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Weiss's Atrocity: Reviewed by DVD Times
Author: Simon Sellars • May 27th, 2006 •Category: Ballardosphere, film
Thanks to Tim C for this link… There’s a most favourable review of Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition adaptation over at DVD Times. As well as providing some valuable insights into Weiss’s film, the review also intelligently summarises Ballard’s approach: “Jean-Luc Godard was using this same material during this same period in films like Weekend and One + One, but in contrast to Godard’s ambivalence towards the artistic and cultural significance of such material, which he would ultimately come to regard as fascist, Ballard is fully embracing in his artistic appropriation of this subject matter as further evidence of the decadence of modern society. Ballard approaches it scientifically and aesthetically, but unemotionally, decontextualising and juxtaposing these events, examining them for something arising out of a particular geometric configuration they propose, seeing it as a kind of Dadaist art installation, and the subject matter is all the more disturbing for it”.
The review, finally, leaves the reader in no doubt that “Weiss works superbly with the material…creating the most Ballard-like visual representation of the author’s work on the screen, with his ubiquitous scientists, doctors and mysterious beautiful women haunting concrete bunkers, motorway underpasses, aircraft landing strips and other areas of urban isolation. The screen is also kept busy with significant and meaningful montages of archive news and documentary footage of atrocities, scientific charts and tools, autopsy reports and x-rays, close-ups of organs being operated upon and pornographic sex scenes”.
The full review is here.
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