JG Ballard

AN IDEAL FOR LIVING

Novelist J.G. Ballard (Crash, Empire of the Sun) has penned one of his periodic pieces for The Guardian, a meditation on modernist architecture coinciding with a giant gallery exhbition at London’s V&A. Here, excerpted, are his thoughts on the relationship between modernism and its ideals and the horrors of the 20th century: Modernism’s attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2006
BALLARD ON POWELL: “REALISM HAS FAILED US…”

I was a big J.G. Ballard fan in my late teens and 20s when I pretty much devoured works like Terminal Beach, The Atrocity Exhibition (made into an independent feature by Jonathan Weiss, linked to here), The Crystal World, and Myths of the Near Future. I’ve been interested then to see the dystopian science fiction writer pop up several times in The Guardian in just the past couple of weeks. I quoted him below in a blog entry on a new Helmut Newton book, and here he is again in The Guardian discussing the great director Michael Powell in a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 22, 2005
“STORY” SEEMS TO BE THE HARDEST WORD

In the interests of brevity, the headline writers at The Guardian apparently flubbed the Elton John reference with this weekend’s John Patterson piece, “Story is the Hardest Word,” an otherwise recommendable article occasioned on the U.K. release of the Slaughterhouse Five DVD. Patterson discusses various successes and failures involving directors who have brought “unfilmmable” novels to the screen: “The results are only occasionally successful as movies. One that works very well is released this week on DVD: George Roy Hill’s marvellous adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which switches back and forth from the bombing of Dresden, a German POW camp, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 8, 2005

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