always (crashing) 2016

Digital video 14 min

Co-directed with Jason Wood

In this mysterious film, very loosely adapted from a Ballard short story, a car drives around a carpark in the half light, sometimes darker sometimes lighter, its driver never visible, accompanied by snatches of radio sound and ambient music. The old Saab and the stained concrete speak to the obsolescence of some of the things and spaces Ballard is so obsessed with, whilst the car’s circular movements recall the intractability of the problems he has left us with: how do we relate to technology, mass media, corporate spaces, without being crushed by the power relations that seem to make these capitalist things more powerful than the subjects who use them and sometimes resist them? The hypnotic movements of the car, its endless free flowing circles, start to become ludic, almost funny at times, and perhaps point to something I have rather forgotten in this text: the pleasures and ludic possibilities Ballard presents us with which remain pleasures even when suffused with horror and the impossibility of exit.
Tristan Burke, Manchester Review

SCREENINGS

Festival

Cambridge International Film Festival
CineCity, Brighton
London Short Film Festival

Gallery

Whitstable Biennial
East Sussex Open, Towner, Eastbourne
South Kiosk, Peckham
Kestle Barton, Cornwall
Institute of Contemporary Art London Ballard: This is the way, step inside (screening and panel discussion).

Cinema

HOME, Manchester
Curzon Bloomsbury
Curzon Home Cinema
Showroom Sheffield
Regent Street Cinema
Glasgow Film Theatre
Queens Film Theatre, Belfast
FACT Liverpool
Ritzy
Picturehouse Central
Anthology Film Archives – New York