It’s good to see the Guardian’s online columnist Danny Leigh get behind our Ballardian Home Movie Competition. As Danny rightly points out, there’s loads of potential, despite a few people elsewhere suggesting that all I’ll get for entries will be a load of shots of the Westway and/or static CCTV mock-ups. Come on, I think we can broaden our horizons a bit more than that (although Westway and CCTV films are welcome, of course). Given JGB’s illness, this could even be a chance for entrants to shoot their own personal tribute to the man…but let’s see what we get when the time comes.
For now, Danny expands on the general thesis supplied in my rationale for the competition, including the quotes from Ballard that kicked the whole thing off, and concludes with an inspirational call to arms:
As a marriage of new-fangled form and far-sighted content, Ballard and camera-phones should surely prove ideal. And there’s also a case to be made that each share a mutually untapped filmic potential – Ballard’s only real screen presence remains the atypical war-time autobiography Empire of the Sun and Crash, David Cronenberg’s noble attempt at translating the 1973 novel’s portrait of violent eroticism on Heathrow slip roads. And yet, for all the cinematic possibilities of (for instance) the oracular Drowned World, gauzily thriller-ish Cocaine Nights or scabrously funny Millennium People, film-makers have kept their distance, successive generations of British directors choosing instead to… well, do what it is that British directors do.
Equally, still in its techno-infancy, the promise of the phone as movie camera is yet to be exploited to anything like its fullest extent. Footage (seemingly) shot on mobiles takes a pivotal role in big-money releases as diverse as the much-discussed Cloverfield and Brian De Palma’s Iraq war indictment Redacted, but in each case it’s there essentially as a prop to a conventional storyline – visual shorthand for “reality taking place here.”
Nothing so very wrong with that – but it would be heartening to think the cameraphone could soon carry on the job that digital video started, back when the cheaper and nastier the equipment was, the more inventive and inspiring the results. Freed from the confines of stars and three-act plots, shot through with that weirdly hypnotic, herky-jerky aesthetic, the sheer immediacy of phone footage could, in the right hands, turn out to be revelatory – and who knows, eventually another of Ballardian’s guiding quotes from the man himself might just come true: “Everybody will be doing it – everybody will be living inside a TV studio. That’s what the domestic home aspires to these days; the home is going to be a TV studio. We’re all going to be starring in our own sit-coms, and they’ll be strange sit-coms too, like the inside of our heads.
And if that doesn’t sound like an invitation to start filming, I don’t know what would.
Thanks, Danny — that’s a rousing note to end on.