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
Always (crashing) screens with selected showings of High-Rise between 25 – 31 March 2016 only.
As part of our exploration of ground-breaking Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, our comic strip review looks at the wonderful animation short Les Astronautes, made by Borowczyk in 1959 in collaboration with Chris Marker.
As part of Kinoteka, ‘Walerian Borowczyk: The Listening Eye’, an exhibition of preliminary studies for his animated shorts Les Jeux des Anges (1964), Le dictionnaire de Joachim (1965) and The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal (1967) as well as his unique wooden sound sculptures is on at the ICA’s Fox Reading Room from 20 May – 6 July 2014.
I’ve just returned from the London Short Film Festival’s Music and Video shorts at the Roxy Bar and Screen, a smorgasbord of playful and elaborate musical and visual delights. Look out for the write-up next month but in the meantime you can check out one of the films in the programme below, Paul Cheshire’s very brief but brilliantly strange The Cursed Cassette. There is still one day of LSFF left, with some very exciting stuff going on, such as the Leftfield and Luscious programme, which we previewed here, and the Salon des Refusés and Rich Pickings events. For more information, check out the LSFF website.
Virginie Sélavy
Watch a scene from The Cursed Cassette:
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
