A post-Ballardian reverie on cars and modernity.
Specially commissioned by Manchester’s new cultural centre HOME to accompany the release of Ben Wheatley’s Ballard adaptation High Rise, Jason Wood and Simon Barker’s short film Always (crashing) is an abstract contemplation of the modern artefacts that fascinated the writer, infused with a dose of Chris Petit alienation. A car endlessly, obsessively circles around a car park to an inhumanly soothing ambient track, intercut with extracts from Ballard’s short story ‘Report on an unidentified space station’. In a way, this metal and concrete reverie is more post-Ballardian than Ballardian: the film eschews the collision between man and modern machine favoured by the writer; instead it loops around a world strangely devoid of people, the driver of the car a mere silhouette glimpsed through the window, framed by the lines and pillars of the car park, as if modernity had finally eliminated the human.
Virginie Sélavy