MovieChat Forums > The Atrocity Exhibition (2024) Discussion > What a pleasant surprise...

What a pleasant surprise...

posted 18 years ago by akin-2-grieve
2 replies | jump to latest

I was in the HMV store near where I live the other day, when I came across this DVD - I was in heaven (not that HMV is anything like heaven) - I am gob-smacked at how much Weiss has managed to capture the essence of the book in the film. Like the book there is almost no narrative, but as a film structure it seems somehow to work.

The Atrocity Exhibition is apart from all Ballard's (my fav author) other work outside of his short stories, and I struggled quite a lot with the book at first. You just have to read the book and not try to understand it, then you understand ti almost automatically - a mad world as seen by a madman whose job is to make mad people sane (if he really was a doctor, and not a patient..), and the film captures this really well.

More films of Ballard's work please - else I will make one eventually....

Does anyone know of any other films of his work? Obviously Empire of the Sun, Crash, and I know they made a one-hour tv show of his short story Home. Doeas anyone know of anything else..?

I see that there is a film version of High Rise currently in pre-production!

[–] epaminndas 12 years ago

Indeed.

Possibly the greatest writer of the last century, and this movie, albeit a bit cheap at times, captures his insane vision magnificently.

What slice of Ballard's world would you shoot on film if you had the rights ?

Concrete Island and the Drowned World immediately come to mind among his novels, being already so cinematographic, but I believe his short-stories contain many, many gems that could make tremendous movies. Voices of Time for one, sure, but also the whole Vermilion Sands universe, and possibly less-known jewels like Manhole 69 or Subliminal Man.

Actually, I need some. Right now.

[–] Captain_Obviuos 12 years ago

I would agree that, yes, Ballard is one of the greatest writers of the last century, but his novels and short stories do not translate well to movies, as evidenced by "The Atrocity Exhibition." While I certainly gave the movie high marks for even trying to make sense of Ballard's book, which is more a series of loosely-interconnected stories (understandably, perhaps, as its protagonist is going mad), I thought the film failed by taking a sensationalistic approach. The heart of the story is a man who has had a nervous breakdown because of what he considers sensory overload. The horrors and beauty of the world are both presented every waking moment, in the media, in glorious living color; and as these same icons are flashed across the screen constantly, the line between them begins to blur, until the man cannot distinguish the two anymore. He begins to find the beauty in horrible things, and horror from beauty, as his mind struggles to make sense of it all. Since most of this takes place internally -- the man's name changes from story to story, some chapters are but a single word, characters he kills turn up again in other stories -- there is just no way to adequately portray the man's feelings onto a filmed medium, which is the final irony, as films and their images are what have driven the man insane in the first place: their unreal world does not transpose with his, the thought-control of the media who tells him what to hate and who to love has left him ambivalent. He just wants to feel again, feel anything, feel human... but what, exactly, does being human feel like?

This was probably Ballard's toughest novel to attempt to film, so kudos to Jonathan Weiss for even trying, however. A few of the other novels/stories you mention above would make outstanding films, like Voices of Time, but only in the hands of a capable maker (I am not saying Weiss was not), who had a real budget, and did not go for sensationalism. Though probably the only ones who fit that criteria cannot get films made these days!