‘”We do not move in one direction, rather do we wander back and forth, turning now this way and now that. We go back on our own tracks…” That thought of Montaigne’s reminds me about something I thought of in connection with flying saucers, humanoids, and the remains of unbelievably advanced technology found in some ancient ruins. They write about aliens, but I think that in these phenomena we are in fact confronting ourselves; that is our future, our descendants who are actually traveling in time.’

Andrei Tarkovsky

[via Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory, a site dedicated to the work of Chris Marker]

If a purely biographical study were undertaken, it could feasibly be argued that Ballard’s work is a variation on the one theme of his wartime experience. To take some examples from his oeuvre: the fake space station in ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, the patch of waste land in Concrete Island, the degraded apartment block in High-Rise, the motorway system in Crash, the abandoned New York in ‘The Ultimate City’, the secessionist house in ‘The Enormous Space’, the ecotopia in Rushing to Paradise, the gated communities in Running Wild and Cocaine Nights, the micronational shopping mall in Kingdom Come – all could reasonably be seen as iterations of the insular and self-contained conditions of Ballard’s Lunghua childhood. But as Roger Luckhurst asserts, therein lies the danger of reductionism, a retrospective, contextual dilution:

Once Ballard published his two ‘autobiographies’, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, they were seized on, in effect, as signed confessions, detached from fictional space but working as decoding machines to render autobiographically readable the body of his work… The logic of this repeated argument is a retrospective rereading of the prior science fiction as encrypted autobiographical performance.

Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls.

Luckhurst aims to recoup Ballard’s standing as a writer of SF rather than ‘downgrad[ing] the “science fiction” texts to drafts of a final “literary” text’, as he sees other commentators doing in the wake of Empire of the Sun. However, during the course of my research it has never been my intention to downgrade these texts by relating them to Ballard’s personal history or to Empire’s fictionalised personal history. Instead, I’m especially interested in tracking a motif that reoccurs across Ballard’s work (including interviews as well as short stories and novels) and to extrapolate what this might mean in the context of memory retrieval and personal myth. As Luckhurst later qualifies, both Empire and The Kindness of Women:

mythologize, which is to say that they take elements of the same compulsively repetitive landscapes, scenarios, and images and recombine them in fictions which yet teasingly and forever undecidably play within the frame of the autobiographical. There is no authenticity here, no revelatory discourse of (in Gusdorf’s insistent phrase) “deeper being”.

For Ballard, his art — his writing — has remodelled the scenario, replaying and recreating a series of parallel worlds that recycle biography and memory as something approaching myth:

Art is the principal way in which the human mind has tried to remake the world in a way that makes sense. The carefully edited, slow-motion, action replay of a rugby tackle, a car crash or a sex act has more significance than the original event. Thanks to virtual reality, we will soon be moving into a world where a heightened super-reality will consist entirely of action replays, and reality will therefore be all the more rich and meaningful. Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

Ballard in interview, ‘Theatre of Cruelty’.

Perhaps we should consider Ballard’s novels and short stories as ‘carefully edited, slow-motion replays’ of the Lunghua camp (and Empire as Ballard’s life seen through the prism of his fiction) — or as virtual-reality projections, in which anything goes in any combination. In The Atrocity Exhibition, T-’s obsessive need to restage, recreate and reinvent scenarios (the ‘sex death’ of his mistress; his own initiation into crash culture) is a microcosm of Ballard’s entire career strategy, a fragment of a hologram rose that in its holistic incarnation seems designed to function hypertextually, in the sense that each piece of writing operates as a portal to another. The anti-linear style encourages the reader to follow pathways of her own device. This goal is embedded in Atrocity’s paragraph headings, some of which are named after earlier Ballard short stories such as ‘The Concentration City’, some of which refer to other chapters in the book such as ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, some of which refer to stories yet to be written such as ‘The Sixty Minute Zoom’. The accompanying paragraphs have nothing to do with the stories after which they are (or would be) named; they are parallel universes of the mind that resist integration, challenging the primacy of the ‘text’. They inhabit the non-space of the interstice, the neural interval prised open when two disparate, yet interrelated parts rub together, creating new meanings, new connections, new portals that themselves split into infinite parallel worlds. As Corin Depper identifies, this strategy bears strong resemblance to Deleuze and Guattari’s overarching sense of ‘rhizomatic’ cultural theory:

The ‘rhizome’ … operates against linear and dialectical ideas. This is mirrored in the formal structuring of [Deleuze and Guattari's] books as a series of seemingly unconnected sections, which force the reader to abandon earlier experiences of reading philosophy in favour of a radically decentred process, almost inevitably skipping across sections and creating new pathways of meaning… these … works could easily be seen as companion pieces to … The Atrocity Exhibition, which proffers a similarly unstable ground on which new notions of history and identity are endlessly being constructed and destroyed.

Depper, ‘Death at Work: The Cinematic Imagination of J. G. Ballard’

ABOVE: La Jetée. Apologies for the English narration – it proved difficult to locate an online version in the original French, with English subtitles.

Unsurprisingly, Ballard was an advocate of Chris Marker’s 1962 ‘photo roman’, La Jetée, a film concerned with nothing but the confusion of physical and mental time, and the eternal cycle of revisiting, overwriting and reinhabiting memory. Shot almost entirely in stills, La Jetée depicts an inmate of a prisoner-of-war camp in post-apocalyptic Paris. The man’s captors select him for a time-travel experiment in which he is returned to the pre-war. He is judged to be a suitable candidate for time travel since he has a particular recollection of the peacetime era that won’t leave him, the memory of a woman he briefly glimpsed as a boy on the jetty at Orly Airport, her face creased in horror as they both watch a man inexplicably shot and killed before them. It is thought that this memory will cushion the shock of his awakening in the past:

This man was selected from among a thousand for his obsession with an image from the past. Nothing else, at first, but stripping out the present, and its racks…

On the tenth day, images begin to ooze, like confessions. A peacetime morning. A peacetime bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves.

On the sixteenth day he is on the jetty at Orly. Empty. Sometimes he recaptures a day of happiness, though different. A face of happiness, though different. Ruins.

Chris Marker, La Jetée.

When he is sent back he seeks out the woman, but is never really sure whether he is travelling through time, dreaming, or remembering the past and reinhabiting the memory. The denouement reveals that the man, due to the paradoxes of time travel, had as a child witnessed his own death, blurring past, present and future in profound flux. Time tracks exist simultaneously, recording, reflecting and contaminating each other.

Time is like a circle, which is endlessly described. The declining arc is the past. The inclining arc is the future.

Everything has been said, provided words do not change their meanings, and meanings their words.

Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville.

For Ballard, as it clearly is for Marker, film is a crucial tool for excavating simultaneous time (which of course is also circular time … may the circle never be broken):

I define Inner Space as an imaginary realm in which on the one hand the outer world of reality, and on the other the inner world of the mind meet and merge. Now, in the landscapes of the surrealist painters, for example, one sees the regions of Inner Space; and increasingly I believe that we will encounter in film and literature scenes which are neither solely realistic nor fantastic. In a sense, it will be a movement in the interzone between both spheres.

Ballard, Munich Round Up, 1968.

In 1966 Ballard wrote an appreciative review of La Jetée for New Worlds, commenting on its ‘fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage … in its unique way a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time’. For Ballard, Marker’s technique of using almost entirely still frames creates a ‘succession of disconnected images … a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter’. Elsewhere, reflecting on the process of repetition and memory retrieval in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard might almost be reviewing La Jetée:

[Atrocity's] mental Polaroids form a large part of our library of affections. Carried around in our heads, they touch our memories like albums of family photographs. Turning their pages, we see what seems to be a ghostly and alternative version of our own past, filled with shadowy figures as formalized as Egyptian tomb-reliefs.

Ballard, annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, RE/Search edition (1990).

Andrzej Gasiorek’s view is that Empire and Kindness are concerned with the imagination’s ‘ambiguous role’ in identity formation: ‘The truth-telling status of both narratives is thereby called into question – both are to be read as versions of the past, not as definitive reconstructions’.

Like La Jetée’s protagonist, then, Ballard has been fixated by a moment he was given to witness as a child — the stasis of Lunghua, interned in suspended time; the atomic flash heralding the post-war era of simulation and planing identity — revisiting it, revising it and re-enacting it in multiple retro-forward scenarios, so that the terms ‘past, present and future’ become inconsequential, irreparably meaningless.

..:: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN:
+ Ballard and the Vicissitudes of Time

Margarida Marinho in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 2002).

An interview with Solveig Nordlund follows this review, plus clips from Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude.

In 2002 the Ballardian feature-film universe expanded substantially with the release of Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude, Solveig Nordlund’s artfully rendered riff on JG Ballard’s 1976 short story, ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. Seen mainly at film festivals, this Portuguese-Swedish co-production was a welcome addition to the Ballard filmography.

Ballard’s story receives its power from its fantastic setting (an abandoned Spanish resort in the future), his trio of representative characters – Dr Gould, the iconoclast visionary, Richard Forrester, the horny bureaucrat, and Judith Forrester, the mannequin-like mother – and the dark irony of ignoring Mother Nature. Ballard slowly teases out the plot, revealing that humankind has been systematically killing off its deformed newborn (called ‘Zotes’ in the film) for the past thirty years, seemingly unaware they were slaughtering the first generation of a new variation of homo sapiens. The story’s genius lies in its deft and subtle details and immaculate timing, leading the reader blindly along with Forrester through sex hotels of irony to the oddly optimistic ending, where the culture of one empire again crumbles and the children of the world begin to assume control of their new universe.

Culture’s fear of the unknown and special revulsion toward the sexually deformed is analyzed in psychological and artistic terms in ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. These babies aren’t born with deformities of the limbs, such as the thalidomide babies of the 1960s, but with optic-nerve-exposed eyes and deformed genitals, aberrations guaranteed to register high on the psychological disgust scale. In this otherworld, mothers will kill, not nurture, their abnormal babies. Forrester sees these sexual deformities as ‘grim parodies of human genitalia’, and he cannot go beyond the ‘nervousness and loathing’ they elicit. All is now subject to an irrational norm. Blind but sighted, sexually deviant but innocent, these doomed children offer up a Dorian Gray portrait of civilisation’s obsessions which everyone is only too willing to rip and burn, horrified at seeing their true selves revealed at last.

In the following interview, Nordlund says, ‘I centred the story on the woman, on her fears and longings’. By inverting the masculinity of the short story, the film reclaims the natural bond of mother and baby and corrects the errors of civilisation as Ballard imagines it. As Nordlund explains: ‘When I did the film I thought very much about parents who want to educate their children into copies of themselves and don’t see the beauty of difference.’

LEFT: Solveig Nordlund (photo by Rick McGrath).

The basic plot is still there – the deformed baby is given to Carmen after the epiphany that these newborn aren’t monsters – but pretty well everything else, save the location, is changed to a feminine perspective, a parallel version of Ballard’s original. In Ballard’s story Judith is essentially a baby incubator, reflecting culture’s taboos and fears about abnormality. She immediately forgets all after the child is born and presumed killed, leaving the resort ‘with the amiable and fixed expression of a display-window mannequin’. Nordlund re-creates her as the driving force behind the story, from her desire to have the baby through her troubled pregnancy to her transformative encounters with Carmen and her ultimate ‘correct’ decision. She and Carmen bond to the point where they start looking the same. In a world of generational warfare, this is definitely an act of peace. Gould changes from Ballard’s observant biker hippie pilot into a surrogate mother — thus retaining a slight echo to Ballard’s Gould — and Nordlund is forced to compensate for his philosophic posturings by greatly enlarging the role of Carmen. A black-shawled, hand-signing mongoloid waif in Ballard, found by Gould and herded by silver paint, she’s transformed by Nordlund into a complex mystery, an exotic beauty in slink who wanders the dark halls like a hologram from the future. Forrester’s role is also diminished – he either makes passes at Judite or is combing the deserted grounds, talking with Gould, or stalking Carmen.

Nordlund keeps her eye firmly on the social by replacing Ballard’s Dali references with state-produced posters showing Zotes on the one hand (baby head with dark, wormy areas where the eyes should be, and the menacing ZOTE written underneath) and normal babies on the other (complete with slogans such as “This Is Us” and “I Believe In The Future”). Nordlund has created the same psychological war zone as Ballard, pitting Eros against Thanatos, but she uses a much less psychologically sensitive path, replacing personal “newsreels from Hell” and the attendant disgust with “monsters” one should fear because they’re seen as grotesque throwbacks to an earlier, more primitive time. The sense of disgust, so prevalent in the short story, is not given any kind of deep psychological examination by Nordlund, although flushing a Zote down the toilet is some recognition of the feeling’s psychological roots.

The film is a marvellous treat for eye and ear. Carmen’s psychedelic cave-room, for example, with its watches and fluorescent lighting is amazing. The cinematography of Acácio de Almeida is often breathtaking in its subtle love affair with light, and the music by Johan Zachrisson is evocative and emotional. The special effects are often highly foregrounded to maximise the intimate effect, and art direction is helped immeasurably by the found set, an abandoned seaside resort in Spain. This is a strong, punchy movie that emphasises the flow of the action in carefully crafted edits.

I made contact with Solveig Nordlund during the July opening ceremonies of J.G. Ballard: Autopsy of the New Millennium exhibition at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Culture, where Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude was (and will be) screening. We met for a chat and coffee on our final day there, but unfortunately circumstances made it impossible to do any kind of formal interview. Fortunately, Solveig graciously agreed to conduct the following email Q&A after we had settled down from the Millennium Autopsy rush.

– Rick McGrath.

Opening 10-minute sequence from Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude. Two further 10-minute extracts are available: Part 2 and Part 3.

RICK McGRATH: Solveig, can you tell us when you first became interested in film, and about the beginnings of your career?

SOLVEIG NORDLUND: I was always interested in film, since I was a child, and I wanted to become a filmmaker. I just didn’t know how. To satisfy my mother I studied at the University of Stockholm and participated in a film made by a theatre group, but I had already met my Portuguese husband and wanted to leave Sweden. My Portuguese husband studied film in London and I followed him there and so it began. I began to work with him and only later did I make proper studies, with the French director Jean Roch in Paris from 1972 to 74.

Do you remember when you first became aware of Ballard?

I read Ballard for the first time in the late 60s in a Portuguese science-fiction collection. I think the first story of his I read was ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’. It must have had a great impact. I began to read all his books and later I made a short film based on this story, called ‘Journey to Orion’. It was totally shot in one of those big ferries between Stockholm and Helsinki. The idea was that the inside of ferryboats and spacecrafts look more or less the same: a closed world with no exit. Made to last for a long time and endure tough weather. After that I obtained the rights to shoot ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’.

When I had the opportunity in 1986 to propose programs about different writers for Swedish television, I proposed Ballard and managed to convince the board. I went to London in order to visit him at his house in Shepperton. I did a series of portraits of my literary favourites, another one was Marguerite Duras. In Sweden the JG interview was called ‘Future Now’ and everybody was impressed with his intensity. JG himself liked it very much. For me it was an opportunity to get to know him and the beginning of a kind of friendship.

What kind of friendship can you have with J.G.? I think I’d always have the feeling he was sizing me up as a potential character. In The Kindness of Women, the family renting the apartment beside the Ballards in Spain are called the Nordlunds. Did you think J.G. was thinking of you?

I feel befriended with Ballard and his universe. That’s the kind of friendship it is. I think he wrote The Kindness of Women at the same time as I made the interview with him. He probably needed a name and took mine.

Was he as you expected?

I expected to meet a tall military-like man and got very surprised when a small, jovial and round man came out of the house. He asked if I had a hat and made me think of Alice in Wonderland. He invited me in and as it was already six in the afternoon he was authorized to begin to drink. We talked and planned the interview for the following day. J.G. Ballard is a fascinating storyteller, also when he is telling his own story.

When you first read ‘Low Flying Aircraft’, did it strike you as filmable?

I think all J.G. Ballard’s stories are filmable and I think I have thought of them all as films. I was on a film festival in Troia, Portugal, the seaside resort that I later used in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude. I think it was in 1987. Troia was a tourist investment that was interrupted by the revolution in 1974, and this abandoned place struck me as the perfect set for a Ballard story. I thought of stories from Vermillion Sands and Low-Flying Aircraft. It took me 15 years to concretise the project.

That’s amazing, that these big lumps of resort would still be vacant after all those years. You must have been amazed. How did you first get in? With permission, or as a trespasser?

It was a tourist project that had begun to be built before the revolution with Brazilian money and that was nationalised after the revolution. Some buildings were used but they never finished the big hotels. They were a kind of unfinished ruins, that you could enter trespassing.

How did Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude come about?

After having done the Swedish television program ‘Future Now’ with Jim, I did ‘Journey to Orion’. After that I obtained the rights to film ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’. The film is a Portuguese-Swedish low budget co-production. At the beginning I thought of shooting it in English, with international actors, but the budget didn’t allow it. And as there were threats that they were going to reconstruct the seaside resort Troia, I had to hurry with the film. It was shot in 2002 and one or two years later the towers were imploded.

‘Journey to Orion’ (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 1987). Part 2 is also available.

When did you decide to make the alterations to J.G.’s basic plot?

Ballard’s story is a short story and I had to do a feature film. In Ballard’s story everything is in the head of the husband who is waiting for his wife to come back with the results of the scan. I centred the story on the woman, on her fears and longings. I participated in a workshop directed by the English script doctor Colin Tucker in order to elaborate the script in that sense. It works in the way that a group of people with scripts criticise each other’s works. Colin Tucker directed us.

How did you choose the cast and crew?

The crew was chosen among technicians I normally work with, Acácio de Almeida for example. The cast was chosen among Portuguese actors once it was decided that there was no possibility to have an international cast. I think we shot for eight weeks. And edited for another six weeks. There were some complementary shots and a rather long digital post-production. From the start of shooting till the film finished, it was nine months more or less.

I was slightly surprised by the Orwellian society you use as a backdrop. Where did that idea come from?

I think it comes from Jim Ballard. When I asked him if it was something he thought I should think about when writing the script, he mentioned the laws of genetic cleaning that until very recently were in use for example in Sweden, and the fear of global epidemics, for example, AIDs.

Interesting. Governments are vaguely mentioned in the short story, but in your version they actively seek out and destroy the newborn, which you call Zotes. I like your slogan, too: ‘We Believe In The Future. This is Us.’ Where did that come from?

From nowhere especial. Just sounded right.

How often did you consult with Ballard over the film?

Only in the beginning, when I asked if he had something he wanted to point out in the story.

What do you think is J.G.’s point in the short story? Given the variations in the film, do you feel it still represents Ballard’s vision, or your own?

I think J.G.’s point is to show that humans make everything to transform and dominate nature but that nature always will find new dimensions in order to survive. When I did the film I thought very much about parents who want to educate their children into copies of themselves and don’t see the beauty of difference.

Has J.G. seen it?

Yes, and he liked it very much. He wrote a very enthusiastic letter where he mentioned especially the cinematography and the actress, Margarida Marinho.

She is fantastic. How did you find her?

She is a very well-known and popular Portuguese actress now, but in 2002 she was in the beginning of her career.

The cinematography is truly breathtaking. Aside from the power of the sets, Acácio De Almeida’s lens seems to caress the light in a very Ballardian way. You must have been very happy with the results.

Yes I was. I also was very lucky to have a very good post-production laboratory with very good technicians.

I was also quite taken with the film’s art direction. Mona Teresia Forsén did an amazing job with the film’s overall look. Did you work this out together? Gould’s stylized fluorescent green ‘V’ sign is also compelling.

Mona Teresia Forsén is a very well-known Swedish art director, but there were many hands that collaborated in the creation of the visual aspect. The Zote alphabet, for example, was created by the Portuguese artist Rui Serra.

I thought the sound was foregrounded in an interesting way, and that Johan Zachrisson’s musical score is very evocative. Did you work closely on this with Johan?

Yes. Johan Zachrisson is a collaborator of mine since a long time. He is Swedish but lives and works in Portugal. I think we tried to get a correspondence to the green colour that the doctor paints the world with.

You show Carmen in the film as a sort of futuristic movie starlet, with sexy dark glasses.

Carmen hides her deformed eyes behind dark glasses. She is blind in a conventional way, she sees with other senses, that’s why she moves in such an adulatory way. Don’t forget that her father, the doctor, has made her look like an ordinary Venus client in order to protect her.

Are you influenced by any particular filmmakers?

I admire Alain Resnais’ Muriel and Providence.

Do you think your film has a happy ending?

Yes. Life goes on even if it is not our life.

Will the film ever be available on DVD? Many people are curious to see it.

It is on DVD in Portugal. If somebody is interested in publishing it with English subtitles I would be happy.

Miguel Guilherme and Rui Morrison in Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (dir. Solveig Nordlund, 2002).

Do you have plans to do anything more from the Ballard oeuvre?

I like very much ‘Deep End’, the story about the last fish on Earth. I had plans to do Concrete Island. I think it is an amazing story and so frightening. You can die in the middle of the crowd without anybody seeing you. But the rights JG’s agent demanded were so high that it’s not possible. But who knows, he has many good short stories.

You told me in Barcelona you didn’t think any more JGB stories would be made into films because of the cost of film rights. Can you elaborate?

I think J.G.’s agent has set a Spielberg level for his novels.

I heard £3.5 million — that’s a lot of money. I wonder if JG knows what’s going on? You’d think he’d like to have his stories made into movies, where reality and illusion combine.

I think he knows and agrees.

What appeals to you most about JGB?

J.G.’s stories are often told as thoughts and memories, but those thoughts and memories are very visual. I like to imagine those worlds the main characters see. I think that had the film rights been more accessible, most of his novels would have been made into film. Now, a lot of films inspired by his work have been made instead.

Many people who have visited the Ballard home comment on its quirkiness. Did you find it unusual?

I found it touching, a big man in a small house. Like Alice in Wonderland.

Interview by Rick McGrath, 2008.

Born in Stockholm on June 9, 1943, Solveig Nordlund began working in film while completing her degree in art history from her native Stockholm’s Universitet. Leaving Sweden for Portugal, Nordlund first worked as an assistant and then a film editor on such productions as Sweet Habits (1973) and Doomed Love (1978). In 1976 she co-founded the left-wing film cooperative Grupo Zero, and that year directed her first film, although she received no on-screen credit. In 1978, she directed a pair of medium-length features, but did not direct her first full-length feature until 1980 with Dina e Django. Nordlund then returned to Sweden in 1982 where she founded the Torrom Film Company. In 1986 she directed ‘Journey to Orion’, her take on J.G. Ballard’s ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, which won a prize at the Bilbao Festival, and also directed a filmed interview with Ballard called Future Now. In 1998, Nordlund’s Swedish-Portuguese-Mozambican co-production Comedia Infantil was nominated for a Tiger Award at that year’s Rotterdam Film Festival. In 1999 she made The Ticket Inspector, which won the RTP/Onda Curta Prize at the Avanca Film Festival, and followed that with Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude in 2002, which won an award at the Coimbra Caminhos do Cinema Portugués, and My Baby in 2003.

..:: MORE INFORMATION:
+ Ambar Filmes: blog for Solveig’s film company.
+ Ambar Filmes’ YouTube channel.

..:: NORDLUND & BALLARD ON YOUTUBE:
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude trailer.
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 1).
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 2).
+ Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (extract; part 3).
+ Future Now interview (extract).
+ ‘Journey to Orion’, part 1.
+ ‘Journey to Orion’, part 2.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘The Projectionst’ by ‘Alan Marker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

In Melbourne a few months back, I had occasion to see John Foxx’s live soundtrack performance and presentation of Tiny Colour Movies, a selection of found-film fragments. Regular readers will recall that I interviewed Foxx in 2006, when the TCM album had just been released. At the time John was maintaining the line that the album was the soundtrack to a found-film collection owned by one Arnold Weizcs-Bryant, who, we were told, collects home movies and ‘repurposed movie fragments’, indeed any type of film produced outside of commercial considerations and not meant for public consumption. John, so the story goes, attended a private screening of Arnold’s collection and was compelled to create a soundtrack to accompany these resonant images, what he calls ‘tiny colour movies’.

According to the TCM liner notes:

Arnold stipulates that the movies he collects must be short — none is more than seven or eight minutes long, and some have a duration of only a few seconds. He insists that these represent a new kind of art. One which is only now becoming possible to recognise. Photography has recently become acknowledged as a new technological art form and commercial cinema is currently undergoing this kind of reassessment … these ideas cross over with Stanley Brakhage. Indeed Arnold was very excited when he discovered Brakhage’s work a few years ago, since he feels it confirms many of his long held views about the aesthetic beauty and cultural significance of film fragments.

John Foxx, TCM liner notes (2006).

ABOVE: ‘Stray Sinatra Neurone’ by ‘Max Forbert’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

One of the filmmakers in Arnold’s collection is a certain Max Forbert, who makes what John terms ‘assemblage movies’. Forbert, supposedly a janitor in Hollywood, collected film scraps saved from the cutting-room floors he was sweeping for a living and later compiled them into his own sampled productions, a fragment of which was found by Arnold after Forbert’s death:

This is a section of a Forbert film that he identifies as using cutting room outtakes from a Sinatra movie, among others which remain unidentified. Shots are: Back view of a man in a suit looking through the window of a set interior (too tall for Sinatra — possibly an extra brought in to test-light a scene). Some brief outdoor shots of cars driving through a glittering downtown New York. Close-up of a woman applying deep red lipstick — again this appears to be a test shot of make-up and lighting. Location shots of Paris and Rome. Intricately cut together, these damaged fragments become an almost tactile essay on the sensual textures and enigmatic images that film can make available.

Foxx, TCM liner notes.

In the liner notes, John talks of the beauty of the imperfections in the films, the scratches and grain, the bleaching from wear and age, ‘elements which only add to the mystery, the emotional and intellectual resonance, and the sensual appreciation, of film’. Tiny Colour Movies, then, is not only an interesting document but also one that has overtly Ballardian overtones. For starters, there’s Ballard’s own interest in the subversive potential of home movies. But also, as I tried to tease out in the interview, The Atrocity Exhibition features many examples similar to what John identifies as a ‘sample film aesthetic’ in the Weizcs-Bryant collection, including therapeutic DIY film groups designed to aid the recovery of schizhophrenic patients:

Cine-films as group therapy. Patients were encouraged to form a film production unit, and were given full freedom as to choice of subject matter, cast and technique. In all cases explicitly pornographic films were made. Two films in particular were examined: (1) A montage sequence using portions of the faces of (a) Madame Ky, (b) Jeanne Moreau, (c) Jacqueline Kennedy (Johnson oath-taking). The use of a concealed stroboscopic device produced a major optical flutter in the audience, culminating in psychomotor disturbances and aggressive attacks directed against the still photographs of the subjects hung from the walls of the theatre. (2) A film of automobile accidents devised as a cinematic version of Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. By chance it was found that slow-motion sequences of this film had a marked sedative effect, reducing blood pressure, respiration and pulse rates. Hypnagogic images were produced freely by patients. The film was also found to have a marked erotic content.

J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Throughout Atrocity, T-, the book’s troubled protagonist, stitches and sutures together fragments from the media landscape — TV broadcasts, snatches of film, billboard representations of movie stars, the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination (even the ‘time music of the quasars’, derived from a strange contraption on his roof, a sculpture consisting of ‘antennae of metal aerials’) — into a form that will make sense to his disordered psyche. This is most clearly expressed in Ballard’s dictum that politics today has become a branch of advertising that sells personalities rather than policies, and that as a result politicians involve us in their fantasies without our consent — fantasies of power, ego, domination, celebrity, lust, all disguised as governance but which are really designed to place us in peripheral roles as impotent bystanders in the major decisions affecting our lives. In Atrocity, then, Ballard’s schizophrenic patients involve politicians in their fantasies, notably the hapless figure of Ronald Reagan:

The conceptual role of Reagan. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc. The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the non-functional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which re-formulate the roles of aggression and anality… In assembly kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

ABOVE: T- devising the ‘optimum sex death of Ronald Reagan’ in Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Essentially, T- reclaims the inner space he feels has been invaded by media and advertising — the colonisation of the subconscious and the stealing of his memories — repopulating it with a collaged, open-ended landscape of images drawn from the free circulation of signs and signals of what we can now view, with hindsight, as Ballard’s own proto version of hyperreality.

As Ballard says,

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.

J.G. Ballard, annotations (1994) to The Atrocity Exhibition.

This strategy of treating all media and perceptual inputs as equal, with no distinction between the inner world of fantasy and the outer world of reality, seems a clear precursor to the kind of culture-jamming hacktivism that would reach a peak in the 90s with the sound artists Negativland and their followers:

Negativland occupies itself with recontextualizing captured fragments to create something entirely new — a psychological impact based on a new juxtaposition of diverse elements, ripped from their usual context, chewed up, and spit out as a new form of hearing the world around us.

As audio artists, we pursue a uniquely contemporary and wholly appropriate creative process which inevitably emerges out of our electronic age of media saturation and the reproducing technologies available to all consumers.

Negativland, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (1995).

ABOVE: JGB in London Orbital.

More explicitly, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, in the film version of London Orbital, acknowledge a clear debt to Ballard, whose influence over the film looms large, both in the interview with him in the middle section and in the reading by Sinclair of JGB’s ‘What I Believe’ that frames it. Sinclair and Petit see the Bluewater shopping centre, ‘Ground Zero’ for the film’s aesthetic, as an architecture mediated by technology, specifically the omniscient CCTV cameras which in their endless, plastic and formless state create what the filmmakers call ‘a new nostalgia, a new boredom, a new kind of time’. If everything is filmable then, Petit and Sinclair’s method of resistance is to become like the surveillance camera, to always be open and to always be filming but to locate the degradations in the tape, the fraying at the edges, recovering and recycling elements of old technologies, what Esther Leslie calls an ‘aesthetic of refuse’, drawing on the double meaning of ‘refuse’: as both rubbish, in that if everything is filmable then everything is junk, valueless; and as resistance, ie refusing to be dissolved into the ‘electronic slums’, to use Petit’s term. Thus Sinclair inserts his home movies into the end of the film, recovering a memory that is in danger of being overwritten yet still framed in the logic of the image, both inside and outside at once — an aesthetic that instantly recalls Atrocity and many other Ballard stories.

Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies project seems a direct descendant of this lineage, especially given this statement of John’s from our interview:

Movies will be played with, just as sound was sampled, for fun and surrealism. Simply because it can be done. I remember positing this five years ago in a talk at the London College of Music and Media. Around that time, I made a movie called A Man Made of Shadows from several other movies. This made a new movie from existing films by collaging, repurposing, hommaging, stealing, sampling, appropriating. Whatever you like to call it. ‘Repurposing’ is my current fave term, along with ‘theft’. Watch out Hollywood. Movies had better get used to this because it will happen. Inevitable.
…
We’ll also need to develop new aesthetics of film, to regard elements formerly regarded as faults as intrinsic qualities inherent in film itself. The beauty of scratches, bleached out film ends, emulsion faults, grain, frameslip, etc. Just as we now value surface scratches in audio sampling.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Lost New York’ by ‘George Wilkes’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

So, freighted with all of this intertextual baggage, I was therefore very excited to learn that John was bringing the Arnold collection to Melbourne; I knew he’d premiered it overseas with a live soundtrack, but that’s about all I knew. I hadn’t really done much research on John since we last communicated, but I still harboured the suspicion that, as I detailed in the afterword to the interview, Arnold and the filmmakers were fictitious personas and that the films were in fact John’s own inventions. I sensed various clues that gave the game away including the name of one of the filmmakers, ‘Alan Marker’. This seemed far too close to the aura of Chris Marker (but with an amusingly British first name), especially given John’s stated admiration for La Jetée, which of course is also about memory being overwritten and recovered.

I felt there were more clues, not least the fact that the synopses of the various filmmakers and their motivations in the liner notes to the album resembled John’s own very individualistic short stories, especially one he wrote a while back called ‘The Quiet Man’ (for even with the best of intentions the best of artists can find it hard to disguise their ‘voice’ when inhabiting alter egos):

The old newscasts affected him greatly, the Kennedy Assassination, the images of Christine Keeler, early Beatles footage, all in a slightly worn Black and White. He edited together a film containing all these images and more, and played it constantly. He found it profoundly moving, the images gaining even more emotive power with each viewing. All these characters of his past moving in old daylight, waving and smiling and moving on.

One of his favourite films was The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, and he often played this without the soundtrack, drowning in the crude beauty of its early technicolour.

At home, too, he kept a small 8mm projector for playing home movies that he came across in his exploration of the city’s deserted apartments. He was fascinated by all the tiny intimate details of these films, the jerky figures waving from seaside and garden at weddings and birthdays and baptisms, records of whole families and their pets growing and changing through the years.

John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1978.

In fact, my musings sparked off quite a bit of debate in various forums about the nature of Arnold, with many people, including myself, initially believing the entire story of Mr Weizcs-Bryant and his amazing collection of found film.

But John remained tight-lipped… or so I thought. More on that later.

ABOVE: ‘Skyscraper’ by ‘Jerry Golden’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

From the first film of the performance, I was drawn into the degraded beauty of the Super 8 footage and the blown-out and colour-saturated celluloid on display. And yes, this was clearly found footage, the genuine article. It appeared I was wrong — you can’t fake period details, hairstyles and cars, on John’s limited budget. But it had been assembled artfully, like the looped film of traffic on LA freeways drawing out the beauty of this perpetual motion sculpture. Or time-lapsed shadows and sunlight passing across buildings, slowed down or reversed, the motion of the elements becoming imperceptible, the buildings and backgrounds the same but not quite as shadows gently ripple across them as if the fabric of time and molecular space was slowly re-weaving itself. When a building became covered completely in shadow, the film was edited so that another building emerged from the black and into daylight, a slow modernist dance of compacted grace and proportion. It seemed a trick of the mind designed to evoke the passing of civilisation, like the classic Ballardian ideal that treats reality as just a stage set that can be pulled away at any moment.

At this point, I thought I might need to re-assess: if these films were genuine, maybe Arnold was, too.

There was much to enjoy throughout the program. Extraterrestrial, sun-soaked clouds magnified to massive proportions so that they seemed composed of nothing but pure colour and grain. Flickering film projected onto women’s faces, turning them into shapeshifting cats and dogs with whiskers and elongated ears. A naked woman underwater, swimming among the wrecks of submerged automobiles as the sunlight from above the surface turns her and everything it touches into a blue dream.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Underwater Automobiles’ by ‘Robert Rouncefield’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

But then I began to imagine that John had made a very clever play: he’d inserted what I was sure were his own films into the found footage. The giveaway for me was twofold. First, the film ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’ featuring a man walking into a series of smoke-filled rooms — we never see his face as it is either obscured by smoke, or he is filmed from the side or behind. In the liner notes, Arnold says this:

I saw these marvellously lit sequences which seemed to have a very definite story, yet there is no explanation or development or resolution. We can have no idea what the filmmaker had in mind. Because of this lack of resolution, they seem strangely suspended. You begin to make connections, you feel compelled to write a story. But there is none. There can be none. The effect is tantalising, like a damaged and incomplete fragment of memory.

But, I’m sure, both the film and this explanation is very obviously the voice of Foxx; this film, to me, is another iteration of Foxx’s ‘quiet man’ persona, the ghost moving through the streets of the city, his identity never quite coalescing, always escaping the gaze. As John has said, ‘The point of view I’ve always worked from is that of a ghost in the city — someone who is a sort of drifting, detached onlooker — but still vulnerable and trying against the odds to maintain a sort of dignity in the face of all the static.’

ABOVE: ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

There appeared to be more confirmation in the film ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’, a montage of shots supposedly featuring a mysterious extra from Hollywood films:

He has appeared in dozens of major Hollywood movies and American television series, yet he is completely unknown to the public. He appears as a background character, a passer-by, often wearing a grey suit, or a raincoat. His calm unhurried walk, his spectacles, his lapel flower and his habit of turning his head briefly (seemingly so that his face will be momentarily on the film), are what eventually make him distinctive. The film was researched and assembled by the man who first discovered his existence, Evan Parker. Parker is an academic whose field is the evolution of Hollywood. In the course of his studies, Parker watched hundreds of films and had begun to speculate about making a study of the extras, those figures passing by in the background. That is when he began to notice one who appeared to be present in several movies. Intrigued, Parker began a search and was surprised to discover the presence of this figure in dozens of major and minor Hollywood movies. This is a slow-motion montage of all the clips of his appearances so far discovered. His identity remains unknown.

TCM liner notes.

Note the reference to the GREY suit!

‘A Peripheral Character’ is an intriguing concept and very well put together, but at times you could tell John had judiciously selected clips of not the same mysterious person, but of similar looking actors from dozens of films, always with their face half turned away, or shot from behind, or bending over — you might just be convinced if you weren’t paying close enough attention that you were viewing just the one ghost in the city.

By the program’s end, I felt as if I’d finally worked it out for sure: that ‘Arnold Weizcs-Bryant’ was merely another psuedonym for Dennis Leigh (Foxx’s real name), and that it was indeed John Foxx himself who is the passionate collector of found footage, the underground filmmaker inspired by what he has stumbled across to create his own ‘sample films’, his own ‘tiny colour movies’…

And the live music? Well, it was classic Foxx, yes, lovely electronic washes drifting as timelessly as the shadows and sunlight of the films. I do like John’s work, but even so I have to say I was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be much improvisation, given that this was ostensibly a live performance of the soundtrack. Tracks stopped and started exactly when the films did, and it all seemed a bit too perfectly sequenced, too faithful to the CD. I would have liked more of a continuous flow, more segues to sustain the atmosphere, more improv, more of the scratches, collages and squelches that John so admires in the films, for as good as the music is, it just seems far too clean, too digital in the live context to suit the conceptual conceit of the films themselves. As a standalone CD it’s great; as an audiovisual package, I’m not so sure.

And then it was question time, and John appeared from behind his bank of keyboards, dressed head to toe in black like a handsomer version of Lux Interior. Before the show I’d thought of sticking my hand up and asking him if Arnold really did exist, but as I was watching the films I decided it just didn’t matter at all to me anymore. Whatever the answer, either way, John’s assemblage of the results had become compelling — if John wanted to keep up the pretense, if indeed that’s what it was, I was happy to play along. Besides I’d already voiced my suspicions two years ago and I didn’t want to seem like a curmudgeon or a stalker by hounding him forever more about it. Also, I was curious to see if anyone else in the audience would broach the subject. Perhaps no-one even cares…

ABOVE: Stills from ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

Questions were asked about Ultravox, about the soundtrack and always John’s answers were mystical, evasive, talking of dreams and flight. Then someone asked him about the Hollywood extra. ‘Did you ever ask Arnold if he had any info on the extra, or whether he’d tried to trace his identity?’ John fidgeted, looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Er… no’ he replied. The mere mention of Arnold appeared to be making him nervous.

Then someone else stuck up a hand. ‘John, I read the piece on Ballardian where you talk about the influence of J.G. Ballard on your work.’ Ah, he’d read my interview, meaning he’d know of the afterword where I first expressed my doubts! We were getting warm, no doubt about it, but would this guy pop the burning question? But ‘Which of his novels is your favourite?’ was the interrogation and the moment had passed again.

A few more questions and then someone asked John if he wanted a beer. He quickly said he’d love one, but then just as quickly said his goodbyes and hustled off the stage, always the enigma, always elusive, never to be seen again. The end.

And I couldn’t help but think of part 2 of our interview, for I was greatly surprised to see him in Melbourne in the first place.

Because when I asked him if he would ever tour Australia, this is what he said: ‘I’d like to. But it will most likely be as drifting molecules about twenty years from now…’

POSTSCRIPT: After the screening, my dormant interest in John Foxx was reignited and I went Googling for more information. As I mentioned, all I really knew of the background to this project was what had emerged in our interview. As far as I knew, for others, as it was for me, the mystery was still sustainable. Little did I know that John had recently come clean! In this post on John’s forum, for example, it’s claimed that ‘The footage that JF and Mike Barker use in TCM is bought at car boot sales, jumble sales and at market stalls. Sometimes people put their home movie collections up for grabs on ebay… this is then digitised and re-edited to produce TCM.’

And this is confirmed in an interview John did just before the Melbourne screening:

I used to buy reels of film (from Brick Lane and Portobello Road markets) and didn’t know what they were and view them to see if there was anything interesting on them. Eventually I amassed all this stuff and didn’t quite know what to do with it. Then I saw this collector’s reel of films one night and thought ‘Yeah — that’s exactly right! It is finite. It does have a place in history’. And some of it is unique and some of the stories behind the pieces are very interesting too. It’s like reading an obituary; which is something I like — it’s not morbid at all. It’s very interesting because you get a summation of someone’s life and their achievements…

So, is it actually John’s collection on display? It would appear that way, yes, judging by this interview. It would appear that Arnold is John, just as John is Dennis. And what of the filmmakers and their backstories? As I wrote in the afterword to the 2006 interview, after mulling over the ‘Frank Watts’ film:

Urban drift; walking through the city; submitting to psychic entry points … surely this is yet another brilliantly evocative John Foxx short story? Yes — the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the case … re-reading the liner notes, the parallels with these ‘filmmakers’, with their obsessions and aesthetics, to Foxx himself now seem all too obvious (let’s not forget that ‘John Foxx’ is a character that Dennis Leigh himself has said he inhabits because ‘John Foxx is smarter than me’).

Arnold’s ‘filmmakers’ are called Robert Rouncefield; Jerry Golden; Earnst Lubin — like ‘John Foxx’, these are humdrum yet fanciful names, mythical yet ordinary, dull names to the point of incandescence. Their bios and summaries exhibit all the traits of the condensed novels in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But there would be one final nail in the coffin…

ABOVE: John Foxx answering audience questions after the Sydney screening of TCM.

Something else I found in my latest research was this video of John’s Q&A after the Sydney performance of TCM. Note that this was filmed the day after the Melbourne gig. Now recall the Melbourne audience member who asked John if he wanted a beer. Finally, watch the Sydney video: as the uploader writes, ‘Note the beer in his hand. Someone from the audience was kind enough to rush off and get him one.’

Someone had obviously been taking notes in Melbourne, had flown up to Sydney, and wasn’t letting John rush off the stage without a drink this time!

Perhaps they thought the beer might loosen his tongue just a little. Indeed, it appears that way for in this Q&A John is far more expansive and revealing than in the session I attended, and even goes so far as to say that some of the TCM movies are outright fiction, ‘complete lies’ as he calls them, created by him under the guise of a fictitious filmmaker and inserted into the program to mess with the audience’s perception:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Did you cut some of those movies up?

JOHN FOXX: Oh, some of them were invented. And some aren’t. And I want to use these films as a way of telling stories. And being dishonest. Because I think dishonesty’s really interesting. What do you call someone who tries to convince you that something is true when it’s not? You call them a liar, don’t you? So what do you call an author? And that’s the thing that really interests me, is that line between truth and fiction. So some things are true in the movies, and some are complete lies. And I think it’s very interesting to try and work out which is which. Some of them are totally fabricated and some aren’t. But they’re all made up of the real thing.

So what one of the filmmakers practices, in other words cutting Hollywood up into pieces and reassembling it, I’ve been doing as well. And I want to continue doing that, because I think film is raw material now, to be used in any way we want. We’ve all grown up with that stuff. And I even dream it. Because I went to the cinema when I was 7, 6, 5 years old in Lancashire. And Lancashire was so grey, in England, and the cinema was so grey, everything merged together. You know, I was usually covered in soot when I was a kid, and everything was in black and white, the factory chimneys and smoke and all that, and when I looked on the screen it was the same thing. So all my memories of it are mixed up in the movies, old science fiction movies and utter rubbish. None of which I could understand as a kid, so I had to make things up with a kit from my own mind. It became a part of my dream language. And I still dream it. So I think we all mix stuff in strange ways because it’s in our heads, isn’t it? We’ve grown up with it. So why not reassemble it in the way we want to? Because we own it, you know — we don’t have to be dominated by it. It’s ours for God’s sake, not theirs — we own it.

However, I’m glad I went into the screening not knowing about John’s admission. It meant there was still a bit of mystery and wonder about the project, it meant I could ‘script’ the story a little bit as I tried to link and crosslink various ideas and theories — using a ‘kit’ from my own mind.

Does John’s admission matter in the end? No — the project stands on its own merits. I was reminded of how many people still take Empire of the Sun to be Ballard’s autobiography, and how they are often greatly surprised and sometimes angry to discover the book is as ‘fictional’ as the rest of his novels. In this day and age, surely it is not too farfetched to suggest that authenticity is just another mask? I personally love the idea of creating a character and inhabiting it so that the boundaries become blurred, inhabiting the interzones and interstitial zones, ‘the yes or no of the borderzone’ to borrow a phrase from Atrocity, escaping definition and classification.

As does Ballard, for that matter, who has his own passion for the idea of faked newsreels, and the notion of fiction passed off as truth:

The fake war newsreel (and most war newsreels are faked to some extent, usually filmed on manoeuvres) has always intrigued me — my version of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket or All Quiet on the Western Front would be a newsreel compilation so artfully faked as to convince the audience that it was real, while at the same time reminding them that it might be wholly contrived. The great Italian neo-realist, Roberto Rossellini, drew close to this in Open City and Paisa.

J.G. Ballard, annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1994.

For anyone interested in Ballard — especially Atrocity — and experimental film, John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies performance is highly recommended. I’m not sure any of it is especially ‘cutting edge’ — Foxx’s liner notes, for example, state that the Alan Marker stuff (as commanding as it is, one of my favourites from the set) is ‘surely unique in the history of filmmaking’, yet I saw the exact same technique performed with skulls and ghost imagery last week in Melbourne by Australian artists who’d been practising it for some time. And overall, in terms of experimental and repurposed film, the phenomenal, unparalleled work of the likes of Guy Sherwin, the old master, and Ben Russell and Ben Rivers, the heirs, is certainly more of an assault in both audio and visual terms.

What Tiny Colour Movies undoubtedly is, however, is Foxxian: too cold by half for some, beautiful and sad for others, an industrial spiritualism and an unalloyed sensuality of machines.

Arnold Weizcs-Bryant: R.I.P.

..:: Previously:
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 1
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 2

..:: More information::
+ Metamatic: John Foxx’s official site
+ Tiny Colour Movies official site

From outer space to inner…
LEFT: Gabrielle Drake in UFO. RIGHT: Ms Drake in Crash!.

Pringle: [In Crash!] you were playing opposite a professional actress, so it wasn’t as though it was purely a documentary.

Ballard: Yes, that was… oh, what was the name of the actress? A rather pretty actress, I suppose she’s now in her 50s. Gabrielle Drake! She briefly appeared as a mysterious woman that I drove around with. It was fun.

David Pringle, “The SFX Interview with J. G. Ballard”, 1996.

The film was based on my interest in the car crash — as it emerged through the pages of The Atrocity Exhibition. It was made in the early 70s. With Gabrielle Drake. She was quite a serious actress in her early days, but then she moved off into Crossroads or something. She was very sweet. I met her a few times on the set, as it were, chasing around multi-storey car-parks in Watford.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Iain Sinclair in Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate”, 1999.

At the terminal risk of coming on like a refugee from io9, this post is in honour of the actor Gabrielle Drake, the most beautiful and stylish woman to ever appear in SF film or TV. How could so many American boys waste their sci-fi wet dreams on Carrie Fisher in Star Wars, especially given that Ms Drake, playing Lt. Gay Ellis in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO TV series, had much, much cooler hair and clothes than Princess Leia. Give me Gay’s sexy purple wig and slinky silver spandex catsuit over Leia’s ridiculous side-buns and risible toga-cum-kimono any day of the week.

As for technical ability, well, Ms Drake is a well-respected Shakespearean actress! But if that doesn’t impress, consider that in the role of Lt. Ellis she was required to not only portray a character who lacks confidence but to also invest that character with a determination to overcome her self-doubt and rebirth herself as a dynamic officer type. Plus she convincingly portrayed unrequited love for a fellow officer, unrequited love being a difficult task for any actor and a far cry from Leia’s cartoonish are-they-or-aren’t-they “bromance” with that pansy Luke Skywalker. Also, any glance at UFO can tell you that Ms Drake’s eyes say so much, a riot of organic semiology fluttering beneath the candy, subtlety beyond compare.

Ms Drake also had the enormous good taste, the good sense, during the UFO era (1970-71) to work with none other than the Sage of Shepperton himself, starring opposite JGB in Harley Cokliss’s short film, Crash! (1971). She performs admirably, playing the very first Ballardian woman-catalyst on film, beautiful but utterly doomed, stripped of identity in the face of an encroaching technological landscape, her coquettish sexuality reduced to literally nothing more than a hood ornament: Ms Drake makes us believe it all in Crash!. I very much doubt that Ms Fisher would be able to switch from space opera to inner space with such ease, skill and grace. And as for Ms Drake vs. either Rosanna Arquette or Holly Hunter in the other Crash, the Cronenberg version, well again there really is no contest, is there? It’s got to be Gabrielle all the way down the line, and then some. (Weiss’s cypher-woman looked the part but she clearly couldn’t act).

Ballard and Gabrielle Drake, sister of the mythologised singer/songwriter Nick Drake. Colonials all. Ex-pats, with memories of tropical splendour, marooned among the concrete atolls of Watford. The Drakes had grown up in Burma. Gabrielle’s parents had been evacuated from Rangoon to India when the Japanese invaded. She recalls her father composing “an entire comic operetta about an Englishman who was based out East”. (Ballard, paying his respects to the earlier film, used the name Gabrielle for the character in Crash who would be played by Rosanna Arquette.)

Iain Sinclair, David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate”, 1999.

To further demonstrate Ms Drake’s versatility in that magical year of 1971, I have interpolated stills of her in the UFO series with screengrabs of her in Crash!. There are also YouTube clips of both works towards the end. And I must thank The Diary of a Mad Natural Historian for alerting me to the existence of Gabrielle on Flickr, from which the stills were lifted. For more, visit Poletti’s “The Ladies of UFO” set.

NOTE: See the Noise blog for a warm interview with Ms Drake, in which she remembers her brother and his music.

SIX DEGREES OF J.G. BALLARD: Ms Drake is connected to JGB in other ways. In 1970 Ballard received his first screen credit (misspelled as “J.B. Ballard”), providing the story for Val Guest’s prehistoric potboiler, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. In 1972, just one year after UFO and Crash!, Guest directed Au Pair Girls, starring none other than Ms Drake, who appeared, gulp, naked as the day she was born.

1971: YEAR OF THE DRAKE

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

YOUTUBE

ABOVE: a clip from UFO, featuring Ms Drake dubbed into German.

ABOVE: Crash! by Harley Cokliss, starring Ms Drake.

ABOVE: opening sequence of UFO.

ABOVE: a montage of clips from UFO.

We’re all suffocated by the consumer society and its entertainment culture, where everything is an image or imitation of something else. We’re so starved of the real, as we think of it, that we’ll happily watch CCTV footage of motorways, rain-swept precincts and corner shops.

J.G. Ballard, Literary Review, 2001.

White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice—it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

“Up and then down: The lives of elevators” by Nick Paumgarten.

Is there anybody out there?

Tell me honestly, what would you do? Say you’ve installed SurveillanceSaver on your computer and you’re scanning the far reaches of inner space for signs of life. You stop, breathless, halted in your tracks by — at long last! — intimations of deviant activity. Because that’s what you’re really looking for, isn’t it? Low-level crime. Subterranean sexuality. State-sanctioned scopophilia. You’re not really interested in static civic squares and motionless, humanless hospital parking lots. For you know these are really blank slates, switching stations for ‘the new man’: enter one end, exit via any number of alternate universes.

After the umpteenth feed of pigs in pens, Eastern European building sites and spotty students looking at porn on university computers, you see this: a man nervously pacing around an elevator car, clearly trapped as the car is going nowhere. He opens the doors, sees only a brick wall. He sits back down. Sleeps. Wakes up. Panics. Screams soundlessly, for there is no soundtrack to inner space, in inner space no one can hear you scream, CCTV being as silent as the tomb. Of course, if you have trouble racking up your empathy a notch or two, you could always try playing some melancholy piano music in the background to enhance the humanity.

After a while, White decided to smoke a cigarette. It was conceivable to him that, owing to construction work in the lobby, the building staff had taken his car out of service and would leave it that way not only through the weekend but all through the week. That they could leave him here as long as they had suggested that anything was possible. He imagined them opening the doors, ten days later, and finding him dead on his back, like a cockroach. Within hours, he had smoked all his cigarettes.

“Up and then down: The lives of elevators” by Nick Paumgarten.

Would you applaud and cheer, like it’s some kind of panopticon performance art? Are you so desperate for reality that you would watch this man disintegrate without once trying to summon help? He’s fated to be trapped in that elevator for 41 hours: enough time for you to go out on the town and come back late at night to find out how’s he doing before you retire to bed. You wake up in the morning, log on, hoping to see if he’s resorted to masturbation to block out the pain of a featureless world closing in all around him.

Idea for a new reality-TV show: trap unassuming citizens in urban environments. An elevator, say, or an office-block toilet. A car wash. A factory. The garbage enclosure of a high-rise housing estate. A concrete island. Leave them there for the weekend. Beam the security-camera images to the world. Do they die? Play with themselves? Talk to God? Talk to you?

Record their emotional response. Rate it and vote on it.

The end.

I find “reality TV” absolutely fascinating. I think people are so desperate to find what they believe to be “reality”, that they will happily watch programs of CCTV footage filmed in underground car parks, rainy shopping malls and motorway junctions… in a sense, the drabber the better.

J.G. Ballard, BBC Online Chat, 2002.

..:: Previously on Ballardian…

+ Trompe l’oeil corridors
+ ‘What would Borges do?’
+ Gargle, don’t swallow
+ The Ballardian Primer: Surveillance Cameras
+ One Nation Under CCTV

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

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).

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

by Pedro Groppo

EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard
Starring: Christian Bale, John Malkovich

Whereas the sensibilities of J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg, who directed Crash (1996), seem to overlap and complement each other, one would be hard-pressed to think of someone like Steven Spielberg as the ideal director of a Ballard adaptation. Empire of the Sun (1987) was the first of the more mainstream adaptations of Ballard’s work, and still remains today the most widespread and popular work based on his fiction, even if it is Spielberg’s least successful movie to date in box office terms. It is however, a landmark in the development of Spielberg’s sensibilities as a director and in the popularization of Ballard.

LEFT: Bale, Spielberg, Malkovich.

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

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

As Spielberg has noted:

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABOVE: The China Odyssey on YouTube.

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pedro Groppo, 2007.

..:: REFERENCES

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

..:: MORE INFO

Shanghai Jim: Form Dictated by Time.

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

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

Thanks to the YouTube community for the uploads.

J.G. BALLARD INTERVIEWS
Ballard interviews.

J.G. BALLARD DOCUMENTARIES
Ballard docos.

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

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

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

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

Over on BallardoTube, the “China Odyssey” doco on the making of Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun has appeared. Ballard features prominently.

Don’t forget part two.

[ thanks Pedro! ]