mean here we have a book that looks at the reasons behind the deaths of millions in the Nazi concentration camps, a book which contains lengthy descriptions of people being abused, dismembered, murdered in the most foul ways, even eaten, yet what seems to cause me difficulty is the use of certain words. It’s an extreme reductio ad absurdum, but one in which the reader does not sit above what’s going on, nodding and smiling to himself, but actually inside the bloody thing, with all the stress and confusion that’s implied by being part of it. That is similar, it seems to me, to another of Ballard’s comments about Crash: ‘I wanted to write a book where the reader had nowhere to hide.’

In Lord Horror, not only does the reader have nowhere to hide, but also, if he or she perseveres with the book — which Colin Wilson famously wouldn’t — they find that they are at risk of becoming the character, which can be even more discomforting. The protection offered by the third person narrative breaks down in several places, with what seem to be very brief passing racist comments of the author casually inserted, a technique that is more refined in the third novel in the ‘Horror’ sequence, Baptised in the Blood of Millions. In Lord Horror they are so brief that you may at first miss them, or perhaps think they are typos. But it soon becomes apparent that this may be happening deliberately, and readers may find themselves in the uncomfortable dilemma of deciding whether they should continue reading the book, and if so how are they to read it? Is the author a racist, or isn’t he? Should I continue to be amused by his black-humoured jokes, or are his detractors right: is this just poor art, camouflaged by quasi-learning, as the magistrate decisively pronounced of the Hard Core Horror comics? A nihilistic, sadistic ‘playfulness’ operates at every level in the book, even in the narrative conventions. Further, the author seems not to care, to subvert whatever credibility the bravest readers and critics give to him.

Lord Horror broadcasts to the people (from Reverbstorm #6): art by John Coulthart (click to enlarge).

The novel is designed to be morally offensive, and also physically offensive. It is highly visceral, often repellent, as when the dried outer skin of the shit cocoon encasing Horror cracks open. When at work on the book, it was a common experience to feel queasy. With succeeding Lord Horror works, each one aims to out-do the preceding one in grossness. If you read one of David’s later books, Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz and Baptised in the Blood of Millions, and nod sagely, thinking that a clue may now be found that will dispel the cloud of ambiguity hanging about the author, you will not find it. Every chink has been firmly filled, hasn’t even been allowed to be open in the first place. There seems to be, at every turn, an imperative to escalate the crudity of the violence and racism — to avoid numbing the reader, to find ways of not allowing the writing the dread anathema of becoming safe.

Ballard’s work has always reflected his interest in surrealist art. And in a way, Lord Horror is a surrealist text, possibly more so than anything by Ballard, who’s always been concerned to ‘tell a story’. A penis that grows so large as to encompass the Earth; a person being devoured whole — that isn’t exactly fantasy, it seems to me … it’s surrealism. The same applies to the way in which the book is written, with rapid stylistic changes — from philosophical disquisition to horrific description — and paragraphs of text lifted from elsewhere and put into the mouths of the characters. To me, the book makes more sense considered as a surrealist novel; if it’s read as an alternative-history fantasy, or as a satire, then I think the reader misses much of what is in there.

Writing about Lord Horror in A Serious Life, Dave Mitchell compared the book to Bataille and Lautréamont and de Sade, and he may be right, but we see ourselves as belonging more in the absurdist camp, with nods to surrealism. Before we knew each other, two of our heroes were Alfred Jarry and P J Proby. I was also influenced by satirical writers like Rabelais, where key figures are exaggerated to ludicrous extremes. David’s ‘surrealism’ was more William Hope Hodgson and Frank Randle than the more formal manifestations in Max Ernst or Salvador Dali. Francis Bacon has always been a strong muse for him, and latterly Paula Rego has excited us both. Michael Moorcock threw in Maurice Richardson, while I also brought the sometimes existentialist bizarreness of the Beats. The ‘absurdism’ of ordinary life, and popular culture such as fifties rock’n’roll and Creole patois was another rich source for Lord Horror — you know, ‘Sleepin’ on his mugwump, playing on his Jew’s harp, music crawlin’ into your skin, Daddy in his Zoot suit, mammy playin’ skin flute, sister makes a swine-hair grin, Doin’ that crazy Cajun cakewalk dance!’ What could be more ‘surreal’ than that? The Mugwump character in Lord Horror is from P J Proby, not Burroughs.

David Britton’s first novel, Lord Horror (1989).

So Lord Horror could be seen a ‘surrealist’ novel, but it is a very personal surrealism, I think, with specifically working-class Manchester roots. William Hope Hodgson once rode a bicycle down the steepest steps in Blackburn. David once saw Roy Rogers riding Trigger through cobbled, terraced streets in North Manchester in 1951. These must have seemed like eruptions from a different universe. The ‘alternative history’ theme, as you have correctly seen, is not the book’s main point; for us it’s a purely theatrical device. And the book isn’t intended as satire. It is more Grand Guignol than satirical.

To our initial mystification, Ballard didn’t like Lord Horror. Possibly it had far too much gaudy end-of-the-pier working-class English ‘surrealism’ for him, rather than the purer, more polite surrealism he did like.

Reverbstorm #4. Cover art by John Coulthart (after Burne Hogarth).

What about Ballard’s use of unconventional narrative structure? I’m thinking particularly of The Atrocity Exhibition, and of Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories, where iconic personalities and historic events appear, bringing along their own narratives. There’s a lot of that, it seems, in Savoy’s work – especially in the Reverbstorm magazines, with the cultural references incorporated into John Coulthart’s artwork, and dialogue consisting largely of quotations … so that the reader is no longer spoon-fed a narrative but has to do most of what Ballard once referred to as ‘the hard work’.

If ‘fragmentation’, non-linear and cut-up writing are responses to complexity as I have suggested, then Reverbstorm is certainly this. The ‘story’ of Reverbstorm, like the ‘story’ of The Atrocity Exhibition or Naked Lunch or Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, is really its form. It is emblematic of a certain time in the 20th Century and in the mental processes of David, John and I. The use of such forms by Ballard and Burroughs was a way of dealing with personal trauma, but such new chaotic forms in literature and art seemed to suggest that by ‘breaking down reality’, more appropriate new ways of looking at it might be found.

John Coulthart’s artwork from the Reverbstorm magazines, of which Alan Moore wrote: ‘Like Baudelaire, Beardsley and Breughel meeting in a crack house, “Reverbstorm” presents, with diamond focus, a portrait of the incoherent, incandescent rot at the heart of the Twentieth Century. Highly recommended.’ (Click to enlarge.)

But there’s a difference here, isn’t there, to using a ‘cut-up’ technique? How would you characterize that distinction?

In Moorcock’s multiverse, fragmentation occurs during the mixing up of narrative threads, due to the way the threads appear and reappear in space-time from the perspective of an observer. But the results of this apparently random selection are very controlled. I don’t know how Ballard went about achieving non-linearity, but his experiments also seem very controlled. Even Burroughs’ cut-up techniques are controlled because, as Jim showed me, they are edited afterwards, and so they are narratives assembled from cut-ups. Much editorial control and direction is shown in works like Nova Express. Between cut-ups and Ballard’s non-linear experiments, or Moorcock’s multiverse stories, there are big differences in technique in the way material is gathered together, although the outcome can often be the same.

For almost a decade after first reading Burroughs, I could not read linear writing. But I did find that I got very adept at writing in cut-up; I could mimic the ‘unintelligibility’ of random cut-up, and produce text that had randomness to a varying degree. It was this ‘stream of consciousness’-kind of writing I was producing that Ballard helped me to edit, which became the Concentrate pieces.

The final ‘Concentrate’ piece: written by Butterworth, edited by Ballard and published in New Worlds #197 (click to enlarge).

David was originally the artist and yourself the writer, yet it’s Dave’s writings that have appeared in Savoy from Lord Horror onwards. How did that reversal come about?

To write well, you need to be driven by anger or some other strong emotion. What drove me in my earlier days was anger I felt at mankind’s failings, but this voice I’d found was already fading by the time David and I met. David’s anger is different — he has never given it up. He has always been angry per se, at existence. Though he is ultimately optimistic he feels a great frustration at life. His perception has always been of the glass half-empty variety. I am the opposite.

The turning point for me as a writer was Lord Horror. It was a collaborative book, and was to have been published under a joint byline, but at the last moment, I gave David the byline. At the end of my last published piece of fiction, written under my own name (‘A Hurricane in a Nightjar’, Savoy Dreams 1984), I wrote directly from the postatomic deserts to the reader: ‘For the time being, thank you’. I knew my voice had gone, although I hoped it wouldn’t go for good. But though it hasn’t returned, happily it has led me to other things.

The result of the publication of Lord Horror and the associated Hard Core Horror and Meng & Ecker comics was another series of police raids, and the prosecution of Savoy under the Obscene Publications Acts. The charge was justified in Court on the grounds of the anti-Semitism displayed in the publications, a rather strange claim since the racial hatred laws were designed specifically for such purposes but were ignored by the police and prosecutors. There was then yet another prosecution, for non-Savoy material kept in the shops, as a result of which David spent a second period in Strangeways prison. How did Savoy cope with this second ‘crisis’? The changes in the business seem to have been less dramatic than those in the early ’80s…

The second time David was jailed, it was his reward for writing Lord Horror. The book was seized and found to be obscene by the magistrates. I conducted the appeal with Geoffrey Robertson and this resulted in the charge against it being overturned. The local Vice Squad were very bitter about this. Early in the proceedings, two members were caught airing their views about Lord Horror in an ‘undercover’ interview for The Observer, saying there was an urgency to act against Lord Horror because they ‘might be the last generation with a moral viewpoint’ and therefore the last people with the capability to do it. They were officers, guys in their 30s, saying they had a moral sense that might be denied later generations, therefore they had a duty to act now to protect ‘common decency’ on behalf of the public. That was their reason for banning the book. They were hoping for the heaviest penalty. At about the same time as the Observer article we were hauled to the main police headquarters, Stretford House, and grilled separately about our publications, both books and comics. We were told we were racially and morally degenerate. We ran some of this interview in one of the Meng & Ecker comics. Later, we heard that Chief Constable Anderton himself had been listening in to the interview, overseeing it, in fact, in his office above where we had been sitting.

It was quite clear to us that the target was Savoy and not, as the police were continually maintaining, what we were selling in the shops – which was largely mainstream fiction, literary, fantasy, rock books, bootlegs and so on. Only a very small percentage of the shop stock was erotica, and none of this was what was called ‘hard’. But because of the unusual zero tolerance climate being generated in Manchester by police Chief ‘God’s Cop’ James Anderton, they could get away with doing us for it.

Anderton was a creature that could only have existed in the slightly surreal atmosphere of Thatcher Britain; repressively conservative, of dubious competence, and given to worrying statements about hearing God’s voice while Manchester filled up with guns and pushers. LORD HORROR was strong drink, to be sure: a hallucinated vision of Lord Haw-Haw, the English traitor who broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain during World War 2. It was difficult, horrifying work, the Nazi atrocities made superreal with the tools of DeSade and Bataille, very much an extension of the “New Worlds school” and its intent to use fantasy as a way to present the real world in a new light for our consideration. Britton is neither a self-hating Jew nor a childish monster. He is clearly haunted by the pre-1945 world.

And they sent him to prison.

Warren Ellis.

‘God’s Cop’: Chief Constable James Anderton.

The police prosecuted us for Lord Horror on the grounds of obscenity because that was the decision taken by the local office of the DPP (Director of Publication Prosecutions). Many people thought it strange, but he thought the Crown stood a better chance of prosecuting us that way. The DPP only charged us under Section 3 of the obscenity laws, which allowed Lord Horror to be condemned by the magistrates but did not allow us the option of a jury trial. However, under Section 3, they could only destroy the book — we could not be jailed. The police used the same tactics as in 1981, trumping-up charges on non-Savoy material that was really very tame, and it was these which led to Dave’s second prison sentence. After the experiences of Lady Chatterley and Last Exit to Brooklyn, they knew that if they went after our more literary titles then the attack would backfire on them; as indeed proved to be the case when they went after Lord Horror and we won the appeal.

LEFT: Raided! One of the Savoy shops in the late 80s.

This time David’s imprisonment was for four months, and we coped less well. We were in the middle of an intensive phase of work rather than at a natural turning point as we had been on the previous occasion, and our fighting spirit wasn’t the same. I had managed to make publicity out of the Lord Horror case, but the victory we’d won felt hollow. On the previous occasion there had been genuine surprise by all parties, even by the prosecution, that the judge had thought to jail David — something rarely done — rather than fine him.

Prison terms are automatically reduced by a half; you only do the full term if you misbehave. Although David did not do the full four months, it was still a very long time. One hour is a long time in a place where anything can go wrong, and where few may know if it does. How best to survive, where survival is a moment-to-moment question? There were no changes to Savoy; when David was released we had a gathering of the clans in the local Pig and Porcupine, and then just carried on. If anything, it had the effect of firming our resolve, so possibly the one ‘change’ we made was — never to change!

Our final large court case directly involved Savoy titles — the Meng & Ecker and Hard Core Horror comics that the police seized when they seized the novel. The authorities felt themselves to be on much firmer ground with these, because of the ‘link’, as they saw it, with children. They even returned to conduct a second raid before the outcome of the first was known, and seized thousands more comics. I conducted the defence for this also, and took the case as high as I could. It dragged on for six years, but at its end, in the High Court in London, the local Manchester magistrate who had originally found the comics obscene was vindicated — even though a child has never read them and never will.

You’ve spoken out in previous interviews about the politically correct mindset of both left and right — and Savoy has suffered from both versions, rejected by Compendium Books and by Rough Trade Records at the same time as it was being raided again and again by the Manchester Police. Ballard labeled the growth of this type of reaction in the 1980s ‘the New Puritanism’. How do you see the position in 2009 — is there more timidity, more unthinking rejection, than there was 20 or 30 years ago?

We haven’t had a police raid in ten years — after twenty-five years of constant raids. On the last raid, in 1999, the police personally admitted that their game with us was over. Their concerns about Lord Horror and the Meng & Ecker comics had been eclipsed by the Internet and world events. Until Lord Horror, it was popularly believed that the successful Last Exit to Brooklyn appeal in 1968 was the final nail in the coffin of police repression of serious books, but it wasn’t. When the magistrate’s charge of obscenity against Lord Horror was overturned in the High Court in 1992, that genuinely was the end, in the UK.

You don’t see the same kind of heavy-handed repression happening here now. Rather than laws dealing with reading matter, there are laws restricting movement and access, something Iain Sinclair is documenting. There is also less inclination on the part of writers to go over the same ground. ‘Taboo’ books may not be progressive or relevant any more.

In his history of Savoy, A Serious Life, D. M. Mitchell suggests that the police raids and obscenity trials have directed attention away from your wider achievements, such as the publication of The Exploits of Engelbrecht, A Voyage to Arcturus, Henry Treece’s Celtic Tetralogy, and the work of Ken Reid and of Langdon Jones. To what extent do you think this is true, and if so, are you bothered by it?

The court cases diverted attention away from our early intentions as publishers and writers, and I think they still colour public perception. I think the police raids stopped us in our tracks at a pivotal moment, and for me it was a great frustration. In 1981, when we went in liquidation, we were poised to become mainstream publishers. Up until this time I was still convinced that we could do so, but in the end our uncompromising, eclectic natures and the politically incorrect nature of the bookshops, meant we couldn’t. After the ‘Savoy Wars’, as we termed the skirmishes during the 80s, we found ourselves stuck in ‘a weird place, like one of those soldiers lost in a forest and still fighting the war after it’s over’, to quote Keith Seward).

Certain critics can’t get past the subject matter, or they don’t see the work as being part of a literary tradition. We’ve been defined at a very simple level as transgressors who got into trouble with the law — it’s much easier to understand us this way — or one-offs who shouldn’t be paid serious attention. In our earlier bookshop days, we were cast as pornographers and bootleggers who had fallen foul of the law. This can work for us, of course, and means we are at least assured of a lasting profile of a kind. We have a cultural trademark, like P J Proby’s split trousers or Fenella Fielding’s husky voice.

John Coulthart’s portrayal of the 20th-century city in Reverbstorm #6.

All along, you’ve published authors whom you admire, especially where their work is otherwise unavailable or unduly neglected. But is there, do you think, some element in common between the authors and artists that Savoy publish or with whom you collaborate? Is there something that links Michael Moorcock and P. J. Proby with Henry Treece and Fenella Fielding?

That ‘element’ is something we’ve tried hard to define in books like A Serious Life. As in anything, it is who and where — who you grow up with, and where you grow up. Being Mancunians, David and I were both exposed to the work of people like Ken Reid, whose 3-panel Fudge and Speck strips appeared nightly in the Manchester Evening News when we were kids. As we got older, we both became aware of Proby, a stricken star who had fallen to earth in the Northern workingmen’s club scene, who became an equally potent conductor for fantasies skewed from the mainstream. Ours has not been the normal ‘expression’ of growing up — our allegiance has been to too many ‘odd’ things for that. Savoy is a stitch of David and I. David’s obsession to preserve youthful influences and to put a different emphasis on the art and culture of his time to the one that has become the consensus; my desire for the radical and new — these link the various, on the surface, disparate Savoy writers, artists and artistes.

A Serious Life: D M Mitchell’s marvelous history of Savoy — the books, the records, the comics, plus interviews with Butterworth, Britton and Coulthart.

Did you have much in the way of dealings with Ballard after starting Savoy? You haven’t published anything by him, unlike Moorcock and other New Worlds writers, though I believe a limited edition of Crash was suggested at some point.

We began by publishing Michael Moorcock, and we just seemed to go along that axis. Plus the fact that Jim wasn’t in need of a publisher, so he didn’t fall into our other category of books at that time: he wasn’t a neglected giant of fantasy, as we saw it, like Henry Treece or Jack Trevor Story. Nor was he in the position of Burroughs, whose ‘lesser’ books like The Job or Dutch Schultz, I thought, were in need of greater exposure, or Brion Gysin, who was in need of documenting as an artist in his own right. David Pringle, and later Vale at Re/Search, were documenting Ballard’s work. And as time went by, our options ran out anyway. When I finally did figure out a way of publishing Burroughs and Gysin, the police raids on Savoy reached a crescendo, and I had to relinquish them.

We were disappointed when Jim turned down the Crash/Fenella Fielding package. Fielding has the allure of Hollywood about her, while having an eccentric English demeanor, and has what we think is the perfect voice for reading Crash. It took us a great deal of effort to get her to do it. At first, she was cautious, because she didn’t want to do anything that she thought might demean women. After protracted discussion, which went on for about a year, she finally took the advice of an ex-BBC director friend, who assured her that it would be OK. She did the reading, but would not read some of the more violent heterosexual sex scenes involving women.

We saw Crash as part of a new Savoy deluxe hardback fantasy reprint series we had started, with new editions of Maurice Richardson’s The Exploits of Engelbrecht (2000) and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (2002). We sent Jim the finished reading, together with samples of these books, with a proposal to release it together with a special edition of Crash. But he claimed that he had always disliked ‘book worship’ in any form, and did not subscribe to the ‘industry of limited editions’; he thought books should be mass-produced and disposable. When I asked whether he would mind us releasing just the Fielding reading on its own, he said not, preferring that ‘a book should just be a book’. He was very courteous and kind, asking me not to take this the wrong way, but I did come away with the feeling that the Savoy chemistry was wrong for him and that we had misjudged him once again — he had reacted very similarly to Lord Horror. It sounds silly, but the incident increased my feeling that in some way I had not lived up to his expectation, after he had gone out of his way to encourage my early writing. I had not received such encouragement or understanding off my own father, and when Jimmy passed away it felt like a father had gone.

The Exploits of Engelbrecht, republished by Savoy in 2000, with this commendation on the cover from Ballard: ‘The Exploits of Engelbrecht is English surrealism at its greatest. Witty and fantastical, Maurice Richardson was light years ahead of his time. Unmissable.’

Mike Moorcock has said that one of his ambitions for New Worlds was to cross-fertilize the popular and literary traditions. I take it that’s an aim with which you’d concur?

Yes, but that’s something that was always going to come much more easily to Michael than to us! For a start, as a writer he is a natural storyteller. Audience is very important to him. In his publishing projects he took over existing magazines with ready audiences rather than attempt to start up something from scratch.

His charismatic personality had attracted to New Worlds already-established authors, Ballard, Aldiss, et cetera. When Savoy began, influenced by New Worlds or, more particularly, by Michael’s enthusiasm for certain writers — Jack Trevor Story, M John Harrison, Langdon Jones — these writers readily allowed us to do their books as paperbacks. As we developed, we became a more gaudy, cross-pollinating rock’n’roll publishing/recording outfit, top-and-tailing Ken Reid and T S Eliot, P J Proby and New Order, or joining up like-minded souls, Burne Hogarth and Cawthorn, Fielding and Colette, The Tides of Lust and The Gas. Gradually, we seemed to find an identity. It perhaps helped that we stayed in the North, away from the temptations of the London publishing scene. On the other hand, if we had carried the battle South we might perhaps have succeeded as a legitimate company. Who knows.

To consciously set out to marry the popular with the literate is beside the point, really. Did Dickens set out to do that? He just did it. A basic rule of adventurous writing is to leave in a certain amount of cliché, so you don’t lose the reader. I think that was something Michael Moorcock taught me: you should not take people too far too quickly or you will lose them. But I think if you are a truly great writer — or a great editor or publisher — you will naturally have popular appeal. Once Michael had ‘trained’ his initial SF readership and attracted new readers — each issue contained a reducing amount of traditional SF — New Worlds became a blend of the popular and literary quite naturally. It was second nature to everyone involved: editors, designers, artists and writers. By contrast, the much later Modern Review, say, which had a declared policy of mixing high and low, seemed contrived.

New Worlds was dependent on its editor’s vision and drive, and when he decided to move on it lost its direction. Charles Platt ran it well for a while, but then he also moved on, alas. Just think what could have been achieved had Michael been able to devote his time to keeping New Worlds going as a monthly magazine, acting as a kind of mainstream Counterblast to the various movements and groups that have come and gone since the sixties.

Only one alternate history series confronted Nazism with appropriate originality and passion. Published by the independent Manchester firm Savoy, David Britton’s surreal Lord Horror and its sequels entered the mind of a deranged surviving Hitler whose visions grew increasingly insane… Soon after they appeared, Hard Core Horror and Lord Horror were seized by Manchester’s vice squad. The books were destroyed and their author went to Strangeways, suggesting that successful Nazi alternate histories must take profound psychological, moral and physical risks.

Michael Moorcock, The Daily Telegraph.

What about the future? How much have Savoy got in the locker? There’s a collection of Mike Moorcock’s non-fiction due for publication, I believe. And what about the final issue of the Reverbstorm series — will that actually be published? It’s been ‘forthcoming’ for several years!

There is a lot left in the locker, but whether we produce it or not is a question of what financial resources we have left. Since losing the bookshops we have been forced to raise money in less exciting, more legitimate ways. As a result we are vulnerable to things like economic recessions, and this present one has hit us badly as it has hit others. David and I are both now in our sixties. But while we can, we will keep going. John Coulthart is designing Into the Media Web, the collection of Moorcock non-fiction, at the moment. We hope it will appear in 2010, together with the promised second Savoy edition of Engelbrecht. John is also at work re-mastering the Reverbstorm part-series as a graphic novel. This will contain the long promised final installment. A collection of articles about Savoy is underway, Tales From the Savoy, as is David’s newly completed Lord Horror novel, La Squab: The Black Rose of Auschwitz, which will be illustrated by Kris Guidio. He is also at work on a new novel, more a short coda to the other books, called Invictus Horror. Plus all the work we did with Fielding is still to be released: Fenella Fielding: The Savoy Sessions (a new album of songs, and companion album to P J Proby: The Savoy Sessions), a double album reading from Colette, as well as readings of Four Quartets and La Squab.

Finally, you’ve also been involved, outside of Savoy, with the launch of a new magazine, Corridor8, which revives the title of your early magazines but concentrating on contemporary visual art. How did the new magazine come about, and what are your hopes for it?

It grew out of an interest in conceptual art, and wanting to do a magazine again. I’d begun publishing a small line of print-on-demand books featuring work which didn’t fall into Savoy’s remit, but which I was in the habit of being offered from time to time by people who knew I was a publisher. One of these books was an interview with Colin Wilson by the writer and journalist Brad Spurgeon, about Wilson’s philosophy as an optimist. Another, which arrived anonymously one morning, was a surreal oddity — a full libretto for an imaginary musical about Jackson Pollock written by an artist friend, Roger McKinley. Although his libretto took the conventional form of a book, it worked as a piece of conceptual art, and it was seeing the possibilities of this that got me interested.

When my father died, my partner, Sarajane Inkster, who had once interviewed David and I after Burroughs’s death about our meeting with him in the Bunker in the early 80s, in a mood of mad creativity generously suggested I use part of my inheritance to produce a magazine. Corridor8 derives its name from the small-press magazines I started out doing, and the first issue is dedicated to J.G. Ballard and New Worlds, although I wouldn’t say it is recognisably in the Ballard/New Worlds or even Savoy moulds.

Michael Butterworth’s new magazine, ‘Corridor8′, launched in July 2009.

Corridor8 appears annually — the next issue comes out September 2010 — and the intention is to make its publication an event. The launch this year had a talk by Iain Sinclair, who used Issue 1 as a springboard for a new work set outside the capital, and also an art installation by the arte povera maverick Michelangelo Pistoletto. As subsequent issues appear, I can see the ‘launches’ growing and becoming more like mini-arts festivals. The magazine itself will continue to be North-of-England-based, on a speculative tip with an international outlook and still focusing on contemporary visual art and writing. Issue 1 focuses on art inside Will Alsop’s ‘SuperCity’ — Alsop’s concept of a linear city running raggedly across the neck of England from Liverpool to Hull and beyond. Sinclair’s work in the same issue explores the corridor in two long psychogeographical journeys, East-West by car and then West-East by bus pass, debunking Alsop’s concept. It was also the first time Alsop’s work as a canvas artist was featured in-depth, since when he has announced that he has retired from his architectural practice to devote his time to painting.

There are also interviews with Peter Saville about his new position as Creative Director of Manchester, and with Yorkshire artist and art catalyst Paul Bradley who produced the Pistoletto installation for us, an article by Jon Savage about the Haçienda nightclub, another article about the Danish art group Superflex’s project ‘tenantspin’ — a web-based television venture to empower residents in Liverpool tower blocks threatened with demolition — as well as, all importantly, profiles of eight artists who live and work in the SuperCity region. For Issue 2, we plan to move the geographical focus further north, towards Cumbria, Newcastle, and the Scottish borderlands — it will have a borderland theme — and on artists who work outside the centre. I am hoping one of the artists will be David Hockney, while the main writer for this issue I hope will be Jenny Diski, another favourite writer, who has some thematic similarities with Sinclair.

Thank you, Michael Butterworth.

Don’t forget the Savoy Books Microfiction competition! Win super-rare Savoy books, comic books and CDs by writing a short story of 100 words or less on ‘Savoyesque’ or ‘Ballardian’ themes. Details here.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ James Cawthorn, RIP: 1929-2008
+ Ballardcraft: Ballard/Lovecraft
+ ‘Get Lost’: Burroughs on Curtis
+ Bunker Tales
+ Horror Panegyric
+ A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

I saw George Romero’s zombie flick Dawn of the Dead for the first time at the Melbourne International Film Festival last night. What a super film. What a statement. And very, very funny too. And in fact very reminiscent of Kingdom Come, for Dead, like KC, also features a sealed-off shopping mall in which a band of resistance fighters attempt to restart a micro society, sustained yet ultimately imprisoned by the trappings of consumer capitalism.

The mall in both Ballard and Romero becomes a city, a country, a galaxy, a self-sustaining micronational state seceding from reality, a State of mind absorbing and zombifying all it touches, and the faceless, cartoonish football hordes in KC are consumer zombies as much as the walking dead in Romero are metaphorically intended to be.

Yet, if you tweak your perspective just a little, the survivors in both could conversely be read as the oppressors, the old world clinging to its accumulated wealth, hording it for themselves in the face of the zombie attack — an all-devouring, ever-growing underclass.

For Romero, like Ballard, is nothing if not a master of ambivalence.

The most Ballardian part of the film is when the survivors seal off a department store — privileged retail space — from the zombies in the mall’s concourse, ie the tacky public domain. The survivors turn on the store’s muzak and roam the aisles to take whatever they want from the limitless, yet depthless wonders of consumerism, free to act out their decadent bourgeois fantasies, setting up their attic space with expensive furniture and luxury TV sets, even though the apocalypse that has blighted the outside world means there is nothing to watch anymore.

Watching this sequence, I could almost imagine yet another parallel world in which KC was written in the late 70s, and George Romero, the master of guerilla filmmaking — an aesthetic and a philosophy that informs the guerilla responses in his storylines — had become the first director to adapt Ballard for the big screen, setting the tone for future Ballard adaptations to come: raw, uncompromising, revolutionary, and shot through with the blackest humour, the perfect defence against insanity.

In short: how Ballard’s books, and Romero’s films, appear to me.

In true Ballardian fashion, there is more than a touch of megalomania to him and it becomes clear that HRH has his own plans for world domination. Believing himself to be telepathic and claiming the existence of extraterrestrials, he forms a religion called the Perfect Light Movement and is compared to Jesus Christ by André Malraux, eventually using his growing power and influence to sieze the UN where he attempts to spark off world war against the US and the USSR. Eventually he is incarcerated on the Isle of Wight where it’s presumed he wrote his life story.

The story’s conceit is that it is typeset like an index, apparently the only surviving fragment of HRH’s “unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography”, and all of the plot details above, plus much, much more, can be gleaned from the brief fragments in the index itself. It’s a format that allows for some humourous moments, as in this entry, in which we discover that Hitler impressed and then disappointed HRH within the space of two pages, an arc of disillusionment that reflects the greatest schism of the 20th century yet comically reduces it to just one line:

Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgaden, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181

Eventually we come to learn that the story, despite the form of the piece, actually unfolds in a linear fashion from “A” (including Avignon, HRH’s birthplace) to “Z”. In the entries for “U”, “V” and “W”, for example, HRH’s downfall is revealed:

United Nations Assembly, seized by Perfect Light Movement, 695 – 9; HRH addresses, 696; HRH calls for world war against United States and USSR, 698
Versailles, Perfect Light Movement attempts to purchase, 621
Vogue (magazine), 356
Westminster Abbey, arrest of HRH by Special Branch, 704
Wight, Isle of, incarceration of HRH, 712 – 69
Windsor, House of, HRH challenges legitimacy of, 588

While the very last entry is revealed to be that of the indexer himself:

Zielinski, Bronislaw, suggests autobiography to HRH, 742; commissioned to prepare index, 748; warns of suppression threats, 752; disappears, 761

Thus in one fell metaphysical stroke the indexer actually indexes himself out of existence, causing the editor to speculate, “Perhaps the entire compilation is nothing more than a figment of the over-wrought imagination of some deranged lexicographer”.

But what’s really going on in this story? Did HRH really play a part in changing the course of human affairs, with all facets of his existence covered up to the general public? Is this index then a giant conspiracy of which now have only vague, shadowy knowledge? As the editor again speculates, “A substantial mystery still remains. Is it conceivable that all traces of his activities could be erased from our records of the period? Is the suppressed autobiography itself a disguised roman a clef in which the fictional hero exposes the secret identities of his historical contemporaries?” Or has HRH somehow collaged himself into world affairs, rewriting postwar history with himself in a starring role? The latter would then beg the question: is Woody Allen a JGB fan? For by now you must have detected the obvious similarities to Allen’s film Zelig, made six years after this story was published.

Funnily enough, “The Index”, for all its brilliance, seems to be an extension of ideas first aired in two earlier, markedly less successful Ballard shorts: “Minus One” (1963), in which the existence of an asylum patient is inferred (and then covered up) from a few scraps of medical papers, and “Now: Zero” (1959), in which the reader, like the “deranged lexicographer” in “The Index”, obliterates himself via the act of participation. I guess this only goes to show that Ballard never wastes an idea, or that he really is writing the same story over and over (the latter is not a criticism in my view, I must add).

“The Index” is also in a direct continuum with The Atrocity Exhibition, whose central character, T-, represents all sides of the equation. On the one hand, T-, like the reader of “The Index”, feels as though he is amidst a vast conspiracy, the conspiracy of existence itself. But T-, driven mad by the new communications landscape fracturing the late 1960s, forms a strategy, as HRH possibly did, cutting and pasting the cultural and political events of the late 1960s into a bricolaged version of reality playing inside the cinema of his mind — with himself in the lead role. Eventually, T-, like HRH, is indexed into his own storyline, even appearing in one chapter as a fragmented, diffuse entity, aligned to Christ, again like HRH:

Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone’s guess.

Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition.

Thus it’s not completely accurate to say that Ballard abandoned the methodology of Atrocity in the 1970s, as many commentators do. As “The Index” shows, his experimental bent was still evident, and as always aligned to a strong storyline. I have read a few pastiches of Atrocity and the importance of plot is something that their writers do not fully grasp for the most part: it’s not enough to pay homage to JGB by simply cutting up text and fiddling with form and structure. Underpinning Ballard, always, is the bones of a strong plot that can be summarised in a linear synopsis and “The Index” (and Atrocity) is no exception. But this sparse framework also makes the work a “readerly” text, in which inference allows the reader to substantially flesh out the bones. In this respect, I see “The Index” as the logical, extreme outcome of the experiment began by Atrocity, in which the text is pared back as far as possible without sacrificing narrative legibility.

This is especially apparent in light of comments Ballard made in a 1983 interview:

In a sense, I’m assembling the materials of an autopsy, and I’m treating reality — the reality we inhabit — almost as if it were a cadaver… the contents of a special kind of inquisition. We have these objects here — what are they?

If you move into a house that hasn’t been properly cleaned up, you find these strange unrelated items: a pen, a hair clip, a copy of Auden’s poems, and without even thinking you begin to assemble from these materials some sort of hypothesis about the nature of life that was lived in this house, or the nature of people who’ve left this debris on the beach after they’ve vanished in a plane crash or what have you.

I assemble materials and I draw from them. I treat the reality we inhabit as if it were a fiction — I treat the whole of existence as if it were a huge invention.… this huge network of ciphers, and encoded instructions — perhaps — that surround us in reality.

“Interview by Graeme Revell”. RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard

Now, having reflected on one of my favourite Ballard stories, I am therefore naturally delighted to report that Lucy Vickery in The Spectator recently ran a competition to “submit a revealing fragment from an index which is all that remains of the autobiography of someone who has privileged access to the great and good”.

Lucy writes:

To give you an idea of what I was after, here are a couple of snippets from J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Index’, a story implied through an index, which is the only surviving part of the unpublished autobiography of Henry Rhodes Hamilton: ‘Churchill, Winston, conversations with HRH, 221; at Chequers with HRH, 235; spinal tap performed by HRH, 247; at Yalta with HRH, 298; ‘iron curtain’ speech, Fulton, Missouri, suggested by HRH, 312; attacks HRH in Commons debate, 367’.

But as she admits this was a pretty tough ask and subsequently “entries were thin on the ground”. However, Lucy did manage to unearth four winners who received £30 each, with a “bonus fiver” going to G.M. Davis. I’ve run two Ballard-inspired competitions here at ballardian.com, and I’m insanely jealous I didn’t think of this for the third — it’s a brilliant idea.

Reproduced below is G.M. Davis’s entry (which includes an entry for Will Self’s “snoring”), but special mention must also go to Basil Ransome-Davies, whose submission featured this hilarious detail: “Eagleton, Terence. Asks me to smooth his way with the Vatican, 246″.

G.M. DAVIS:

Mandela, Nelson, surprisingly short when you meet him, 526; political errors of, 828
Miners’ strike, author’s resolution of, 917–8
Mosley, Max, ‘kindred spirit’, 42; ‘Nazi pervert’, 1620
Nabokov, Vladimir, aesthetic fallacies of, 301
New Statesman, author’s rejection of editorship, 559; sales slump, 560
Portillo, Michael, deaf to good counsel, 338
Price, Katie, seeks author’s advice on mammary enlargement/reduction, 844
Prince Charles, personal hygiene problem, 208; bares soul, 443
Principia Mathematica, discussion of with Allen Ginsberg, 71; author’s refutation of, 113
Quantum theory, author’s contribution to, 12, 19, 47, 77, 101–114, 298–306
Rice, Condoleezza, ‘not so black as she’s painted’, 866; good in bed, 992–4
Rooney, Wayne, spotted by author as four-year-old, 1083; ingratitude, 1119
Sarkozy, Nicholas, requests author’s help in drafting European constitution, 1443
Scorsese, dissuaded from abandoning cinema, 636; as drug-crazed egomaniac, 665
Scotland, faulty central heating at Balmoral, 460; as failed state, 700
Self, Will, snoring of, 1757

The rest of the entries can be found at The Spectator.

by the Crashman.

ABOVE: ‘White Bird’ by the Crashman. ‘XB-70, Tu-144: White Bird Must Fly, or she will crash’.

From the moment Blake crashes his stolen aircraft into the Thames, the unlimited dream company takes over and the town of Shepperton is transformed into an apocalyptic kingdom of desire and stunning imagination ruled over by Blake’s messianic figure. Tropical flora and fauna appear; pan-sexual celebrations occur regularly; and in a final climax of liberation, the townspeople learn to fly.

From the cover blurb to The Unlimited Dream Company, J.G. Ballard, 1979 (Triad/Panther edition, 1985).

Perreau: You once said “Nothing has any sense except in terms of ephemeral airplane culture”. Motorways, airplanes, shopping centres… What is the link between these things? What do humans do?

Ballard: They take planes and fly around, like the great soaring birds who endlessly cross and recross the ocean. Like the albatross, we are looking for our soul. Tourism is a rehearsal for death.

From Yann Perreau’s interview with J.G. Ballard.

As a stripling, I had the immense good fortune to stumble across the short stories of J.G. Ballard in the pulp science fiction magazines of the day: IF, F&SF, Analog. These prompted me to get hold of his early novels: The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Crystal World. I was seduced by the subtle brilliance of Ballard’s work, by the total absence of worked-to-death SF themes, by the air of detached sophistication, overwhelming to a callow adolescent like me.

When Mr Ballard turned his back on “conventional SF” and pioneered the British New Wave with Michael Moorcock, I was as excited as anyone. His work opened up a relentless, terrifyingly limitless voyage into the libido, the id, the savage psychopathology that lies hidden in every ordinary man and woman, the possibility of any strange thing. Reading Ballard as an adolescent changed my entire view of the world, certainly of what was called “Science Fiction”.

In the early 70s a fellow fan handed me a copy of Crash. It was an utterly stunning experience. Crash ruined my taste for anything but the finest SF, and I was haunted for years by visions of Vaughan’s peculiar hobbies, those bizarrely twisted, almost unheard-of modes of human sexuality spelled out inexorably by the book. Now nothing could satisfy me as fully as Mr Ballard’s experiments with what the human psyche was really capable of, laying out unthinkable sexual and psychological grotesqueries in his trademark elegant, gentlemanly, spare and penetrating prose. His writing remade my intellectual world.

I gulped down his later novels, each more thought-provoking than the last, reveling in the astounding but visibly true events reported in the daily news as much as in his work. I found little to criticize, least of all his unflinching view of the profound yet subtle changes imposed by modern civilization on a thinking organism many millions of years old, an organism evolved under very different conditions than prevail today.

I searched for similar oracles, those who could further light the shattered-glass-strewn, arc-lit motorways we would soon be endlessly traveling. The Cronenberg movie was devastatingly, beautifully faithful to Ballard and after I saw it I realized that all of Ballard’s work could be read as a screenplay, a script for a movie about the storms of change enveloping the world.

ABOVE: ‘Helicopter Opera’ by the Crashman. ‘Helicopters crash to soaring opera by Kimera’.

I developed a desire to put forth my own tribute to Ballard’s work and somehow to carry forward the concepts that had so fascinated and changed me. I am no writer of any skill, and the idea of writing something “derivative of” or “inspired by” the genius of the Oracle of Shepperton was repellent to me. It could not fail to be anything but the crudest of imitations. So, to contribute to the Ballardian universe and its inhabitants, I latched onto the themes expressed in Crash, and since Mr Ballard’s novels acknowledged little or no boundaries, neither would I. I felt I could somehow take the themes of Crash even further, in different media if necessary. I thought about the event that had more or less inspired Crash: Mr Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars as art, with the death and destruction latent in these twisted, crashed vehicles unleashing something that had always been hidden in the minds of their viewers. I wanted to do that.

In my teens I acquired a pilot’s licence, for sport and for the opportunity to master dangerous technology. But I was also drawn to plane crashes, to air crashes of any type, crashes at air exhibitions, transport accidents, airliners, sport planes, military fighters. They attracted me in the same way as Vaughan, who could not pass a motor accident without slowing to view and, if possible, photograph the result. From childhood I collected every book, press clipping and photograph I could find that dealt with aviation accidents and their strange and often grotesque aftermaths. To this day I have valises bulging with old magazine and newspaper clippings of long-forgotten air crashes.

Famous air tragedies have become iconic for me: so much human anguish dealt out by a crack in a pressurized Comet window joint, by the decision of the KLM captain at Tenerife to advance the throttles of his huge 747 while another loaded 747 on the same runway ahead of him lay hidden in the fog. By the peculiarly unforgiving nature of mechanical flight, midair collisions against all odds, the inexplicable crash deaths of highly experienced pilots from unexpected causes, of men and women who had spent thousands of hours at the controls. As Ballard’s work implies, we are at the mercy of our own technology.

I began to understand what it was that never fails to fascinate the public about aviation: the CRASH. A massive, newsworthy and completely public display of flying vehicular violence always raises the psychological stakes on the table, and is faithful to the essential Ballardian spirit. In the film The Great Waldo Pepper the barnstorming protagonist asks, “Why do people come to airshows?” The answer he is given is: “People don’t come to airshows to watch planes fly. They come to watch a man die.” Few psychoanalysts would disagree.

But I have also never met a pilot who can resist reading a crash report or viewing a film of one. We learn from them, “there but for the grace of God go I” — but like a car accident on the motorways that now define our civilization, no one can look away. We are all spectators at this destructive end-stage of our grotesquely dehumanizing civilization. Eventually it will become boring, as Mr Ballard has predicted our future as a civilization to be.

ABOVE: ‘Kraftwerk Crashes’ by the Crashman. ‘Topnotch crashing, all technical styles’.

Added to that, I was also fascinated by Ballard’s stint in the RAF and the flying symbolism in his books. Again and again he has teased us with aviation and its dangers, so akin to the dangers of the motorway. There’s the protagonist aviator in Super-Cannes with his crash-injured knee and his banner-towing girlfriend. There are the accounts in The Kindness of Women of military training in powerful RAF Harvards in Saskatchewan; of the ceaseless activity at the huge airports that always seem to be at the nexus of those fascinating and deadly motorways; of the forever-lost Turkish aviator trainee and his crashed Harvard, inverted for eternity in an unnamed Canadian lake, its form just visible, slowly disappearing under green algae as Ballard flew over it. And of the bold and virile American Mustang over Shanghai, herald of liberation and of a change in Ballard’s life as profound as that triggered by the Japanese occupation, itself announced by graceful formations of Zeros and Mitsubishi bombers over the soon-to-be-destroyed Shanghai of the 1930s.

So here was my chance to sit at the Ballardian table and place my own dish on its menu. Given my aviation background, and my desire to evoke the spirit of Crash, what could be more appropriate than the sight of a sudden and unexpected crash, preferably of a large airliner, its great silver phallus shattering in an ultra-high-speed orgasm of violent, spasmodic disintegration, uncontrollably spewing the shocked, wandering gametes of its ambulatory survivors and the ragged chunks of human flesh still full of their own unique DNA? This is epistemology, the very question of identity itself: “Who are we?” “Who were you?”. And what could be more Ballardian? No one ever emerges from an air crash unchanged at the deepest levels, even if they do survive.

ABOVE: ‘Crash Right In’ by the Crashman. ‘Baby let your hair hang down…’

The raw materials for the experiment were already available. I found numerous websites devoted solely to air accidents, those rare films where a motion-picture camera has recorded the unfolding of the crash, the cries and shouts of the survivors and onlookers, the stunned silence of the injured and the unending silent rage of the dead, lives with a whole trajectory changed forever in the intersection with violent arcs of shatteringly powerful, aluminium turbine-powered technology. Right away these suggested TV commercials of traveling death and terrifying impacts rather than beaches and sun, films of agonizingly public yet intensely personal disasters of which the Zapruder Kennedy motorcade film was an early harbinger.

I collected these films, poring over dread experiences frozen forever in time. Again, I recalled Ballard’s exhibition, where the mere presence of the crashed vehicles in a public art-space had touched and unleashed the id of the viewers, to the point where the audience began to interact unpredictably and destructively with these static displays of demolished technology. Somehow, Ballard’s work had touched something that was always there, but rarely expressed in public.

I began to edit the films to music, making my own choices and juxtapositions, the goal being to emerge with a collection of short videos that had been extracted from reality, yet would evoke in the viewer the same types of emotions and insights unleashed in Mr Ballard’s work. I used a neo-Ballardian pastiche technique to edit them: no plot, no dialogue with the viewer, nothing but crash after crash, and the result emerged as a video collage of horror, dismay, and death, Ballardianism expressed in an entirely new set of technological media.

ABOVE: ‘Turning Japanese’ by the Crashman. ‘I think I’m turning Japanese…’

The films in their original state were often silent, sometimes monochromatic and flickering with age, and sometimes modern color video, the soundtrack replete with the noise of impact and the cries of onlookers. But music dictated an important “feel” to the videos, echoing and amplifying the visual crash itself, lending it layers of additional meaning (although I often left in the cries of spectators and survivors, the better to immerse the viewer in the event). I found that the visual material of crashing aircraft lent itself readily to many kinds of musical background. Repeated slow-motion test crashes of old airliners called for music evoking the eventual futility of life. Exciting airshow passes and flaming collisions called for equally exciting, pounding rock ‘n’ roll. Surviving, parachuting pilots had their luck accompanied with notes of musical grace. Antique crashes evoked songs from their own black-and-white era. Uniquely elegant aircraft crashes called for matching beauty in the music.

At first I kept these short videos to myself. I felt the general public would see them as merely morbid, while the aviation community, of which I remained a part, would probably react even more negatively. Then I began to post them on websites devoted to bizarre and unpleasant events. After I had made a few of the videos public, a collective audience began to slowly emerge. I began to receive feedback and criticism, sometimes constructive, often laudatory, and sometimes merely abusive. But these people were accustomed to horrible sights and events already, like a doctor or air crash investigator. How would a random, general audience feel and what would they say? I took the next step: in 2006 I uploaded most of the videos to YouTube.

I expected to be excoriated by this wider, larger general public as a ghoul, an exploiter of the suffering of others, and as it happened the word ’sick’ was freely applied to the videos as well as to myself. I considered this a compliment, as it mirrored the initial response to Crash (‘This author is beyond psychiatric help: do not publish’, according to the publisher’s reader). But, and I had expected this too, neo-Ballardians began to show themselves, finding subtle excitements and even strange beauty in the videos, that uneasy, disquieting splendour inherent in the slow-motion breakup of a speeding aircraft. Negative commenters, meanwhile, would often complain that the music was not to their taste, ignorant of the maxim “de gustibus non est disputandum”.

While I got my share of abuse as a psychopathic air crash ghoul and poor chooser of soundtrack music, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: not one of the persons commenting who had an authentic aviation background found them less than fascinating, and the vast majority of them found the videos praiseworthy. They admitted they were fascinated and horrified at the same time, feelings made familiar by the very real possibility of such crashes happening to them. They had been fatally intrigued. As one of my sharpest critics admitted, even he couldn’t look away from the screen. The material was simply too visually powerful. I had touched something, and I hoped it was close to what Mr Ballard had touched in the readers of his novels and in the viewers of his crashed-car art installation.

I continued to expose my unpromoted, unadvertised work, with all its unfettered techno-pornography of aviation violence. Within a little more than a year my videos had been seen by well over a million people on YouTube alone. The experiment was working on a large stage now.

ABOVE: ‘Proud and Glorious’ by the Crashman. ‘Death and glory in the air…’

The viewers seemed to get the intended spirit of these odd video creations right away. Others had already begun making fascinating crash-collage videos of auto accidents, and my work was seen as kicking the violence stakes up a notch, because, I suppose, of the relative rarity of plane crash films and the indisputably brutal violence inherent in their nature. Famous airliner crashes, the air conflicts of WWII, the pathetic mishaps of general aviation and the unintended accidents at public airshows and aerial exhibitions interested the vast majority of viewers.

I found that nationalism played a large part in most of the negative reactions. Russians, for example, would complain about videos devoted to their own airshow crashes. My video of the incomparably horrible Lviv airshow accident in 2002 showed shredded bodies on the runways, yet how could a video faithfully recording the original event ever be justifiably censored? No one can even see these videos unless they seek them out…

Once a contingent of Britons forced YouTube to take my collage of helicopter crash films offline, by bombarding them with complaints that it showed a completely non-explicit but fatal crash of one of their own country’s helicopters. Again I adopted a Ballardian stance: here it is, make of it what you will. View the videos or not, as you choose. To the extent I needed one, I pleaded the aesthetic defense of reality, of psychological and factual truth-telling — and a strong one it is.

It’s interesting to note that since I began posting in 2005, quite a few others have begun to do the same, editing various aviation-accident and plane crash videos to music and posting the result. The experiment has gone “viral” — a novel subgenre is emerging on YouTube and many other sites devoted to odd videos.

On a personal level, I consider this experiment an enormous success, comparable to the feelings of an author or filmmaker who knows that literally millions of people have chosen to view their work. On the Ballardian level, as a public psychological experiment in Applied Ballardianism, it merely proves what we already knew: that Mr Ballard’s unique visions are as powerful when translated into other media as they are in his work itself.

We know that Mr Ballard does not use the internet, but his partner, Claire, does. If by chance she runs across this project someday and shows it to him, I can only hope he will accept this experiment as it was intended: as a sincere tribute to the man and his work.

I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

J.G. Ballard, introduction to Crash, 1973.

The Crashman. Copyright 2008, Crashman Productions.

..:: MORE CRASHMAN
+ Crashman: YouTube
+ Crashman: LiveVideo

Written & directed by: Simon Brook.
Based on the short story by: J.G. Ballard.
Produced by: Susanna Virtanen.
Music: Joshua Zaentz.

Starring: Alfred Hyslop, Paul Ravich, Earl Hagen, Bob Arcaro.

I’m probably biased, but in my estimation Ballard has hardly released a clunker — at least in novel form. Granted, The Wind from Nowhere is even in Ballard’s own analysis, ‘just a piece of hackwork’, knocked off in a matter of weeks to get a foot in the door, but still it has its moments. And the ones the critics loathe — Kingdom Come, say — reflect more the sour prejudice of mainstream media than they do Ballard. I find resonance with Kingdom Come each time I set foot outside my door. How many other 78-year-old novelists can we say that about?

But if we turn to the short stories it’s a slightly different matter, at least early on. ‘Now: Zero’ (1959), for example, was predicated on a last-sentence twist that was as corny as it was predictable. Ballard was big on the surprise reveal in those days, yet when it paid off the reward was secure. ‘Concentration City’, a classic short published two years before ‘Now Zero’, hinged on the sneak attack of the last line and was all the better for it. Even so, the feeling lingers that Ballard, pre-Atrocity Exhibition, was somewhat inconsistent, reinforced by the fact that ‘The Subliminal Man’, one of his very best stories (either novel or short), came out in 1963, the same year as one of his weakest efforts, ‘Minus One’.

‘Subliminal Man’ is quintessentially Ballardian: its sharply delineated descriptions of motorways, flyovers and shopping malls haven’t aged at all. As with the vision of urban panic in ‘Concentration City’, it works precisely because of the taste and restraint Ballard dedicates to the mise en scene; both stories are imbued with an uncanny resonance, the power of suggestion, as much for what they don’t reveal as for what they do. But ‘Minus One’, contextualised with the rest of the oeuvre, is completely baffling. It barely feels like Ballard at all, straining to make its point with considerable overkill.

‘Minus One’ is set in Green Hill Asylum, which ’serves the role of a private prison’, catering to the very rich who dump their mentally defective relatives and lovers there — ‘abandoned casualties of the army of privilege’ — safe in the knowledge that these outcasts will not be seen nor heard from again; the asylum promises they won’t be re-entering society, presumably from a cocktail of drugs and shock treatment. But when a patient, Hinton, goes missing, the asylum’s director, Dr Mellinger, panics. Fearful of losing his job, he manages to convince his staff that Hinton never existed in the first place.

Although it’s not a bad premise, paradoxically the very nature of that premise reveals the story’s greatest flaw: it’s just too talky, with its tedious description (rather than depiction) of events. Yes, that’s necessary, given Hinton apparently doesn’t exist and therefore his ‘backstory’ can’t be shown, but it hardly makes for great writing. Ballard toys with the old ‘what is reality and who defines it?’ conundrum, and almost trips over his words describing Mellinger’s examination of Hinton’s ‘total existential role in the unhappy farce of which he was the author and principal star’. Perhaps we can detect the elements of a failed experiment here, the story’s overblown dialogue and interior monologues leading to a much more pared down and streamlined prose in Ballard’s late-60s works. But then again, even Ballard’s student story, ‘The Violent Noon’, written some 12 years earlier, seems to have a sharper blade. Maybe ‘Minus One’ was simply an aberration, reminding Ballard of the need to refocus; remember, ‘The Terminal Beach’, his stunning document of postwar malaise, came just one year later…

In ‘Minus One’ Ballard clearly has a point to make about the nature of psychiatry and its insular cabal but his heart just doesn’t seem in it, as when Mellinger meditates on Hinton’s file:

He refused to accept that this mindless cripple with his anonymous features could have been responsible for the confusion and anxiety of the previous day. Was it possible that these few pieces of paper constituted this meagre individual’s full claim to reality?

Unfortunately, the concept is not really developed beyond the ‘few pieces of paper’ analogy, and ultimately there is never any doubt that Hinton actually existed; the Ballard of just a few years’ hence would undoubtedly have heightened that ambiguity. Eventually the whole thing limps to a halt with yet another of Ballard’s patented twists in the tail, and while I admit I didn’t see it coming, after it unfurled itself I found it rather banal: potentially mindblowing, but, again, undercooked in its execution.

So, why did documentary filmmaker, Simon Brook, choose this story, this runt in JGB’s litter, as his first foray into film in 1991? I don’t really know, but I do know that ever since I saw a listing for it on IMDB I had to see it. So I tracked Simon down and asked him to send me a copy. (Note that as Simon now lives in France, he has requested I also upload a version with French subtitles, alongside the version you see at the start of this post.)

The film is undeniably stagey, but I’m guessing that had to have been a chief reason for Simon choosing the story; with a cast of four, set in a psychiatrist’s study, you won’t be needing a massive budget. Offsetting that, Simon’s fluid, restless camera extracts the maximum mileage from close angles and slow backward pans, relentlessly tracing the study’s cramped interior, mimicking the asylum’s stuffy worldview. Plus he cleverly mixes up the eyeline matches; the scenic parameters between two characters engaging in dialogue are never simply a matter of reversing the shot when one character is speaking to the other. Instead, we see perspectives from the side, from above, from everywhere. It’s a brisk cinematographic pace, but sometimes the pacing works against the film; if you slacken your concentration for a second or two you might actually miss the final twist.

The acting magnifies the overtly rhetorical language and vaudevillian aspects of Ballard’s story, an effect further intensified by Joshua Zaentz’s faux-chamber-music soundtrack. I can’t say any of that is to my taste. Alfred Hyslop, as Mellinger, eye-pops and mugs for the camera, veering dangerously close to Carry On territory, while Paul Ravich, the actor playing Booth, Mellinger’s main underling, comes to resemble the spaced-out astro-hippies in John Carpenter’s Dark Star. It’s all a bit much.

I can’t help wondering what the results would have been like if the film had played up the dark secret of the asylum, with its habit of making people disappear. There is a hint of this, when we learn that Dr Normand, who doesn’t go along with Mellinger’s methodology, has been lobotomised; that’s a great touch that wasn’t in Ballard’s story, but I’m really talking about mood and tone, and the acting and music, mainly. Combined with the twist in the end, enacted in Mellinger’s claustrophobic study, and Simon’s camera breathing down everyone’s necks, the effect could have been rather disturbing.

Still, this may well be the only time you will see Ballard played strictly for laughs. And for that, Simon Brook certainly deserves his place in the pantheon of unsung directors of JGB, alongside Potter, Cokliss, Scoggins and Cazals.

It’s not all Cronenberg and Spielberg, you know…

Illustration by John Coulthart.

WINNER
Ben Slater; ‘Vista 8′

JOHN: Monochrome location scouting inside a high-rise hotel that looks half-finished. Remnants of an affair litter the piece: photographs, a high heel and the cutting to two cars so close together it would be difficult not to predict a Crash. As Christopher Brookmyre said, beware half-finished places, you know, the Death Star, Jurassic Park, Nakatomi Plaza…

SIMON: Ben’s film, shot among the Vista 8 high-rise in Singapore, seems to me like it’s recording the last moments of a suicide. You chance upon a mobile phone discarded in the high-rise’s courtyard; you press ‘play’, and this is what you find… I do like the snatched inclusion of Bowie’s man-machine classic, ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’.

MORE ENTRIES BELOW…

I’d like to organize a Festival of Home Movies! It could be wonderful — thousands of the things… You might find an odd genius, a Fellini or Godard of the home movie, living in some suburb. I’m sure it’s coming… Using modern electronics, home movie cameras and the like, one will begin to retreat into one’s own imagination. I welcome that…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

We had eight entries in our little competition for 1-minute-or-less films shot on cameraphones, modelled after Ballard’s 1984 call for a ‘festival of home movies’. A reminder of the requirements:

+ Shoot a film using your mobile phone’s video function, no more than one minute in duration, and using no post-production or processing — the film must be shot entirely ‘in camera’.
+ The theme: anything at all to do with either one or both of the Collins English Dictionary definitions of ‘Ballardian’:

BALLARDIAN: (adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

Mounting this exercise was hugely enjoyable for me and I was delighted to discover some real gems among the eight. I have been inspired by those Ballard ‘home movie’ quotes ever since I first read them years ago, and just the very the idea of unearthing ‘a Fellini or Godard of the suburbs’ has always excited (and humoured) me. So have we found one? Perhaps not. But we just may have discovered, finally, what lies in the angle between two walls…. (not even John Foxx, you may recall, could crack that conundrum).

To determine a winner, John Rivers from HarperCollins assigned points to each film, as did I. We then combined our rankings. The result is that Ben Slater, with ‘Vista 8′, came out on top. Ben wins a copy of Miracles of Life, plus these HarperCollins reissues: Millennium People, The Drought, The Crystal World, The Drowned World and The Unlimited Dream Company.

The runner-up is Pablo Sgarbi from Brazil, with ‘120 Days of an Angle Between Two Walls’ (see below), and he receives a copy of Miracles. Congratulations to Ben and Pablo, and many thanks to all entrants and to everyone who supported and promoted the festival. Extra special thanks to HarperCollins UK for getting behind the idea, and to JGB for everything: always and of course.

Next year, who knows? Perhaps we’ll get entrants to simulate the filmed ratissages in Super-Cannes, or Bobby Crawford’s home porno movies in Cocaine Nights…

Here now are the remaining entries direct to you from BallardoTube, the Net’s only dedicated Ballard TV channel, where ‘history is just a first-draft screenplay’ (according to JGB in ‘The Greatest TV Show On Earth’), and where ‘premium subscribers can experience transexualism, paedophilia, terminal syphilis, gang-rape, and bestiality (choice: German Shepherd or Golden Retriever)’, as decreed by JGB in ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’.

RUNNER UP
Pablo Sgarbi; ‘120 Days of An Angle Between Two Walls’

JOHN: A voice simulator spews forth graphic prose like a poetry machine from Vermillion Sands. Juxtaposed with images of ordinariness, a ceiling corner, a kettle, a cup of coffee. Reminding us what lies in the dark psyches of people everyday.

SIMON: Beautiful and hilarious: a robot reads a passage from the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, dispassionately intoning squirting buttocks and jets of blood, while common household objects ’star’ on the screen: those elusive wall angles, a coffee cup, and so on. In its juxtaposition of extreme and violent sex with banal home appliances, this is perhaps the most ‘Ballardian’ film of them all. I love this entry a lot.

..:: Remaining entries (not ranked; in alphabetical order)

Shahin Afrassiabi; ‘Home’

JOHN: A static shot, half composed of white, with red material intruding beneath. A seemingly random collection of sounds from talk radio or television are heard, slowly snatches emerge. Mopeds, a body found on a golf course. Murder on the roads, in the suburbs. “They shouldn’t be here,” claims a politician or letterwriter and as if to answer the listener appears to move away.

SIMON: An effective study in boredom, the psychological blank slate against which all manner of deviant behaviour is exposed and spontaneously generated, like flyblown maggots on rotting meat…

Mike Bonsall; ‘Day of Creation’

JOHN: Machine noise, loud and abrasive. A tool kit, saws, cutting tools. The slow reveal of a pile of Ballard titles leads you to wonder if here JG’s works are being recut, sliced, diced and served again. The Day of Creation is the final title to appear. The maker has taken Ballard and chopped him up.

SIMON: Mike B. is the creator of the JG Ballard Short Story Concordance, and he is currently working on a concordance of Ballard’s novels. These projects required him to buy extra copies of Ballard books and to razor their pages for easily digestible scanning under the all-powerful OCR software, before they could emerge out the other side as digital mulch. This film, then, is a delightful little in joke aimed squarely by Mike at his own obsessiveness, but it also functions as a sly and clever appraisal of Ballard’s entire ouevre, which has always relied on repetition, recycling, détournement, collage, bricolage…

Julian Gough; ‘Flesh Frame’

JOHN: Micro-entertainment, as flesh is exposed on a computer screen. That it only takes up a quarter of the screen makes it look like the body has been filmed and is being edited. Only to blur into a sunset. Consumerism takes over as the computer screen turns and pulls away to a credit card rectangle ready to accept your chip and PIN.

SIMON: This film chases its own tail, eventually disappearing into the black hole of inner space. Utterly beguiling.

Russell Miller; ‘A Journey Through A Distant Land’

JOHN: Concrete, bleakness, a travelator that moves vs. a river refusing to run. CCTV-positioned footage of a seemingly empty street lined by lock-ups hiding ephemera, memory junk, yesterday’s crashes. Daylight as harsh as the artificial strip lighting. In a denial of creation we return to the water from which we emerged.

SIMON: Classic Ballardian imagery, here: the flyovers, the apartment blocks, the obsessive stalking of nothing in particular. An artificial eye scanning the ruins of a humourless Earth, perhaps…

Jack Strain; ‘Ballardian’

JOHN: An urban warrior applies his warpaint in slow-mo before a projection of traffic is destroyed in a deliberate act of vandalism. The whole process seems to be watched or logged.

SIMON: A fabulously evocative film, menacing and dark, and making full use of the competition’s ‘in camera’ editing stipulation. The burning frame is a wonderful touch, and the glimpse of madness at the very end is bizarre and unsettling, behaviour that is perhaps the only response to the crushing insanity of the outside world.

Supervert; ‘Superego’

JOHN: Big Ballard is watching you! And joined by a smaller version of himself. Ballard argues with himself over an unheard question. As we watch, we are given permission only to be refused a second later. We are eventually told ‘no’ twice and our audience is over. That the responses are from Sam Scoggins’s movie about The Unlimited Dream Company and the ‘90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient test’ give the film a different meaning, that you’re being fed the results of a psychological experiment, while appearing to participate in one yourself.

SIMON: This film manipulates footage from the Scoggins film and is just a little disconcerting. It’s like being given a glimpse into a malfunctioning brain, with its psychopathology unashamedly on show, brandished like a weapon. Ultimately the synaptic process is unfathomable and the viewer, like all readers of Ballard, is left on the outer, able to only impotently guess at the intent, forced to fill in the dots herself…

..:: Previously on Ballardian…

+ J.G. Ballard Pastiche Competition

Everybody will be doing it, everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days; the home is going to be a TV studio. We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be strange sit-coms, too, like the inside of our heads. That’s going to come, I’m absolutely sure of that, and it’ll really shake up everything…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Andrea Juno and Vale’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

The mobile phone can be seen as a fashion accessory and adult toy as well as a break-through in instant communication, though its use in restaurants, shops and public spaces can be irritating to others. This suggests that its real function is to separate its users from the surrounding world and isolate them within the protective cocoon of an intimate electronic space. At the same time phone users can discreetly theatricalize themselves, using a body language that is an anthology of presentation techniques and offers to others a tantalizing glimpse of their private and intimate lives.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Impressions of Speed’, in Speed : visions of an accelerated age / / edited by Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz (1998).

(the article may be more forward-thinking than it seems: the accompanying primitive web graphics seem strangely reminiscent of millions of myspace pages).

The hatchet job also includes an ‘interview’ with the patron saint of ‘fractal artists and anarcho-physicists’:

CyberViews: Sci-Fi Author J.G. Ballard
By David Thorpe

In his 1973 novel Crash, J.G. Ballard grabbed humankind by the hair and dragged us through the broken glass strewn on every highway in the Western world. He scraped our brains into a pulp, with bits of gravel and glass scabbing into our blood-matted hair with every turn of the page. He forced our wide-open eyes onto the still-spinning tire of a freshly wrecked car, the hot rubber excruciatingly scraping away our corneas until we arrived at a new vision: mankind had become reliant on a technology that was killing us at a rate of dozens of thousands per year. As our vomit began to ferment, clarity emerged. We are a society of technology unfettered by humanity… where can we go next?

CyberFrontiers: Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Mr. Ballard. So, where do you think this whole cyberspace adventure will take us next?

J.G. Ballard: It’s my pleasure. I quite enjoy a good discussion of technology. You see, my only aim is to slide a glistening shard of rent metal across the eyeball of the human race, to bisect the eye, so that the warm fluid streaks down onto the human face and dries there, caked into a nightmare realization of the human subconscious. Where does man end and technology begin? We have built our own chromium prison of nightmare landscapes. Consider the erotic geometry of the toaster, gleaming like a chromium breast upon my kitchen counter, built only to be penetrated. When does humankind stop penetrating the toaster with bread and wake up to the new nightmare of erotic injury-toast? We see our toaster before us, rounded like the breast of a woman, and our hands are drawn to press down the plunger, to light the coils, and we watch in erotic agony as the coils turn red, then orange, glowing like the nightmare of toast and semen, and we must penetrate the toaster. The toast can no longer mediate our lust, and we must slide in one digit, then two, and the pain is an exquisite nightmare as our fingers slide past the chromium labia of the toaster’s top and into the red-hot slots of erotic agony. We smell our own flesh burning, fusing with the metal, and our orgasm is the orgasm of nightmares. The chromium geometry of the toaster melts our agony into humanity, and we know then that we must penetrate the toaster further, and we grasp the blinding pain of the searing slot with our hand and we bring the toaster down to our pubis. We must penetrate the chromium labia with our phallus, and so we do.

CyberFrontiers: OK.”

This is what the bloke in the corner store was on about when he was telling me that Ballard was “sooooo last century”.

[ via Joe McNally ]

On 14 September 2006 JG Ballard gave a reading from his new novel, Kingdom Come, and talked to Robert McCrum of the Observer at the Institute of Education, London — the evening was presented by Blackwell. Looking rather dapper and displaying a sharpness and wit that puts people half his age to shame, Ballard talked about his childhood and influences before touching on some of the big questions of our age: consumerism, Islamic terrorism and the communications revolution.

Ben Austwick

——————————————————————————————–
STOP PRESS: Rattling Other People’s Cages, Ballardian’s new interview with J.G. Ballard, is now online.
——————————————————————————————–

ROBERT McCRUM: Your books are very funny.

JG BALLARD: I tend to be a bit on the deadpan side I think, to put it mildly. The surrealists use a sort of serious humour, and I flatter myself to think I’m in that area too. But it’s a dangerous area to be in. Americans in particular find my stuff very confusing: “What, is he serious?”

There’s one passage in Kingdom Come about a hostage siege in the Metro Centre. This must have been informed in part by your experiences of the war. Do your experiences of China and Shanghai in the Second World War still resonate in your work?

Well, they probably do, even though it was a long time ago. People do get over unhappy experiences in their childhood. War is a terrific revelation, there’s no doubt about it, whether you’re a civilian or a combatant. In many ways I think it’s more of a revelation if you’re a civilian because you’re so powerless.

I had the most comfortable, ex-pat life in the Far East then abruptly woke up one morning — the morning of Pearl Harbour — and everything had changed. Seeing my parents frightened was an education in its own right, and being interned in the camps made such an impression. It’s something very few children know in the West. It separated those who could cope from those who couldn’t. People were sort of boiled down to their reduced essence: meanness, courage, generosity, eccentricity. I think the whole idea of life as a sort of stage set, which it is, registered itself forever in my brain.

‘I feel like I’ve stepped into a time capsule…’
JG Ballard, on his return to Shanghai (still from the BBC documentary ‘Shanghai Jim’, 1991)

At that point, at the age of eleven or twelve, did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Yes, I did. But I was writing even before the war, in the late 1930s.

My mother based her whole life as far as I know on playing bridge and drinking large martinis. She died at the age of 93, a wonderful advertisement for the misspent life. I mentioned the two-martini lunch to her and she said, “Two martinis? Five martinis”. She never worked, of course — I don’t think the idea ever entered her mind. Her job was to run the home and arrange dinner parties.

She spent an enormous amount of time playing bridge and gossiping, real character assassinations, whilst passing this small child around. I didn’t know who the heck they were talking about, but was fascinated by the game and its bidding system — two hearts, three no-trumps and so on — and I thought, ‘what on earth does all this mean?’ It was a sort of code and I wanted to figure it out. So I asked my mother to explain the conventions. She did and I thought ‘my God!’ I was so inspired that I actually wrote a little book on how to play contract bridge. I think the gigantic moralistic strain in my fiction that everyone comments on probably stems from that first effort to set the world to rights.

And when you were that age, what was the young JG Ballard reading?

I was reading everything.

To come back to Kingdom Come, for those of you haven’t read it yet, in a way it’s in the genre of the detective story.

Detective novels are a genre I’ve never really read. I’ve read Raymond Chandler, but I never read all the classic Agatha Christie novels that were published at the time I was growing up.

What did you read at the time?

I read children’s versions of Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland and so on. I read boy’s annuals and Boy’s Own paperbacks. I read American best sellers: extraordinary books like All this and Heaven Too, which most of this audience will be too young to have read, but is an amazing, emotional novel. Even at the age of nine I could see that. I read American comics. I devoured magazines: Time, Life, the Saturday Evening Post. I was a real magpie.

Some writers have said — I’m thinking of VS Naipul here, and there are a number of others — that when one has grown up in the British Empire, one knows England through pictures, through books, and the extraordinary shock of coming to London and seeing the city which they’d read about, which they’ve seen through the eyes of Dickens or whoever it may be. When you came to England, was it a shock?

Yes, it was. It was a huge shock. From reading the Just William books and Winnie the Pooh I thought everybody lived in Kensington. But there was something wrong: not only had three quarters of the population never even been referred to, but large parts of the place had been bombed to the ground. I found it extremely difficult to cope, frankly.

I’m going to quote back to you something you wrote in Kingdom Come: “Like English life as a whole, nothing in Brooklands can be taken at face value”.

Oh, that’s true. Everything — when I arrived, and to some extent now — was coded. It was all a matter of private languages and house rules. It didn’t matter where you were, there was a way of paying a bill, a way of ordering a meal in a restaurant, a way of buying tickets at a ticket office. Everything was calculated to convey a message of some sort — social status, generally speaking.

You were figuring out how to live here.

Still am, still am.

Let me just say at this point, it’s the 50th anniversary today of the publishing of Jim’s first story, ‘Prima Belladonna’, in 1956 in a magazine called Science Fantasy.

I didn’t know!

How did you get to the point where you writing stories like ‘Prima Belladonna’?

I read medicine at Cambridge University, working with cadavers and so on, which was a very important experience. It gave my imagination a huge repertoire of images that have sustained my fiction.

But I knew I was going to become a writer. The problem was in those days it was very difficult to make a start. I wasn’t anywhere near ready to write a novel. I had all this extraordinary experience from the war, but I wasn’t anywhere near making sense of it all.

I read Horizon, which was a very serious literary journal. I read New Statesman, the Observer, and I thought this was what writing was about. You doffed your cap to the grand practitioners of modernism: James Joyce, Kafka. I thought a writer, a serious writer, was someone who wrote within that sort of context. The problem was, when I wrote in that sort of way it wasn’t very good, or original, and I couldn’t get it published.

When I was in the RAF, based in Canada, at about 24 years old, I came across a science fiction magazine — lurid cover, a space monster grappling with a half-naked blonde — and when I turned the pages, inside I found the stories were far more serious than you might think. These were the sort of stories that Kingsley Amis, to his credit, realised constituted a kind of invisible literature. I felt a sort of jolt of recognition. Here’s a fiction about the present day that owed nothing to aping past models. It had vitality, endless vitality, which was absent from the then British literary scene. The serious writers I admired, Lawrence Durrell, Graham Greene, later Anthony Burgess, all lived abroad, and I sort of understood why.

Here was a fiction about advertising, the media landscape, television, the threat of nuclear war, and I thought, ‘this is something I’ll have a go at’. I thought there’s endless possibilities with this fiction — something can be done with it, and this is my job. For the first ten to fifteen years of my career I couldn’t believe I was seen as being a science-fiction writer, because in the science-fiction field I wasn’t that at all –they loathed me. I was a virus that had entered their immaculate cell, infiltrating their cellular machinery to create this cancerous monster. I was Public Enemy Number One. I went to one or two science fiction conventions and was almost physically assaulted.

In one of the editions of Crash, you write, “The fiction is already there. It is up to us to invent the reality”.

I think that is pretty true on one level. We live in a world of entertainment culture that’s informed by relentless television, hundreds of channels, by advertising, by politics conducted as a branch of advertising, by consumerism as a whole. It’s seen as a reality because people are quite serious about it, but it’s completely devoid of real elements.

My father as a young man, or my grandfather as a young man, or my grandmother, would have recognised reality. They had a clear understanding that reality was work. That isn’t true any more. The whole thing is a huge fiction. This is why we’ve sort of lost our direction as a nation. We assume that everyday reality is as real as in our grandparents’ time. I think even our present Prime Minister is to some extent a prisoner of his own fantasy world, who doesn’t realise it and has started to believe his own fictions.

I don’t think it can be reversed — the other world, the reality, has become so fictionalised. Any points of reality we have are in our own heads. Our obsessions. Nodes of anger, greed, hope, the need to remythologise our lives — these are the only realities we have. To my father’s and grandfather’s generation all that was just nonsense. ‘You’re dreaming boy. Go to work. Wake up’. There’s been a sort of switch of polarities.

I want to ask how important your writing style is. Is it something you’re aware of?

I don’t give much thought to style, which is probably a fault.

The message seems to be much more important than character.

Yes. I’m not really interested in characterisation, I’m much more interested in psychological roles.

It’s something you’ve been criticised for.

Yes, and it’s probably too late to change. I’ve always loved case histories. The sort of things you get in textbooks, you know: ‘Mrs Ash was sitting on a train from Potter’s Bar to Paddington, when she noticed that God was sitting opposite her’. The textbook takes this very seriously. It’s governed by the situation. Her basic situation, the psychological role this woman finds herself in, is very interesting. There’s nothing about her mother in law, or her role in the Women’s Institute, because she’s seen God! That’s what’s interesting about this woman: a psychological revelation. That’s much more interesting than any trivia about where she buys her shoes.

We actually know very little about the characters in our lives, the people we deal with. Every husband in the land I’m sure has woken up next to his wife after five years and thought, ‘I hardly know her and I share a bed with her’. But they’re very happily married. We can be very close to people and know next to nothing about them. Character doesn’t reveal itself that obviously. To create a fully rounded character takes an enormous amount of time. It’s not a matter of just a few little flicks of the wrist.

You’re always described as the Seer of Shepperton.

Well, that’s a joke.

In 1967 you wrote a story called “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, in which you predicted the Reagan presidency. And of course there’s Crash which predicts all kinds of things, so you have foreseen a few things.

I don’t know. I haven’t done a count. I see myself as a weatherman. I look at the sky, read the weather — that’s all I think I’m doing actually. I can see a storm coming. I think we live in frightening times.

Going back to your last book, Millennium People, which deals with a kind of terrorism, when you were writing it were you tempted at all to write about the War on Terror, or even allude to it?

The thing about the War on Terror and Islamic terrorism is that so far — thank God — it’s had a very limited scope. Whereas there’s a strange, cultural shift that I’ve been watching over the last 45 years since I came to England: the airport culture, the motorway culture, CCTV cameras, all the rest of it. People like alienation, curiously enough. They like disposability. Friendships that last half an hour. Things have changed, and one can’t help but notice.

Here and there in the novel I talk about inner London, what I call heritage London, by which I don’t just mean Bloomsbury, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey — I mean Muswell Hill, Holland Park. A middle-class London held together by dinner-party culture. I admit I’ve been part of it. It sustains a view of England as a place of Georgian rectories and so on. It is not. If you want to see the real England, go out to the M25 motorway towns, where it’s almost impossible to buy a book, say a prayer. The old civic virtues have gone and we have a throwaway, disposable culture — which is prone to takeover, frankly. There’s been a sort of shift.

‘Every car had a St George’s flag’. Photo by Simon Crubellier.

The takeover would be what you call soft fascism?

Yes. It could happen. I live in Shepperton, a small town. There’s about forty or fifty shops on the high street. During the World Cup every one of them had a large St George’s flag in the window; every car had a St George’s flag flowing from it. One of my neighbours erected a flagpole. I looked out of my bedroom window and I saw a flagpole! Where do you get a flagpole? I wouldn’t know where to start.

I thought, ‘something’s happening here’. I’ve speculated that the white working class is tribalising itself. Waves of immigration have been coming here for the last forty or fifty years — black, Asian, Kosovan, Polish — and the white working class are saying, ‘remember us’. I don’t think it’s racist — not yet. But there’s something going on, and sport could be a catalyst.

There are references in Kingdom Come to Goebbels, the Fuhrer, etc. It seems that the message in Kingdom Come has been conditioned by your childhood.

I’ve never taken the view that the two huge totalitarian systems that dominated the twentieth century, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, just arrived out of the sky and after leaving tens of millions of people dead just vanished. I think there’s something uniquely dangerous about human beings. We’re the only animal species that in its ordinary, everyday condition is mad. We aren’t overrun by mad alligators or mad squirrels. I think we’re a very dangerous species.

We should take some questions from the audience now.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Could you expand on what you said about Tony Blair not living in the real world?

I wasn’t making a political point. I just think that he is a rather sad and deeply unhappy man. Something’s gone seriously wrong. He’s a person who needs to be liked, and that’s part of his strength. I go along with the general view that his big mistake was to get too close to the American president and enter the Iraq war. The problem is we don’t trust him any more. We see him as a bit of a fantasist. Whether we’re going to be happy with his successor is a different matter.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What happens next for a consumerist society? Will there be a post-consumerist phase that you anticipate?

Well, I wouldn’t know. There are some very strange movements afoot. Religious revivalism for one, in the States in particular. There was a graph in the Times a couple of days ago that showed that something like 98% of Americans believe in God. One shouldn’t interpret that too literally — at least I hope not — but there are some very strange currents in society. The problem is, modern technology allows change to take place at an enormously fast pace. A suspicious substance is found in a bungalow in Bishop Stortford, and the next day the entire airline system of the West is more or less shut down. Everything’s so volatile. I hope my wildest dreams don’t come true.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’d like to ask what inspired The Drowned World.

I think there’s no doubt that The Drowned World, my first novel, was unconsciously inspired — though it took me a long time to realise it — by Shanghai during the annual spring floods, when the Yangtze overflowed and the streets of Shanghai were a foot deep in water. As a boy I thought, ‘this is a bit weird’.

English novelists over the past two or three hundred years have made a specialty of stories of world destruction — cataclysmic novels. It’s never been that popular in America but it’s intensely popular here. English novelists have destroyed London by every conceivable means. It’s an interesting strain in our character. If you put too many rats in what they call a rat universe, the rats after a while separate off into little clubs, then they start attacking each other — then they start attacking themselves. Maybe there’s something about overcrowding here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: In some of your novels you talk about random acts of meaningless violence making us feel more I alive. I was wondering how you’d apply this to the July 7 attacks in London?

In many ways that wasn’t an act of meaningless violence. The people who perpetrated it knew what they were doing. Suicide bombing is a sign of despair. The men who crashed planes into the World Trade Centre knew they’d never defeat America. The Chechnyan terrorists know they’ll never beat Russia. I’ve got a feeling that many of these young Islamic terrorists know that Islam is too deeply rooted in the past to defeat the West, and it’s a tragedy of gigantic proportions. I fear huge numbers of people are going to die before there’s any resolution because these people are absolutely desperate — they don’t see any way in which Islam is going to be reconciled, so they retreat into fantasies of violence that tragically kill large numbers of people. It’s something we have to live with.

At the end of the last century, people would ring me up and ask me my views about the future. I said I can sum up the future in one word — it’s going to be boring. Vast suburbs that extend around the planet: utter boredom, broken by acts of unpredictable violence. The man in the supermarket who opens fire with a machine gun. And the suicide bomber, a man who has nothing, setting off a bomb in a desperate way to prove himself. The idea of meaningless violence, which I looked at in my previous novel Millennium People, has a huge appeal. I can understand that. It’s in the roots of one’s childhood — all children smash their toys. The trouble, of course, is that people get killed.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is your work a critique of modernism?

I think modernism shot its bolt. There’s something about modernism that’s too self-immersed and neurotic. I think people prefer confusion.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You talked about 50s science fiction as having great vitality. Where do you see that same vitality now? Is it in internet culture, or is it still fiction?

I think internet culture does have that vitality, from what I see over my partner’s shoulder 18 hours a day. She retrieves the most extraordinary things from the internet. I think internet culture is the most vital culture today. I don’t think there’s anything remotely rivalling it. It’s so democratic. Where it’ll go I don’t know. I’ve got a terrible fear that big corporations will start blocking off larger and larger areas of it. But that hasn’t happened yet as far as I know. I think it’s a wonderful force.

——————————————————————————–
..:: LINKS
+ Rattling Other People’s Cages Ballardian’s newest interview with J.G. Ballard

OPENING LINE:
“Every afternoon in Shanghai during the summer of 1937 I rode down to the Bund to see if the war had begun.”

I have a real soft spot for The Kindness of Women, an autobiographical work that’s loosely described as a sequel to Empire of the Sun. Here, Ballard is honest, self-deprecating and wildly vivid in laying out the tracks of his adult life. While it’s actually a fictional ‘reimagining’ of Ballard’s life rather than a straight recounting (which is what all autobiographies essentially are, if only they’d care to admit it), Kindness is essential for anyone looking to delve into the motivations behind works such as Crash and the 70s Ballard that has been so mythologised.

And it’s very funny, too, full of keenly applied and intentional humour, like this description of being serviced by a prostitute (p. 250): “Like a fisherwoman at an angling hole, patiently waiting for a bite, she moved about on her heels, the tip of my penis between her labia.”

I can see Ballard’s wry smile behind the typewriter every time I read this, his passive, avuncular expression tinged with mildly titillated bemusement at the abstraction sex has become.

Some quotes from the Grafton edition:

Ballard is the most modern of writers; his art engages with the artefacts and obsessions of the second half of this century in a manner and with an intensity unmatched by any other writer I can think of. The book is full of memserising writing, classic examples of the Ballard Style, paragraphs and pages that disturb and enthrall… A force is operating in this astonishing book which is hard to resist.”

William Boyd, Daily Telegraph

“It has a brutal spine — plenty of hardware and violence and graphic and clinical sex scenes. But it is also, in its own chilly way, enormously tender and likeable with huge vision and ambition.”

Sunday Times

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’).

From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:

The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, published over the last thirty years. In a long and highly-acclaimed career, J.G. Ballard has established himself as one of Britian’s most distinctive and admired writers, the author of such influential novels as Crash, The Drowned World, High-Rise, Empire of the Sun and, most recently, Rushing to Paradise. Throughout his career he has also been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, he has gathered together the finest of these pieces and grouped them under themes such as film, lives, the visual world, writers, science, autobiography and science fiction.

Marlon Brando, Nancy Reagan, Elvis Presley, Deng Xiaoping, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, William Burroughs and Graham Greene are just some of the people who feature in the ninety articles, together with many of the themes familiar to readers of Ballard’s fiction, includign Shanghai, television, surrealism, cars, motorways and the atom bomb.

The result is an astonishingly varied and fascinating collection — a provocative and entertaining review of the modern world, as seen through the eyes of one of this country’s most original writers.”

I happen to think that some of Ballard’s best writing can be found in the non-fiction realm; in fact, there was a time, when I first chanced upon his work, that I was convinced he was a superior journalist than a novelist. Although it’s not in this collection, I especially savour Ballard’s phrasing in his lovely meditation on Helmut Newton:

A company of beautiful women moves through the palatial corridors or gazes into the opaque depths of ornate mirrors, waiting for a last act that will never unfold. Even those women who are naked seem scarcely aware of themselves, as if their sexuality is defused by the strange bedrooms where they wait for the rich and powerful men stepping from their limousines in the courtyards below.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

The Edge features a typically acerbic review of User’s Guide, by Gerald Houghton:

In 1977 Ballard wrote one of his most experimental and most brilliant short stories, ‘The Index’. Did the attached book ever actually exist? Was it all a figment of some deranged imagination? All that remains of this autobiography is a collection of names and page numbers; tantalising nudges and winks, like a road-map with the motorways rubbed out. It’s a game we can play with A User’s Guide To The Millenium: Hitler nuzzles up to Mae West, Dali to Nancy Reagan, Derek Jarman with Walt Disney, Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Jim interred in the Japanese camp. What, if anything, do all these and the rest have to do with this rather unpresupposing British author?

Ballard is never less than urbane, but his best dinner party manners mask real teeth. Thus he adores the Surrealists, Henry Miller, Joyce and Genet, but is dismissive towards others (Warhol), occasionally outright scathing (Nancy Reagan). The Ballard in these pages is clearly in awe of Burroughs’ reupholstering of narrative form, while describing himself as an old-fashioned storyteller. (It’s fulsome praise that should be tempered with a reading of his superb interview with Will Self in Self’s recent Junk Mail.) He is mystifyingly rhapsodic over Dali, surely the most overrated artist of the century. (What, one wonders, would Ballard make of the comment that Dali is the ‘kind of artist you think is brilliant when you’re 15′? Are you listening Damien Hirst?).”

..:: CONTENTS

1. FILM
Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet…

• ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’ (1990)
• ‘Magical Days at Rick’s’ (1993)
• ‘Hollywood Sex Idols’ (1991)
• ‘Push-button Death’ (1991)
• ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (1977)
• ‘A User’s Guide to the Millennium’ (1987)
• ‘Courting the Cobra’ (1993)
• ‘The Samurai of the Epic’ (1991)
• ‘La Jetee’ (1996)
• ‘Blue Velvet’ (1993)

2. LIVES
Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito…

• ‘The Chain-saw Biographer’ (1991)
• ‘Survival Instincts’ (1992)
• ‘Fallen Idol’ (1991)
• ‘The Killing Time’ (1979)
• ‘Mob Psychology’ (1991)
• ‘Closed Doors’ (1977)
• ‘Last of the Great Royals’ (1989)
• ‘Sinister Spider’ (1992)
• ‘Lipstick and High Heels’ (1993)

More contents to come.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).

From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; reprinted in two volumes in 2006):

For the first time in one volume, the complete collected short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes — regarded by many as Britain’s No.1 living fiction writer.

J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and most influential novelists. Throughout his remarkable career, he has won equal praise for his ground-breaking short stories, which he first started writing during his days as a medical student at Cambridge. In fact, it was winning a short-story competition that gave him the impetus to become a full-time writer.

His first published works, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’ appeared in Science Fantasy and New Worlds in 1956. Ever since, he has been a prolific producer of stories, which have been published in numerous magazines and several separate collections, including The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future and War Fever.

Now, for the first time, all of J.G. Ballard’s published stories — including four that have not previously appeared in a collection — have been gathered together and arranged in the order of original publication, providing an unprecedented opportunity tp review the career of one of Britain’s greatest writers”.

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilirating imagination — and a national treasure.”

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

A large body of opinion says that Ballard’s a better short-form stylist than novelist. On some days, I agree. My first exposure to Ballard, aside from Crash, was his short story ‘The Subliminal Man’. It hung in my imagination like a sharp blade over a heifer’s neck. Absolutely incredible, the imagery of it:

The old cities were surrounded by the vast motion sculptures of the clover-leaves and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.
…
Then the flicker of lights cleared and steadied, blazing out continuously, and together the crowd looked up at the decks of brilliant letters. The phrases, and every combination of them possible, were entirely familiar, and Franklin knew that he had been reading them for weeks as he passed up and down the expressway.

BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY
NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
…
They walked out into the trim drive, the shadows of the signs swinging across the quiet neighbourhood as the day progressed, sweeping over the heads of the people on their way to the supermarket like the blades of enormous scythes.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963).

All the criticisms that are usually applied to Ballard’s novels — style over substance; lack of characterisation; thin plot — simply don’t apply in this format. In fact, in this realm they become virtues, as the sheer weight of Ballard’s imagination is compressed, and then unpacked, with full force. He didn’t dub the short pieces that make up The Atrocity Exhibition ‘condensed novels’ for nothing. Ballard’s a radical, a man who saw that the 20th-century novel was stifled by 19th-century function and set about stripping it to its very essence. That aesthetic became his body of short stories: quite simply, the man’s a master of the form and it’s a damn shame he doesn’t write them anymore.

I have the hardback, single-volume, supposedly complete version — a fallacy, for it only includes three pieces from The Atrocity Exhibition. I’m not sure if the new two-volume set rectifies that — probably not, considering it would take away sales from Atrocity itself.

It’s a bit of a cheat. If the publisher considers Atrocity to be a novel (as Ballard does), rather than a collection of short stories, then the Complete Short Stories shouldn’t contain any Atrocity pieces at all. According to Ballard expert David Pringle, there are three Ballard shorts that weren’t included, seemingly at the expense of the three Atrocities: ‘Journey Across a Crater’ (1970), ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B——” (1984) and ‘The Dying Fall’ (1994).

I call that a missed opportunity.

Update: reader Mike Holliday contacted me with some further comments on this collection:

Despite its title, the book does not include all of Ballard’s short stories. If we discount those that are shortened versions of Ballard’s novels (Storm-Wind, The Drowned World, Equinox), then the following are missing:

(i) The Violet Noon, an early non-professional story published while Ballard was at university

(ii) most of the stories included in the original edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, namely You and Me and the Continuum, The Assassination Weapon, You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe, The Atrocity Exhibition, Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy, The Death Module, Love and Napalm: Export USA, The Great American Nude, The University of Death, The Generations of America, The Summer Cannibals, Tolerances of the Human Face, Crash!

(iii) the so-called ’surgical fictions’, Coitus 80, Princess Margaret’s Facelift, Mae West’s Reduction Mamoplasty, Queen Elizabeth’s
Rhinoplasty, Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty

(iv) a few other pieces, namely Journey Across a Crater, The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******, Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon, and The Dying Fall. It also excludes those items classified as Miscellaneous Media [including Ballard's collages for Ambit magazine].

In 2006, The Complete Short Stories was republished in two paperback volumes, but this edition omits the novella The Ultimate City.”

Disappointingly, there’s not a lot of decent criticism surrounding Ballard’s short-form work. Over at Rick McGrath’s site, however, John Boston has posted a thorough and interesting account of “the four short stories that got [Ballard] back into writing science fiction: Now: Zero (1959), The Waiting Grounds (1959), The Sound-Sweep (1960), and Zone of Terror (1960).”

..:: LINKS
+ J.G. Ballard’s Introduction to the Complete Short Stories

..:: CONTENTS

+ ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956)
+ ‘Escapement’ (1956)
+ ‘The Concentration City’ (1957)
+ ‘Venus Smiles’ (1957)
+ ‘Manhole 69′ (1957)
+ ‘Track 12′ (1958)
+ ‘The Waiting Grounds’ (1959)
+ ‘Now: Zero’ (1959)
+ ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
+ ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960)
+ ‘Chronopolis’ (1960)
+ ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960)
+ ‘The Last World of Mr Goddard’ (1960)
+ ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (1961)
+ ‘Deep End’ (1961)
+ ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1961)
+ ‘Mr F. is Mr F. (1961)
+ ‘Billennium’ (1961)
+ ‘The Gentle Assassin’ (1961)
+ ‘The Insane Ones’ (1962)
+ ‘The Garden of Time’ (1962)
+ ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962)
+ ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
+ ‘Passport to Eternity’ (1962)
+ ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962)
+ ‘The Watch-Towers’ (1962)
+ ‘The Singing Statues’ (1962)
+ ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ (1962)
+ ‘The Subliminal Man’ 63 (1962)
+ ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1962)
+ ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962)
+ ‘The Time-Tombs’ (1962)
+ ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1962)
+ ‘The Venus Hunters’ (1962)
+ ‘End-Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Minus One’ (1962)
+ ‘The Sudden Afternoon’ (1962)
+ ‘The Screen Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Time of Passage’ (1964)
+ ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ (1964)
+ ‘The Lost Leonardo’ (1964)
+ ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964)
+ ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964)
+ ‘The Delta at Sunset’ (1964)
+ ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964)
+ ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964)
+ ‘The Volcano Dances’ (1964)
+ ‘The Beach Murders’ (1966)
+ ‘The Day of Forever’ (1966)
+ ‘The Impossible Man’ (1966)
+ ‘Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer’ (1966)
+ ‘Tomorrow is a Million Years’ (1966)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)
+ ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ (1967)
+ ‘The Recognition’ (1967)
+ ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ (1967)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968)
+ ‘The Comsat Angels’ (1968)
+ ‘The Killing Ground’ (1969)
+ ‘A Place and a Time to Die’ (1969)
+ ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ (1970)
+ ‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’ (1972)
+ ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974)
+ ‘The Air Disaster’ (1975)
+ ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
+ ‘The Life and Death of God’ (1976)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976)
+ ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)
+ ‘The Smile’ (1976)
+ ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976)
+ ‘The Dead Time’ (1977)
+ ‘The Index’ (1977)
+ ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977)
+ ‘Theatre of War’ (1977)
+ ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ (1978)
+ ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’ (1978)
+ ‘Zodiac 2000′ (1978)
+ ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978)
+ ‘A Host of Furious Fancies’ (1980)
+ ‘News from the Sun’ (1981)
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)
+ ‘Report on An Unidentified Space Station’ (1982)
+ ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984)
+ ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985)
+ ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’ (1985)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War 3′ (1988)
+ ‘Love in a Colder Climate’ (1989)
+ ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
+ ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989)
+ ‘War Fever’ (1989)
+ ‘Dream Cargoes’ (1990)
+ ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992)
+ ‘The Message from Mars’ (1992)
+ ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’ (1992)

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

PENGUIN: You don’t belong to any one school, who do you read or admire?

WILL SELF: I do have some very defined and precise influences on my work and on how I see my work as a writer. Of the post-war writers, I stand most in thrall to J G Ballard, to his vision of an apocalyptic world. A world in which effect and in which feeling is to some extent deadened or even destroyed by alienation and by technology. I think the big difference between me and Ballard is that there are no jokes in his books at all, or at least not intentionally any jokes.

No intentional jokes in Ballard? Maybe not; but his work is full of keenly applied and intentional humour. Here’s a favourite ‘passage’ (oooh err, sounds a bit rude) from Crash: “…she masturbated in the bed beside me in the mornings, thighs splayed symmetrically, fingers grovelling at her pubis, as if rolling to death some small venereal snot…” (p. 180).

Then there’s the description of being serviced in The Kindness of Women: “Like a fisherwoman at an angling hole, patiently waiting for a bite, she moved about on her heels, the tip of my penis between her labia” (p. 250). I can see Ballard’s wry smile behind the typewriter every time I read these, his passive, avuncular expression tinged with mildly titillated bemusement at the abstraction sex has become.

Granted, these examples aren’t exactly thigh slappers. There’s no punchline. And they’re different in execution (if not conceit) from the classic Self sex farce, typified by this passage from Self’s Cock:

“Carol dreamt that she was an enormous chemical factory; like the ICI refinery near her parents’ house in Dorset. Great twisted ganglia of pipes burst forth from her vagina, some of them emitting vast plumes of dry ice spume, others winking with warning lights protected by metal basketry. Her head was marooned far away on the estuarine sand; her great buttocks were shoved against the concrete causeway. Little men, wearing hard yellow hats and driving little yellow trucks, hovered around her anus and vagina. Carol awoke screaming” (pp. 25-26).

In terms of comedy value maybe it’s like comparing Terry Jones with John Cleese, but Ballard makes me laugh, that’s all there is to it, by underscoring the absurd stylisation sex can descend into.

James “Gags” Ballard does have his critics, though, like Brigette Frase. In her summation of Cocaine Nights (worst book of 1998, according to Brigette), she wrote that it was “a shame that Ballard and his characters are unblemished by any sense of humor. With a nip here and a tuck there, this could have been a really funny novel”.

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition

Ballardian presents an exclusive interview with Jonathan Weiss, director of The Atrocity Exhibition, the film based on the J.G. Ballard collection of ‘condensed novels’.

———————————————————————————————————————-
NOTE: This is a revised and expanded version of the original interview. The new additions are a reworked introduction, the addition of notes, and the inclusion of JW’s original, lengthier reply to one question (which I missed the first time around; see the note), plus my follow-up response and JW’s follow-up response. See the postscript for more background to this interview. SS
———————————————————————————————————————-

When film adaptations of JG Ballard’s work are discussed, it’s Crash and Empire of the Sun that grab the headlines. And then there’s Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition. For ages, JGB watchers have speculated about this film — because it’s had just a few screenings since its completion six years ago, it’s gathered a thick crust of secrecy. Weiss, working with very limited resources, oversaw a stop-start production that unfurled over a number of years. Originally running at 105 minutes, the film was edited down to its present 90-minute form after its screening at the 1999 Slamdance festival. And that was pretty much it for The Atrocity Exhibition — it never had a theatrical release, was never marketed. Very few people have seen it. But now, thanks to the Dutch company Reel 23, which recently released this buried work on DVD, we can finally see what Weiss was up to — as Andrés Vaccari did in his review of the DVD for Ballardian.

And now here it is, flawed, fatal and totally flammable — the Jonathan Weiss Interview.

– Simon Sellars

—————————————————————————–
All images © Jonathan Weiss and Reel 23
—————————————————————————–

How did you first come across Atrocity Exhibition, the book?

I had been hunting for the book for a long time, maybe without even knowing it. I never went to film school and initially had no desire to be a filmmaker in the traditional sense. I had been making some truly ‘experimental’ films (I usually hate that term) in that I really was experimenting with film structure looking for what worked, what did not. I started to realise that the duration of short films might be posing inherent problems for what I had in mind. But I found very few feature length films that did what I was interested in, perhaps only Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, and a bit in some of the Derek Jarman Super 8 films blown up to 35mm, like Last of England.

And then somehow I found the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, and I knew in about two pages that I had the book I was looking for. It was absolutely perfect. It was already a shooting script for a film, but since Ballard was an author, he called it a book. I had read other Ballard works, but of course they are totally different from The Atrocity Exhibition, which is the ultimate distillation of his thinking, rendered in a poetically scientific style.

How did you approach Ballard?

I wrote a letter to his agent asking for permission to use the text to do a Super 8 version. I received some sort of vague permission, which would have been worth entirely nothing later. But the film became a real production, as people who were commercial entities in New York City at the time found out about what I was doing and begged to sign on. You cannot believe how enthusiastic people were to help me make it into a ‘real’ film — something that could be projected from 35mm in a typical movie house. So we just made it. It reminds me of the children’s book, Stone Soup: you start making a cauldron of soup with nothing but stones and water, but if you do it right, at the end it’s filled with vegetables and meat.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

At the end of the filming process, when we had a rough cut that was close to the finished version, a friend from England who knew Ballard’s daughter offered to deliver a copy of the VHS to him. He called a few days later to report it delivered. The next day, I heard my wife at the time, Anna Juvander, who plays many roles in the film, screaming. I went to see what the ruckus was about. She was standing by the fax machine, shaking, reading a fax. It was the first one from Ballard, praising the movie. The next day, I kid you not, we received another. He loved it. He loved it so much, in fact, that when I read the faxes I thought, ‘Maybe he’s not quite right any longer’. I was not ready for him to call the movie ‘a poetic masterpiece’ — I would have been happy just hearing that he could watch it in one sitting, or something similar.

We subsequently were able to buy the rights, very reasonably, because of that. In the nick of time, too, as Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa company were after it. I shudder to think what would have happened if JGB did NOT like the movie. Moral of this story: don’t ever, ever, ever do anything as stupid as making anything without getting the rights, in stone, for one million years minimum.

Did Ballard have any input into the film?

JGB indeed helped after the film was finished with a suggestion for a little introductory sequence, which makes the film a tad bit more accessible. I liked the inaccessible opening, but saw the wisdom in his approach. Other than that, he essentially rubberstamped the film with his good wishes.

What was the funding structure like? Was it entirely private?

You are obviously not an American. There is NO such thing as public money for this kind of film in the USA. There might be public money for making a documentary about Eskimos with Down Syndrome, but not for features. That is one reason why American film is the way it is and why other countries’ films are, also, the way they are.

Why did you cut 30 minutes from the original running time?

We took out all the good parts. Like the serious sex and violence.

OK, but why?

Just kidding. I did have a funny interlude with the head of programming for the Sundance Channel, who wanted to buy the film but wondered whether the few frames (less than one second) of hard-core penetration would make it through corporate headquarters. I suggested I replace the footage, because it did not have to be penetration to do what I wanted in that scene. She looked at me like I was a naughty child: how dare I contemplate ‘compromising’ a work of art by self-censoring it. So I said, ‘Fine, leave it in’. She was fired or left the station soon after, anyway. The porn is still there. We just did some necessary editing. I am happy with the length of the final version of the film. Longer was not better.

The film took a number of years to complete. How did you maintain the look and feel over time?

Formaldehyde works wonders. The film took more than a year to shoot, mainly because the shooting schedule coincided with the worst winter in about one hundred years. The editing took forever and went through three different editing houses, because we had no money — it was done as a labour of love, and love runs out.

How did Reel 23 come into the picture?

They liked the film.

That’s it? You suggested to me that the parent company, Filmfreak, actually created Reel 23 so your film could finally be seen. That must have been a huge boost to your confidence.

The people at Filmfreak and Mr Ballard have been the only bright spots on an otherwise very depressing and bleak landscape since making the film. The problem, of course, is that the film is SO very different from other films that to sell it you need to differentiate it from the rest of the stuff in the store. To do this the wonderful people at Filmfreak really went out on a limb and made a very risky investment to market Atrocity and, importantly, other films like it or in the same spirit. This includes very different material, like David Cronenberg’s first films. They had Atrocity subtitled in most languages necessary for a wider release and even had the master made for a NTSC DVD, which to date is waiting for the right distributor to take on the film for America. They’re a European company and not in a position to do distribution for the USA and Canada.

How do you feel about your home audience missing out?

It’s tragic.

Are you being sarcastic?

Wouldn’t you be sarcastic about the prospects of finding distribution for a tiny Ballard adaptation in the ultra-commercial, competitive American market if the main Ballard website thoroughly trounced your film? It’s like asking a thirsty man if he wants something to drink, whilst turning the spigot off. I was at an event a week ago that precipitated this — where someone asked if I had read Vaccari’s review of my film. It was clear from my conversation with them just how damaging this is to TAE in terms of finding a distributor. You may not think so, but you are not in the film business, to my knowledge.

You may not realize the irony of the situation, but having started TAE at the age of 25, (I turned 42 yesterday), I now find myself having to try and undo the damage that some two-bit clod has perpetrated, so that some people might still want to see my film. You talk about the “dire” situation of film in Australia, due to a lack of funding, you say.

[ NOTE: I mentioned to Weiss that I have interviewed many independent filmmakers here in Australia. I told him this mainly in an attempt to establish some kind of common ground -- also to express sympathy with him and with the concomitant plight of independent filmmakers working with extremely scarce resources. I needn't have bothered. Jonathan refused to meet me halfway, and my attempt was swiftly used against me. ]

Do you realize that the problems with film, on the level of something like my film, for example, are far more complex than getting the government to give you some cash? Imagine working for more than 15 years on a difficult, little film which one would expect at least Ballard fans to appreciate. Then having some ham-fisted moron who authoritatively pronounces Ballard to be “outmoded” in his thinking (on a “Ballardian” website, no less) trashing the film as being “dated” because it does not mention Britney Spears and Paris Hilton!

NOTE: Andrés mentioned Britney and Paris, in his comment after the review, as an example of how cultural icons become dated, not of how Weiss’s film is dated; he never calls for either woman’s inclusion in the film and to suggest otherwise is a clear misrepresentation. Also, Andrés never calls Ballard outmoded; rather he suggests that the one book, Atrocity, has not worn as well as some of JGB’s other works. I don’t agree with that, but it’s Andres’s opinion and he’s entitled to it.

Don’t you feel embarassed publishing that? Would you really want to have a drink with Jim after he read that? What would you say to him? Something like, “Sorry to publish that blather, but its not my opinion. Really.”

[ NOTE: That's 'Jim Ballard', in case you're wondering. ]

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment, Simon. Your website, and others like it, are about the only portal through which prospective audiences for TAE will likely travel. At the moment, the world walks the Google path and the first place they are going to start is yours, as far as this is concerned. Google “Atrocity Exhibition” and film and see where you go. For most people the first stop, with an authoritative name like Ballardian, is also going to be their last. How many people who read the review will go to the trouble of trying to see TAE? I would not waste my time, if I were the usual sort, having read such a cursory dismissal of not only the film but the book itself.

[ NOTE: I can't wear this charge. I never look at one review when deciding whether to see a film; I always like to gather a range of opinions, and as far as I can tell that's a pretty normal attitude... By this stage I was getting thoroughly tired of Jonathan’s attempts to bully us into giving him a favourable review, tired of him belittling my journalistic credentials, tired of him abusing my colleague despite repeated requests to stop, and tired of this website bearing the brunt of being the only site to review Weiss’s film. I suggested to him that he publish his own website devoted to the damned thing. Jonathan could then shape public opinion the way he wanted to shape it. As it is, Reel23’s graphics-intensive Atrocity page does him no favours — with no text, merely images of text, it is nowhere to be found on Google. In this day and age of instant access and instant publishing, Jonathan really has only himself to blame for Google searches returning at No. 1 anything other than the official, sanctioned Atrocity product. ]

In short, I think you have done a disservice to the only small, independent film ever made of one of Ballard’s works, and you worry about the “dire” condition of film? Rather ironic. I would be extremely suprised if either you or Mr Vaccari ever gave any thought whatsoever about the effects of your actions on a film like this. Mr Vaccari’s motivations seem clear — this is his little moment of authority and attention. Your motives escape me.

Reading what you have up now, you would never even know what Ballard himself (namesake of your site, remember) thought of the film, which is quite extraordinary. Most authors quietly hate what is done with their work on film.

I’m sorry the review played a part in your decision to not contact distributors, but neither I nor Andres should feel any responsibility or obligation to you in that regard. What if a major newspaper like the Guardian published a negative review in their online section? What then? You really need to get out of the trap of thinking that this site has some kind of obligation to publish a positive review of your film. I’m sorry to say, but I don’t run a Ballard ‘fan site’. I am as interested in publishing critical opinions of Ballard’s work and related products (like film versions) as I am in praising the man. The site is not hagiography.

Would you care to expand upon your responses to Andres’s criticisms? It would seem he is not alone in voicing some of these points. Other reviewers make similar claims, like this one.

Anyone who thinks that the world depicted in The Atrocity Exhibition has been rendered obsolete in anything but its decorative attributes is severely deluded. That review suggests I ‘made a grave error’ in thinking that the content of Atrocity is still relevant. So what is that content: that we DON’T live in a pervasive media landscape where reality checked out long ago? That we are not obsessed and consumed by psychopathologies that create and determine our relationships with ourselves, our family and friends, our celebrities, our governments? That our cars and other vehicles stopped having polyperverse identities, and are no longer sexualised fetish objects? Has sex itself receded from the flood plains of our time and gone back to its purely procreative origins?

The problem is that as subsequent generations are born into this upside-down world, they see it as normal and natural. It is not. They see the wardrobe, props and sets change and use these ephemera as a surveyor sets his stakes.

NOTE: Weiss originally emailed me the following ‘postscript’, which I missed the first time around, but which I recently discovered at the bottom of another message. I’m publishing it here, for completeness’ sake.

Mr Vaccari’s contention that the book, the film, or both, are “dated”, seems to be making two points. One is that the film belongs to a certain specific historical period (I assume the late 60s) and that is bad. It’s bad to be dated. Which means that all historical films, for example, anything that tries or simply does evoke a period is bad (TAE, by the way, does not do that as a matter of course). Bad meaning dated. Toss all Merchant Ivory, not because it’s sickly film culture, but because it’s historical, it’s dated, thus it’s bad. Toss Andrei Rublev, too, I would assume. Where we stop tossing, I don’t know.

The second point pertaining to this line of attack would be that the references themselves, being historic, are dated and getting old and grey. They don’t work anymore, don’t have the power they used to. Nobody can identify with Marilyn Monroe anymore (excepting yesterday’s Wall Street Journal dated April 10 06, discussing the economics of control over her image). Mr Vaccari must know this problem himself from rereading his own torturous attempt at recreating Ballardian fictional prose and style in “Chariots of Fire”, a delightful piece I found on his website, using Princess Di to “update” things a bit from Ballard’s “dated” original. Actually, if truth be told, Mr Vaccari has quite the hard on for Atrocity Exhibition, despite his professed disdain, as he copies it yet again in form and function in the wonderful short bit, “Why I Want to Fuck John Howard,” a real treat and topical to boot.

But back to Mr Vaccari’s major point of criticism — the point of referencing. References function in a myriad of ways, and no film, nor any work of art, can possibly be divorced from the culture and icons which comprise it. People have no problem watching films set in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, etc. Why? Because whether a film is good or not has nothing to do with the period in which it is set or the references it contains. If you needed a Rosetta Stone to watch the film, that would be another story.

There’s an interesting quote over at Senses of Cinema: ‘Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair have never done anything so vulgar as attempting to “adapt” a Ballard fiction. They understand too well that we now live in the landscape that Ballard has been faithfully anatomising and populating with characters since the 1960s. Why bother ‘adapting’ when you can hit the motorway and find all the sets, the actors, and the (CCTV) camera positions ready and waiting for you?’

Mr Petit and Mr Sinclair do not make feature films. They make arthouse installations, but call them ‘films’. Here’s an IMDB comment on their London Orbital: ‘Pompous, pretentious, meaningless and totally pointless’. Maybe they should try being vulgar next time. Since you bring up Mr Sinclair, please note that his BFI book on Cronenberg and Ballard [also called Crash] was so filled with fabrications and outright lies in its discussion of my film, still then a work in progress, that when I spoke to JGB about it he was as appalled as I was. That some of the self-appointed gatekeepers of ‘avant-garde’ culture in the UK, and, for that matter, Ballard’s work, have to invent things about The Atrocity Exhibition, as Sinclair did, suggests another agenda at work.

That shocks and surprises me. Do you want to set the record straight and point out exactly what Sinclair got wrong?

Sinclair invented erroneous figures for how much the film cost and where the money went — having NEVER having talked to me or communicated with me in any way. I even called Ballard as some of the errors were actually attributed to him. JGB assured me that these things were fabricated and indicated he had his own issues with the veracity of the book.

I can live with a so-called serious author trying to belittle my little film, in a book on a relatively big film by Cronenberg, by saying it cost a fraction of what it did, and that the money was spent in a trivial way, et cetera. What I cannot abide by was Sinclair’s central premise: that all filmic adaptations of serious literary work have to be divorced in spirit from their progenitors. If not, Sinclair insists, they have no integrity. Well, I consider Ballard to be a very good judge of things like integrity. Ballard loved the film and has been the film’s biggest support. But Sinclair could not mention that, because his premise and his pay check was to write a book praising Cronenberg’s take on Ballard, which compelled him, I assume, to denigrate my approach.

Why would Sinclair do that? Because you’re from outside the UK? I haven’t read the book; I’m just speculating…

The problem, well understood in academia and minor cultural zones like this, boils down to territoriality. The stakes, understood in terms of money or power, are miniscule. This breeds the worst kind of petty territorialism, where supposedly intelligent adults behave like spoiled children not wanting to share their sandbox. I assume Mr Sinclair, who later went on to try and make a Ballardian film with a small budget himself, was trying, like a dog pissing on a hedge, to mark off his own little fiefdom. The fact that some unknown American with no pedigree had actually made a full-length adaptation of the most difficult-to-adapt book Ballard ever wrote, and having Ballard LIKE the movie, may have pissed off some people in the UK, Sinclair included.

I also, in retrospect, now think the same of Mr Vaccari’s very strange dismissal of both the book and my film, as he has obviously been inspired enough by The Atrocity Exhibition to write his own undisguised copies of parts of the book.

NOTE: I have since read Sinclair’s book and I cannot see how it could have provoked such a reaction. As Tim Chapman mentions in the comments at the end of this interview, Weiss’s film is barely mentioned in Sinclair’s book, but even so Sinclair actually notes that Ballard praises the film. Tim has reproduced the relevant excerpts in the comments section: see it and decide.

Have you ever confronted Sinclair?

I would not know how to reach him let alone expect him to come clean. If you fabricate a bunch of garbage and someone confronts you with your malfeasance, would you expect contrition?

I had a similar thing happen at the same time with the BBC. They had requested a copy of my film to include in a program about adaptations of Ballard’s work. I was thrilled, of course. Imagine my shock when they used footage from my film as if the BBC had shot it, with no context and no proper acknowledgement of my film. They even used an actor to narrate OVER my film, from the book! No mention at all that I had made The Atrocity Exhibition. When I demanded an explanation and retraction, it was a month later and all I got was a curt letter admitting what they had done and removing my footage from their piece.

This is how even the BBC behaves with small films. It’s truly shameful, and no one cares.

Is a Ballardian aesthetic still needed in film and literature these days? Is Ballard’s worldview still relevant?

If it was not relevant, why operate a Ballard website? Nostalgia?

The question isn’t whether I think a Ballardian aesthetic is relevant today, but whether you do. Do you? I’m not attacking you; I’m genuinely interested in your answer.

Ballard’s work is essentially dystopic. Its subject is the world gone wrong, usually a slightly-in-the-future world which makes the whole thing easier for the reader to accept. In the last several decades, the Ballardian project has become centred on the decline of a value system which has held sway for Western Civilisation for centuries, even millennia. What is supplanting this value system — something extremely nihilistic — Ballard seems to see very clearly and be able to capture in his work. I felt that is true in The Atrocity Exhibition, and I feel it compelling his most recent work, perhaps even more strongly. Very few authors have the ability to both sense and capture this seismic change. He is a philosopher as much as an artist. Thus his aesthetic, his thinking, is more relevant than ever.

That does not even begin to come to terms with Ballard’s prescription for the malady, which is truly, majestically radical. It can be summarised, perhaps, by not rejecting or resisting the process of decline, but by abetting it.

Because your film deliberately subverts traditional narrative and contains some fairly disturbing imagery, people perceive it as ‘difficult’ viewing. Did that make it hard to market the film? How did audiences initially react to it?

The film has never had a theatrical release. And perhaps it should be that way, given the ‘vulgarity’ (to use the word properly) of film marketing and the realities of theatrical distribution today, worldwide. Where the hell is it supposed to play? At my local multiplex? I can count all of the theatres in New York City that play other films such as this on the fingers of one hand, with a few fingers left over. It’s not exactly March of the Penguins, now, is it? The film was never marketed because marketing requires money, hiring a publicist, et cetera. We never had the money to do that. I was hoping that a few influential critics or cultural figures (besides Ballard) would help the film in that regard, but I was mistaken. This website constitutes marketing, because the readers here are the core audience for the film, and look at how well that is going.

As for being difficult, if people call a film difficult, then it becomes so. I have had numerous instances of people showing up at private screenings with NO idea of what the film would be, dragged there by a friend, with no warning. At the end of a typical screening, it is usually very, very quiet. For some minutes. People are usually very still. They are in some kind of other state — maybe it’s shock, but I don’t think it’s that. Quite frequently, people who have nothing to do with the film business, or the culture world generally, are the best viewers, the ones who get the most from the film — the ones who understand the most, precisely because they THINK the least. The most difficult aspect of the film is actually seeing it.

Was the 1999 Slamdance screening the first?

The film first showed at Rotterdam in 1998, as a work in progress. As for festivals in general, they are not very good places to expect people to seriously watch films. They are essentially big parties, or rather disgusting, stupid, frenzied greed fests with people desperately running around, literally, looking for the next indie film that could make them a few million bucks. Considering that the problem with indie film (meaning everything save studio megaliths) today is the utter triumph of the worst kind of commerciality, it is really pathetic to see adults spend the kind of energy they do in the film world to make a few, paltry bucks. If you want to be a capitalist, it’s such small change.

You could, for example, be a hedge-fund manager and make in one year the total gross of all of those films. Then you could finance or even make yourself any films you wanted, and not give a shit how much money they made or lost. Obviously, the rewards are elsewhere.

You co-wrote the script with Michael Kirby [who also plays Dr Nathan in the film]. How did the working process between the two of you evolve?

Normally, a script is extremely important, as a film is about characters and you understand them through dialogue and action. The Atrocity Exhibition is very different. It is about places, space — meaning architectural space — time, events, unusual forms of consciousness, et cetera. There is no narrative. A non-narrative film. How do you make a ‘non-narrative’ film? They don’t teach you that in film school, which I had no interest in going to, anyway. You cannot read books or magazine articles on this subject. Michael, who was a very smart man, realised that the best approach for a book and a project like this is to create the illusion of a narrative.

People are so thoroughly conditioned in narrative, they will project it ANYWHERE they can. Everyone who watches The Atrocity Exhibition will construct a narrative of their own, and I have never heard two that were identical. Some viewers become quickly frustrated by the lack of narrative and think of it as a personal affront, an insult to their intelligence. Since they do not ‘get it’ because they are looking for ‘it’ in the wrong place, they become upset and dismiss the film. But others, who just let it flow over them, have reported experiences usually found during serious drug episodes, extended periods in isolation tanks or other attempts to get beyond the purview of quotidian consciousness. I guess that means Michael was on to something.

I wrote my part of the script visually, seeing the scenes happen. Michael did most of the dialogue, which is often lifted from the book. We were not looking for a ‘natural’ effect, but it might be worth noting that I spent most of my time directing the actors to stop acting, and deliver their few lines in as natural a way as possible. Michael did most of his writing for the Wooster Group, a very famous theatre company in SoHo, New York — funny how no one complains that the Wooster Group, people like Willem Dafoe, are doing non-narrative stuff.

The best way to look at dialogue in the film is like traffic signs for a motorist. They are there to keep you from getting lost — or worse.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

The film is full of striking imagery — in parts it plays almost like a photo-roman. Do you have a photographic background? Is Chris Marker’s La Jetee an influence on your work?

I adore that film, and often wonder why so little came after it in the same vein. As for imagery, my issue with cinema is that it is not about film, it’s just filmed theatre — if you want to do film, it’s about the image. So if you make a non-narrative film, what is on the screen had better be compelling visually. Other than my sensibility, I have no photographic background and am a crap photographer.

Many people are surprised to learn that’s there’s a film version of The Atrocity Exhibition. How does it feel being the father of the ‘bastard child’ of JGB film adaptations? How do you see your film in relationship to David Cronenberg’s Crash and Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun?

I don’t see any relationship with those films.

Right, but what I’m getting at is this: do you feel your film has suffered unfavourably when Ballardian adaptations are discussed, considering you were up against the King of Hollywood on one side and the Indie King on the other?

It would be nice if people could just watch my film for what it is and not compare it to something as heterogeneous as the other Ballard films. But that does not usually happen, and considering the hostility to The Atrocity Exhibition, I have to wonder why? What is so threatening about this film? It has nothing in common with the other films — is that the issue? I truly do not know myself.

Victor Slezak as ‘T’ in The Atrocity Exhibition

I see some similarities. Just as the Atrocity book seems a prototype of Ballard’s novel Crash — a prequel in many ways — I wondered if you saw your film as serving that function to Cronenberg’s Crash. There seem to be similar stylistic choices: the blue light bathing some scenes; Victor’s acting as ‘T’, which seems to share mannerisms and tics with Elias Koteas in Crash; Anna’s Novotny, again sharing traits with Holly Hunter in Crash; the framing of scenes in car parks and so on. Or are such similarities merely functions of Ballard’s writing and its remarkable consistency?

Just to set the record straight, I shot The Atrocity Exhibition BEFORE Cronenberg shot Crash, so there is no possibility of influence from his film, nor would I copy his look, because I never liked Cronenberg’s cinematography, though I like some of his earlier films, like Videodrome. Anything shared between the two films is due to the books emerging one from the other, as Cronenberg, ‘parasite’ that he is (to use your fellow reviewer’s terminology) also lifted the exact same lines from Crash as I used in Atrocity. Ballard actually repeated material word for word in both books.

Cronenberg took a literal, ‘narrative’ approach to another supposedly ‘unfilmable’ book, Naked Lunch. Now, on the DVD’s commentary track you say you had no idea how to film Ballard’s ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ scene, and so you went for the most literal approach [in the film, T has sex in an automobile with Karen Novotny as she wears a Ronald Reagan mask]. But wouldn’t a literal approach have simulated some kind of mental therapy group, with patients masturbating over pictures of Ronald Reagan?

The issue, which keeps coming up in the comparisons with Cronenberg, is that I am literal in my adaptation of Ballard, but in fact Cronenberg is not. Just as he was not in Naked Lunch. Read that book and tell me that it is anything like the text. My problem is simple: Naked Lunch or The Atrocity Exhibition are essentially exceptional vehicles, which if read properly, will take you someplace very different from what is considered normal life. Cronenberg’s very style, which is extremely mainstream from a cinematographic and editing point of view, will always be at odds with his subject matter, at least when it comes to a book like Crash. To me, that is a fatal flaw. If you want to ride the vehicle to the end of the line, it has to be stylistically consistent or at least not fighting the material, the essence of what is being portrayed. I thus had to use a style as extreme as the book itself, something Cronenberg NEVER does. All his films look the same to me, visually speaking, the only difference being that over the years they got a bit slicker and better produced.

Anna Juvander as Karen Novotny in The Atrocity Exhibition

Regarding my ‘literal’ approach to the Reagan scene, I simply ask myself, ‘What is really happening here — in the text?’ People are in a constant sexual flux, consistent with the chaos of images we have created for ourselves, continuously overlaying images over objects and vice versa, often to sexual ends. In the film, there are scenes where ‘literally’ people are confused as to what is more ‘real’ — the image of a thing or the thing itself.

You’re keen for me to emphasise to our readers that Ballard was totally sold on your vision of the film. But Ballard was also keen on Empire of the Sun and Crash. So, it seems to me that Ballard would rubberstamp any filmed version of his work. Obviously, though, his reaction means a lot to you. Can you tell us a bit more about your relationship with Jim?

This is a tricky subject. As it is no mystery what I think of the films you mention, it may seem contradictory that I actually believe what JGB thought of my film. With Empire, Ballard was paid a lot of money and had access to a huge new audience for his work. If I were Ballard, I would not be complaining about Cronenberg, either. Ballard is certainly not biting the hand that feeds him. I honestly don’t know what Jim said about Crash. I know he was generally positive, but I never discussed the other films or directors with him. I thought that crass. I do not, however, see what Jim could possibly gain from spouting a bunch of goo about my film. He was very clear, for example, in those initial faxes, that he thought the film might fall irretrievably between the cracks. In private, he completely dismissed other attempts to film his work. So I believed him, and especially so since he did the DVD commentary, something to my knowledge he has not done for either of the other films. There is really no motivation, in this instance, for Ballard to fluff The Atrocity Exhibition. Unless you think he is some senile old geezer who just loves anyone making a film, however bizarre, of his work.

If I have to choose who, as an authority and a critic, to listen to regarding Atrocity, I will choose Ballard and not chimps like Vaccari and Sinclair. Since I gather your readers might follow my inclination, I noted the omission of Jim’s positive comments in the negative criticism of Vaccari and Sinclair, whose motives I find suspect on a host of counts — such as the fact that they are both guilty of trying to make really bad versions of Ballardian film or writing.

The two commentaries on the DVD (yours and Ballard’s) suggest there was a great deal of congruence between your interpretation of the book and Ballard’s views on his own text. Was there any area or aspect of the book where you found Ballard’s interpretation substantially at odds with your own?

I must be the most sheep-like of all possible interpreters of Ballard’s work, as I found no place I was at variance with the material I worked upon. Because of this, some reviewers enjoy using the term ‘parasitic’ in discussing my approach. A parasite, however, is defined by its negative effect on its host. JGB has yet to voice his objections.

My DVD copy is very grainy. Is that a deliberate effect?

You need a better TV set.

The set I have is just fine. The grainy texture merges the filmed footage with the archival film — it’s a good effect. So, is that a deliberate effect or a bad transfer?

I spent a great deal of time in pre-production choosing film stocks, lenses and exposure settings to create a very different film look, almost a vintage look, a bit like the visual texture of some of Tarkovsky’s films (I am only talking about the texture or grain here.) We used an Agfa stock, discontinued about when the film commenced shooting, which looks completely different from Kodak or Fuji, what everyone else uses. Same with the black and white, which was Ilford.

Would a bigger budget have changed the film? Would you have retained the archival footage?

I set out to make a film that I had never seen before. That much I accomplished. Having no money made it a much better, more interesting film than if I were better endowed. I moved out of Manhattan and found a large, industrial loft space in a very bad area of Brooklyn where I could shoot and live at the same time. That enabled a much different mode of production, where I could actually cook for my crew while a shot was being setup, for example. It was far more human, less hurried and stressed. It’s hard to work on a train when it’s doing 60mph, they say, and it’s true.

The archival footage was an interest of mine long before making the film. With the book, I found an ideal project to put such material to work. There is a very special psychological effect that comes from using decontextualised real footage, even after our little reality TV epidemic. When you view plastic surgery footage, or car crash simulations with dead bodies, outside the context of a documentary or program on that subject, the result is entirely different from watching the same material with a narrator droning on. The archival footage I used in Atrocity, which required months of searching in US government archives, brought another level to the film, one that could not have been achieved in any other manner. All the footage I used, by the way, was obtained gratis, contrary to what Mr Sinclair wrote in his book, where he asserts that my film’s budget was consumed by purchasing archival footage.

North American directors are all over Ballard film adaptations, but to me much of Ballard’s work is especially British. Obviously, much of his work is set in Britain, but there’s also a peculiar kind of British reserve regarding issues of class and sexuality that JGB appears to be sending up. Any thoughts on that?

I don’t see the book I adapted as having much to do with these issues. I actually went to University at London School of Economics, and understand what you mean in terms of British pomposity and sexual repression, but don’t find it relevant in this instance.

In your DVD commentary, you say that people watch narrative films to escape their ‘dull, boring’ lives? Isn’t that a little patronising?

Is it really patronising, or just true? Do you think I was talking about everyone else’s life whilst my own is so brimming full of excitement, sex, violence and generally interesting conflicts that culminate in highly satisfying denouements? Come on.

The modern world is replete with slaves: you have office slaves, factory slaves, agricultural slaves. The ones who have enough money to spend on two hours of escape go to the movies. That includes, of course, the rich, bored slaves, too, of which there are plenty. In fact, in 20th-century terms, just about everyone leads dull, boring lives, as seen relative to the lives of people like Tom, Brad and Angelina, whose real lives are mythologised on checkout-stand magazines so that the illusion is complete and pervasive.

Just go back to the film:

Traven: ‘Don’t you want to be in the movies, Karen?’
Karen Novotny: ‘We’re all in the movies’.

Are there any current directors at all whom you feel kinship with? Or do you feel that you’re at the vanguard of a new sensibility?

I would suggest that I am merely a leftover from an older sensibility, of directors inconceivable today. Unfortunately Tarkovsky died prematurely and all the other directors I admire, like Antonioni, Kubrick, Passolini, Teshigahara, Ozu, Kurosawa and the like, are long gone. Men who cared about what humanity is and what it is becoming. That especially is what I am interested in and is the sole concern of my filmmaking. Other people can make the entertaining stuff.

That would tie in with your DVD commentary, where you claim Atrocity is some kind of ‘nurturing’ film rather than a ‘junk food’ film.

‘Nurturing’ sounds like I made a granola bar into a film. Or that I’m some sort of wet nurse. At least the part about Atrocity not being the filmic equivalent of junk food is indeed correct. It’s not some empty crap that when consumed gives the illusion of fullness and satisfaction, if only for an instant. And then leaves you fat and sick.

I did not set out to make this or any other film as a stepping stone to a greater career in film, which was obviously my first, and perhaps my last, mistake. I’ve found that people in the film world, even the part of that world that pertains to my kind of films, really take you seriously only if they sense you are a ‘player’. They want to see where you are going. Lest you think I am kidding, Darren Aronofsky made PI around the same time I did Atrocity. It looked to me like a bad student film, but it was shrewdly marketed and now the guy is making Batman films.

That is the state of films today — it’s total sell-out land. So no, I don’t feel any kinships with people working today, not even people like Gaspar Noe, who I am sometimes compared with, because I am no fan of either gratuitous violence or doing anything in a film for the sake of effect or shock value.

Is it possible to change audience perception within a narrative-driven film industry? You must feel under siege from critics who see a non-narrative aesthetic as some kind of fault.

Go back a hundred years and look at the art world. How many artists were leaving traditional painting and representation for abstraction? What happened to them? Does that answer the question?

Not really — I’m not especially versed in the art world and its history.

My point is very simple: when abstraction arrived in the art world it was met with total derision, condemnation and refusal by the academy and the mainstream. Today, in a world where everyone is supposed to go to art museums, if only to catch the King Tut or Van Gogh megashow, we actually delude ourselves that we are culturally more astute than our forebearers, that a development like abstraction would immediately be greeted today with open arms, and/or that the avant garde has been subsumed into culture generally.

Cinema is the most comprehensive current art form, also the one uniquely of our time. Yet there is virtually no filmmaking being done that deserves the name of art. Film is entertainment, which is basically what art has become, as well. Abstraction, a bastard child of art which came to define modernism, is obviously kith and kin with the departure from narrative in film. And I can tell you from personal experience that you get the same reception making non-narrative films today as abstract painters or some poor bastard like Van Gogh got one hundred years ago.

Narrative film for me is pretty much dead. All the stories have been told, in their essence, to death. Every conceivable plot device has been done, every combination has been done, the only thing that changes is the time, place, etc. This is why there is a continuous progression towards ever greater violence and pornography in film (notice the ‘new’ movement in Asian cinema of ‘extreme’ violent film.) The elements of shock and titillation try to cover the banality and exhaustion of the form of what I call ‘filmed theatre’.

Anna Juvander in The Atrocity Exhibition

Beyond the narrative horizon lies this incredible territory of possible films, but no one is brave enough to go there. If you do go, the people in the industry, morons that they are, don’t get it. Ordinary people do, however. But for the film industry, ordinary people are like subatomic particles for quantum physicists. As soon as they are placed under observation, their true nature becomes suspect, impossible to ever verify. All their research and focus groups suggest remaking Mission Impossible until the Rapture. Or for the independent crowd, assuring that every gay, lesbian, minority and special interest group receive their just due on screen, albeit using the same stories traditionally reserved for the mainstream.

Given the criticism you’ve faced, and the lack of exposure the film has received, do you feel the whole experience has been worthwhile?

I cannot say whether making the film was worthwhile. I made a worthwhile film, yes. It cost me dearly. It may never be seen by many people, and if it were up to some of the so-called Ballard ‘authorities’ like Mr Vaccari, it would not even be seen by Ballard fans, which would truly be a shame. I still hold out hope that a few people will somehow see the film and realise that it is possible to make a different kind of cinema and be inspired to make better films themselves. That would be enough for me.

What do you think JG Ballard’s greatest contribution to the 20th century is?

TBD.

Come on — let’s talk about Ballard. He deserves it. What do you appreciate about the great man?

I’ve basically spent my entire life trying to figure out why everything is so fucked up. Most people either don’t seem to know that this is the case, or pretend not to notice. When I discovered Ballard’s writing, it was obvious that he was one of those very few people who confront the world with astonishing honesty, insight and intelligence. The reason he is considered prophetic is simply his degree of awareness and his imaginative force. He sees around him, today, what others miss, understands the conflicting forces at work, and suggests probable or at least interesting outcomes that will occur in the future. It’s like watching balls go flying by. If you see the direction they are going, and their speed, you can predict fairly accurately when, where and what they will hit. Placing this process in the near future makes it appear prophetic.

Ballard is a new breed of philosopher, a far more interesting type, and maybe the only one to survive as the traditional ones are doomed to extinction. He is able to take very complex, subtle ideas and give them aesthetic form, give them import. This is so very rare.

The Atrocity Exhibition is your only feature film. Do you have plans to make more?

Given that Atrocity took all my energy and money for such a long time, and that the film world and the art world still don’t know what to do with the thing, I have been reconsidering making another film. As I have often said when people remark how wonderful it must be to be a film director — it’s a task I would not wish on my worst enemy.

…:: THE END

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POSTSCRIPT: Since this interview was first published, a couple of positive reviews of the film have appeared online, notably from influential British film magazine Sight & Sound, which renders Weiss’s claims that North American distribution solely rests on what this site has to say in a very different light. I haven’t included everything in the interview, but rereading our email trail today, I am still as shocked and bewildered as I was at the time. The clincher, as far as my decision to tell the story of this encounter open and honestly, was in Jonathan’s very last email, where he branded me ‘journalistically corrupt’ for editing the interview down from over 10,000 words, and for slightly rewording some of my original questions to him. I just couldn’t win. Not only did I do this after Jonathan pointed out that some of my questions unnecessarily referred to negative reviews, which I agreed with, but also because the nature of email interviews means you throw everything in, as you might not have a chance to ask follow-up questions — then you edit down later. The changes to my questions were minor and I stand by them — the originals exist for anyone who wants to see them. It’s not like I was hiding anything, either — the reason Jonathan knew about this was because I showed him the transcript before it went online. I was also accused of altering the tone of the interview with this rewording, which is why I have expanded the interview to include replies from Jonathan that were originally left out. The tone was already confrontational, right from the start.

Having said all that, I do wish Jonathan all the best for the future. I’m positive his film will find the audience it deserves. In the end, though, as far as he’s concerned, it probably doesn’t matter — a lot of people have taken quite an interest in this interview and have said to me that it’s made them even more determined to see the film. Some guy on a film forum even called it ’superbly vitriolic’. So, ‘every cloud’, eh Jonathan?

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MORE INFO
+ Andrés Vaccari’s review of the DVD.
+ See Reel23 for bios of Weiss and Ballard; a Director’s Statement; and letters from Ballard to Weiss praising the film; a trailer from the film; and information on how to order the DVD.