Hey ‘Sabrina Pendleton’. The above quote from you is one of the most idiotic things I’ve read on the internet in the last week. Your attacks on the film are without base. You can state that you did not like the film (due to the fact that you did not ‘get it’), but you should avoid saying such nonsense as “my ten year old child makes better movies then [sic] his”. It paints a pretty clear picture of a raving lunatic moron that I’m sure most people do not like, let alone Mr. Weiss. So of course he’s not going to be the kindest person he can be when dealing with you.

But aside from that, I don’t think you’ve ever met him. I don’t think you’ve seen the movie, and I think you’re just trolling an obscure web site. So get the fuck out.

TAE is a great movie, and I’d love to see another picture from Mr. Weiss. Tarkovsky’s ‘The Mirror’ is one of my favorites, and this film is on par with it in my opinion. I do wish the Reagan sequence was more detailed, but I understand the direction Mr. Weiss took.

Regarding the interview, I felt that all 3 parties involved were assholes. So naturally that’s going to make for a pretty incendiary interview.

At the moment, I think it is the later comments, near the end. This site is full of endless, AMAZING surprises. So, thank you Mr. Sellars, for doing the thankless job, and doing it extremely well.

I have seen the DVD of the film in question and think it to be a very fine cinematic treatment of Mr. Ballard’s AMAZING text.

I’m glad it’s received a DVD release. Did it ever acquire an American distributor?

not in melbourne, no — however, it can be easily obtained through amazon and indeed through the distributors, reel 23.

easy!

best
simon

Do you know where I could get a copy of this DVD in Melbourne? Having read the interview and the other comments I would really like to see it.

regards Brent

please enjoy the rest of the site.

I haven’t ‘fallen into the trap’ of thinking you have to toe the line, I am just giving my own opinion (like your reviewer was) but the fact you make that comment and think like that to me suggests that any objectivity regarding the film in this case. It seems every comment is baselined to your own personal experience with Weiss. You can stand by your experience of the man – although I feel you should more stand by your experience of the film.

‘what a lack of understanding, incredible’, you say — my reviewer, andres, expressed an independent, honest opinion. you don’t agree with it, that’s fine, but please don’t fall into the trap of thinking andres — or this site — has to toe the line. whatever that may be.

as i have said, i have a different opinion of the film — more positive — than andres, but i have no wish to express it at this present time; indeed, no immediate wish to promote the work of someone who was so aggressive towards me.

the film is beautiful and caprtues the world of the book for me. As did Empire and Crash. And if you think about those books, and who directed the films, it all makes sense. Empire was a very popular book, and porbably Ballard’s most accessible. Director – Steven Spielberg. Crash was fairly well known and controversial. Director – Cronenberg. Atrocity Exhibition is what it is. Director – Weiss, an independent.

I like and admire all 3 films, but for very different reasons. Of all of them, I feel AE is the closest to the world, or the mind rather, of the book.

I agree with most of what Weiss says having read the interview. I would never listen to critics anyway though – leech mentality. What a lack of understanding, incredible – this is probably what has antagonised Weiss – he made this film as a labour of love as someone who really tried to understand Ballard, only for one of the main mouthpieces of Ballards work to dismiss the film, and what’s more misunderstand it.

So while Weiss is hysterically lashing out at anyone who doesn’t like him – boo hoo for Mr. Weiss, but he’s not three years-old anymore – he’s also rather clueless about film history. I think it’s a great interview, as well, but almost entirely because it serves so richly as a direct look at regressive, Paris Hilton-like child fantasies in which, everyone loves little Johnny Weiss…

I have now responded to this allegation with notes throughout Part 1, and a postscript at the end of Part 2.

Really need to see the film now!

I think it’s fair for an artist of whatever sort to want to reply to a reviewer — (I say that having written a lot of reviews myself) — though you have to be careful about appearing thin-skinned or hysterical. Weiss does come off looking sort of like that, but in the end I agree with him. The points Andrés raised in his review seem pretty juvenile to me. Following the same logic, Andrés would want to remake Gladiator in Iraq or something. That’s just plain silly. Atrocity Ex is all about the late 1960s early 1970s media culture. The book and the film wouldn’t make sense if you just transposed them to today.

And I still want to see a U.S. release of this DVD. What’s the big deal? You can make 1000 disks yourself for a few grand… It’s better than nothing.

What ! Has he read Sinclair’s BFI monograph ? It slaughters Cronenberg’s ‘Crash’. Weiss is only mentioned in passing; perhaps that’s the problem.

The book has around a page worth of material around the Weiss film ( p102-103), beginning with a direct quote from Ballard: “There’s a film of The Atrocity Exhibition. An amateur film made for 50,000 dollars – mostly spent on the rights to documentary inserts. But Cronenberg’s film, on the other hand, is very stylish.” This is presumably the line of which Weiss says “JGB assured me that these things were fabricated and indicated he had his own issues with the veracity of the book.”

Sinclair emphasises Ballard’s enthusiasm for the Weiss film: “… a painstakingly faithful transcription of Ballard’s text. The author is delighted; once again the burden of responsibility shifts, now there is something out there that can be known as ‘Jonathan Weiss’ Atrocity Exhibition’… It’s a worthy completion, so he feels, to the trilogy of films adapted from his books.”

However, Sinclair continues with a critique that does bring to mind some of Vaccari’s criticisms (although this is presumably an earlier version of the film), which is probably worth transcribing entire -
“Weiss, shooting over a period of two years, has contrived a work so deferential to the original that it is virtually a proof of time-travel. But with this approach comes the risk of neutralising subversion by making it visible and graphic through the process of substituting Ballard’s savage acceleration for a cold-blooded logic. Nothing, it struck me, could be further from Un Chien Andalou. There were no shocks, no diversions from the rule of Ballard’s text: no perversity that had not been sanctioned. The film moved with the impetus of an academic thesis, cutting between archival footage and immaculately staged representations of Ballard’s drama. The visual language of Weiss’ Atrocity Exhibition is an attempt to duplicate the texture and rhythm of Ballard’s prose. Weiss speaks of aspiring to the ‘epigrammatic quality’ of the original: short, tight sequences. His film, stopping down the excitement that came from reading Ballard’s books at a period when its risks were still active, achieves the intended effect of ‘listening to secret transmissions’. The element of ennui, in going back over that which is already known, provokes a pleasant state of reverie. The viewer is free to re-edit favoured passages, to drift away, substituting images for words (or words for images); musing on the nature of the Ballardian trajectory. How he collages newsreel, dream and the trance of language, to establish the curvature of prophecy.”

And that’s it. Hardly damning, and I would have though fair comment (I’ve not seen any version of the film myself, so can’t really argue the aesthetics – and Wiess’ behaviour in this interview is hardly inspiring me to rush order the DVD).

Weiss’s response to this, recycled IMDB comments and all, comes across as rather petty and neurotic. He’s not averse to his own “fabrications and outright lies” either: “Ballard loved the film and has been the film’s biggest support. But Sinclair could not mention that…” See above.

Some people really can’t take criticism, I guess. A shame.

Also, why should Andrés complain that the non-linearity of the book gets forced into a linear film? Hey man, haven’t you ever seen Eisenstein or read his books on montage? Maybe you can’t skip around in a film like you can in a book, but film remains the non-linear medium par excellence, if you ask me.

The only point where I think Weiss sounds like a whiner is when it comes to distribution. I know it’s a bitch to spend time, money, energy, and passion making something that nobody appreciates, but in this day and age you don’t have to sit on your ass waiting for a studio to distribute your films. Get a website, man. Rip the first twenty minutes of your film to Flash video. Set up some links to PayPal so people can buy your DVD. You’re not going to sell millions, but if your film is any good, it will find its audience.

I’d love to see this film. Why don’t you bootleg some copies of the US version? It’s not doing you any good just sitting in a can somewhere.

If Ballard’s textual work is impressive on many levels, one of those is his sense of humor. Weiss’s apparent lack of that characteristic is nothing short of astonishing.