J.G. Ballard
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Braking and Entering: Director David Cronenberg on His Austere and Unnerving J.G. Ballard Adaptation, Crash
The following interview with David Cronenberg about his film Crash originally appeared as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1997 edition. With Crash having just been rereleased in a new restoration by Criterion, it is being republished online for the first time. Also regarding Crash: Joanne McNeil’s essay on the relation of the work to the source material, J.G. Ballard’s novel. Blood, semen and gasoline are the liquids that course through David Cronenberg’s compelling study of sexual fetishism, Crash. But far from being a, well, messy affair, Crash is startling for its cool precision and astute manner of intellectual provocation. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 5, 2021 -
Ballard in the Rear View
In his autobiography, Miracles of Life, J. G. Ballard reminisces about a derelict casino he came across in his youth. The abandoned building gave him the sense that “reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.” It is a canny summation of the familiar visuals in his fiction. Ballard was obsessed with facilities like hospitals and airports, places with sterile obstructive architectures and machine-like routines for individuals to perform, and theaters of reality that break down […]
by Joanne McNeil on Oct 28, 2020 -
“I Wanted to Tell a Story Where the Atmosphere Was So Severe That It Literally Consumed the Movie”: Jeffrey A. Brown on the Environmental Horror of The Beach House
In his final book, The Weird and the Eerie, critic and theorist Mark Fischer differentiates between “the weird” and the supernatural as it appears in both literature and film. For example, the supernatural world of vampires, writes Fischer, “… recombines elements from the natural world as we already understand it….” These supernatural stories are contrasted with fictions based around suggestions and byproducts of natural phenomena, such as black holes. “… The bizarre ways in which [a black hole] bends space and time are completely outside our common experience,” Fischer writes, “and yet a black hole belongs to the natural-material cosmos […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 19, 2020 -
Almodovar’s Lockdown, J.G. Ballard’s World, Aphex Twin, Hal Willner and Spin-Off Podcasts: 4/8/2020 Links
Are you looking for a trusted, socially-distanced source to provide you with semi-regular cultural recommendation links during this time of pandemic? Okay, well, I’m not really either. My inbox too is full of check-ins and missives from journalists and curators seeking to maintain a digital relationship by supplying Netflix watchlists and the like during this awful interregnum. So consider these posts as much an activity for me as you as I revive this column by highlighting a few things that may provide some degree of interest, empathy or wisdom. Some things to shift your attention away from the cable news […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 8, 2020 -
In Every Dream Home a Heartache: High Rise Director Ben Wheatley on Adapting Ballard, Practical Special Effects and ’70s Parenting
I first met and spoke with Ben Wheatley in Brighton, where he lives with his wife and collaborator, Amy Jump. I was there for the inaugural Dark and Stormy Crime Festival, where Wheatley was screening his existential hit man thriller, Kill List. That film, along with Sightseers, Down Terrace and A Field in England, comprise a body of work that has rightly cemented Wheatley’s status as a raucous, disruptive, independent voice within the sometimes staid confines of the British specialty film industry. Wheatley’s new film High-Rise — an adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s 1975 dystopian sci-fi novel and his highest-budgeted to […]
by Alix Lambert on Apr 21, 2016 -
Watch: Sam Scoggins’ J.G. Ballard Short, The Unlimited Dream Company
Having just posted the trailer for Ben Wheatley’s upcoming adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s classic dystopian novel, High-Rise, now’s a good time to check out this considerably more obscure — yet, for fans of the British writer, equally rewarding — film. With a hat tip to Dangerous Minds, check out Sam Scoggins’ rather Ballardian author’s portrait, which mixes interview footage with both imagery and storytelling strategies drawn from Ballard’s work.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 11, 2016 -
Toronto, Camden and Venice
TORONTO by Scott Macaulay High Rise has long been considered one of the J.G. Ballard’s most “adaptable” books, with the author’s dispassionate meditations on disassociation, inner and outer space, and the psychologies and paraphilias unleashed by 20th-century life encased within the sturdy confines of a modern apartment building and a class-based tale of survival. Nonetheless, High Rise has taken decades to reach the screen, despite the attachments of numerous directors, including Vincenzo Natali, Bruce Robinson and, revealed producer Jeremy Thomas at a talk at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, interest from Nicolas Roeg. Premiering at the festival in Platform, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 28, 2015 -
Managing Rubble and the Degradation of the Building: Ben Wheatley on High-Rise
Perhaps the most divisive film at the 40th Toronto International Film Festival was in the inaugural Platform competition section. High-Rise was originally published by author J.G. Ballard in 1975; now, English filmmaker Ben Wheatley (Sightseers) has brought to the big screen the tale of Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a new resident in a luxury apartment building who becomes entangled in a civil war between the building’s different social classes. The media interest kicked into overdrive for the social satire when Soda Pictures purchased the Canadian distribution rights. During the craziness, Filmmaker was able to sit down with Wheatley to talk about […]
by Trevor Hogg on Sep 22, 2015 -
TIFF 2015 Critic’s Notebook #2: High-Rise, The Lobster and Anomalisa
Toronto seemed the perfect place for Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise to have its world premiere. The J. G. Ballard adaptation stages a class-war in an ultra-modern high-rise, and the theater where it played Sunday night is only about a mile from the luxury condo developments that tower over Toronto’s waterfront, which suggest a modern Eden in shiny glass and steel but have instead exacerbated the city’s homelessness problems and real-estate bubble. Another felicitous detail to the evening: the screening was sponsored by Visa and before you could take your seat to see Wheatley’s commentary on class and capitalism, there was a […]
by Whitney Mallett on Sep 16, 2015 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #83 (Part 1)
Second #3901, 65:01 1. Jeffrey: “I’m seeing something that was always hidden.” 2. J. G. Ballard, from Concrete Island, 1974: When he reached the embankment and searched for the message he had scrawled on the white flank of the caisson, he found that all the letters had been obliterated. 3. André Breton, from “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 1924: Under the pretense of civilization an progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy . . . It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Feb 24, 2012
