If you think any of this is going anywhere, think again. Travis, one of Nathan’s more vocal subjects, is planning an “atrocity exhibition” and has a thing for celebrity car crash victims like James Dean. Nathan, the stuffy head of a distinguished neurological institute, who spends his days treating crazy patients with bizarre obsessions involving Marilyn Monroe, JFK and the erotic properties of the angles between walls. Of TAE, Ballard has said, “it takes the logic of the book and translates it almost seamlessly into a very different medium.” It’s the third feature to be adapted from Ballard’s work, following Steven Spielberg’s EMPIRE OF THE SUN and David Cronenberg’s CRASH, and is easily the most obscure (in every sense of the word) of the three. It was initially completed in 1997, but reedited from a near two hour running time down to 105 minutes for screenings at the 1999 Slamdance and 2000 Seattle Film Festivals, as well as the ’05 PAL DVD release (which contains a commentary track with Ballard himself). Ballard’s 1969 THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION was packaged as a novel, but is in fact an anthology of interconnected short stories composed of single paragraph descriptions with bold-faced headings like “The Optimum Wound Profile.” Ballard was apparently trying to ape the dry, passionless prose and layout of scientific journals, but with a morbid concentration on sex and perversion-as one of the book’s characters claims: “science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space…one looks forward to the day when The General Theory of Relativity and the Principia will outsell the Kama Sutra in back street bookshops.” These characters spend their time doing things like recreating the assassination of JFK and fighting World War Three in a series of body gestures.įilmmaker Jonathan Weiss’ adaptation of the book was shot over a two-year period in a number of disparate locations, from junkyards to abandoned military installations to the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art.

Reiss accomplishes this impossible task about as well as can be expected, meaning potential viewers are in for an extremely demanding film.

With this nonlinear epic, filmmaker Jonathan Reiss adapted what is certainly one of the most unfilmable books of all time: THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION by J.G.

The atrocity exhibition book