Ballardian

In 2005 the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) announced a subsection of the event called ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’:

‘Has a festival of Atrocity films ever been held? — JG Ballard, 1990.’

Yes. You are looking at it JG. Welcome to The Atrocity Exhibition our maliciously mad and mischievously misanthropic look at the world around us. Yes humanity has truly made a damn fine mess of it all don’t you think…lets take a look and see what the current world dystopia has for us to…..enjoy?

They then proceeded to screen Bumfights, the ‘reality’ doco that paid homeless people pitiful amounts to degrade themselves on camera. MUFF justified it with an immature political rant: ‘There is something more to Bumfights 3 though than mere exploitation. Bush shits all over the homeless but here their antics and mistreatment bring home a painful truth that is simply painful and is directly confrontational in showing the decline of western civilisation.’

Now I know I’m going to fuel MUFF’s ‘us against the world’ rhetoric with the following, but here goes…

As I was working with homeless people in Melbourne that year, holding writing workshops so that we could publish a magazine that would arm people on the streets with a *positive* creative outlet, MUFF’s juvenile ‘it’s shocking so it must be subversive’ agenda really pissed me off and I decided to boycott the festival. The hijacking of Ballard to serve this abhorrent Bumfights trash really got my back up.

Three years later they’re at it again, announcing that this year’s theme is ‘A Benevolent Psychopathology. Read J.G. Ballard and get with the program.’ MUFF’s director, Richard Wolstencroft, used to run a S+M club called Hellfire here in Melbourne. He now refers to himself as a ‘transcendental fascist’ so who knows what the end result of his latest little Ballardian flirtation will produce. Here’s hoping something with a bit more depth than the usual S+M-flavoured interpretations of Atrocity and Crash.