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Ballard name-dropping film directors like nobody's bussiness, but somehow making it completely relevant to the subject matter at hand. Not to mention the deadpan satirical bite he does this with. We are the directors of the film of our life.

#jg ballard #intensive care unit #short story #family #film #directors #federico fellini #ingmar bergman #alfred hitchcock #jean luc godard

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In ‘Escapement’, Ballard’s protagonist watches a teleplay that sounds deliberately evocative of Arthur Miller’s familial tragedies, such as ‘Death of a Salesman’ and (more overtly) 'All My Sons’.

Whether this a playful and respectful homage or something more mocking is hard to say. Though the use of 'melodrama' as a description is telling.

#arthur miller #j g ballard #short story #escapement #teleplay

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Prima Belladonna

#JG Ballard #prima belladonna #short story #interspecies sex #plant #femme fatale #sex education #sex #intercourse #excerpt

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‘What I Believe’ by J.G. Ballard 

#prose poem #jg ballard #manifesto #i believe

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The Real Drowned Earth

This is one of the views people are getting right now in Houston Texas due to one of the rainiest days on record. When you see ponded water like this, don’t drive through it - reportedly 5 people died in this flood, all of them from driving into something like this!

#iseeballard #drowned earth #ballard #reality #vine

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From Robert Bresson: The Essence of Cinema, for more on filmmaking and the art of cinema, subscribe: A-BitterSweet-Life: Spark Your Cinematic Passion.

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Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)

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Like I said in my previous post, just look at those careful camera caresses.  The disturbing (or liberating?) marriage between man and machine. 

#camera #karlheinz böhm #michael powell #iseeballard #gif

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In Peeping Tom, the film that destroyed Powell's career, a psychopathic cameraman stabs his victims with a concealed tripod bayonet as he gazes at them through his view-finder. It is a grisly and definitely very weird film, but when I saw it on its release in 1960 I felt there was something missing. There was no hint of why the cameraman behaved as he did, and the distinct feeling that we, the audience, were the real target. This seemed to be confirmed by a clip of home movie in the film, where the psychopath's tyrannical father is played by none other than Powell. I suspect that Powell was challenging his audiences, forcing them into a series of psychological trials. Each film is a test of the audience's nerve, especially if sex is on the menu, a situation we today are happier with than the audiences of 50 years ago.

J.G. Ballard on Michael Powell’s postwar cinema

Watched Peeping Tom last night and found it to be, not only influential, but predictive of the sexual, violent and sexually violent state of contemporary filmmaking.  Not to mention Karlheinz Böhm’s somewhat Ballardian protagonist, afflicted with his (and, in a sense, all of our) voyeurism fetish (scoptophilia). And not just voyeurism alone, but voyeurism through technology (the camera lens). Just watch the way he caresses the camera with a sensual, uncomfortably erotic charge. 

That Ballard himself happened to be a fan, or admirer, of the film is no coincidence. 

#iseeballard #peepingtom #film #cinema #horror #voyeurism #jg ballard #michael powell #fetish

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Mouchette (1967)  or: Crash by way of Robert Bresson. 

#crash #bresson #mouchette #iseeballard

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Manuscript page from JG Ballard’s Crash

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JG Ballard’s Writing Room

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of The Violation by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women. Sometimes I think I have gone to live inside it and each morning I emerge refreshed. It’s a male dream…The postcard is Dali’s Persistence of Memory, the greatest painting of the 20th century, and next to it is a painting by my daughter, which is the greatest painting of the 21st century. On the desk is my old manual typewriter, which I recently found in my stair cupboard. I was inspired by a letter from Will Self, who wrote to me on his manual typewriter. So far I have just stared at the old machine, without daring to touch it, but who knows? The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric. I have worked at this desk for the past 47 years. All my novels have been written on it, and old papers of every kind have accumulated like a great reef. The chair is an old dining-room chair that my mother brought back from China and probably one I sat on as a child, so it has known me for a very long time. A Paolozzi screen-print is resting against the door, which now serves as a cat barrier during the summer months. My neighbour’s cats are enormously affectionate, and in the summer leap up on to my desk and then churn up all my papers into a huge whirlwind. They are my fiercest critics. I work for three or four hours a day, in the late morning and early afternoon. Then I go out for a walk and come back in time for a large gin and tonic.

- Writers’ Rooms, The Guardian, 2007

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Vaughn, Crash: A Novel, JG Ballard

His exhausted face, with its scarred mouth…As his pock-marked jaws champed on a piece of gum I had the sudden feeling that he was hawking obscene pictures around the wards…But what marked him out was the scar tissue around his forehead and mouth, residues of some terrifying act of violence…Heavy black hair…Broken and re-set nose bridge…His features looked as if they had been displaced laterally, reassembled after the crash from a collection of faded publicity photographs. The scars on his mouth and forehead, the self-cut hair and two missing upper canine gave him a neglected and hostile appearance…His hard mouth, with its scarred lips, was parted in a droll smile.

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The radio play is an outdated mode of storytelling, but that isn’t to say it’s ineffective. There’s something tremendous in the audio-centric textures that isn’t apparent in any other medium - the way ambient noise paints a picture, underneath dialogue. The advent of modern technology, especially that of home/DIY sound recording should make the radio play more prevalent than ever.  Yet... how can one explain the popularity of podcasts? Perhaps it’s merely a generational thing. 

#ballard #radio #audiodrama #radioplay #adaptation

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An unofficial Polish poster to Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash. 

Fantastic - captures the grotesque eroticism perfectly. 

The stark, highlighter yellow, zig-zagging like lightning.

The glazed face of ecstasy, smiling as she crashes.

The wheels... or are they breasts?

#david cronenberg #jg ballard #polish #poster #crash #film

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1. Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) from Human Consumption.

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

“In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.”