Ballardian

John Carter Wood sent me this link to vintage German crash-test photos. These shots evoke the footage in the Crash! short film, where Ballard notes, ‘I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. … They filmed them beautifully because they wanted to know what was happening. They weren’t interested in the aesthetics of the thing. … One could see four feet of metal suddenly become one foot. Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace. The power and weight of these cars gave them an immense classical dignity. It was like some strange technological ballet.’

This German shoot, featuring classic Mercedes, is from the same era as that crash-test footage — the 50s — a time, as Ballard says, when ‘the styling of Mercedes cars [was] at once paranoid and aggressive, like medieval German armour’. (When I look at this Frankenstinian machinery, with weird engines strapped to the rear, I can’t help thinking of animal testing — and specifically that mouse with a human ear grafted to its back.)

Subjugating the confidence of a machine may have a serious knock-on effect down the line, when, like Frankenstein’s monster, the machine turns on its creator. This time around, though, assimilation is the goal, as ‘modern technology [reaches] into our dreams and [changes] our whole way of looking at things, and perceiving reality … drawing us away from contemplating ourselves to contemplating its world’ (as Ballard observes).

I await Jeff Bartlett’s verdict.