An inordinate number of peppers

The Atrocity Exhibition

I saw this last weekend. I'm a fan of Cronenberg's Crash and was anxious enough to see this that I bought a European DVD off eBay. Ballard is a writer who fascinates me in his approach to insanity. Insanity not as a pathological condition to be cured, but more as a situation of consciousness. A product of an evolutionary force. Cronenberg shares the same fascination of course, most particularly in films like Scanners and Videodrome.

So let me share one annoying thing about trying to see a movie like this one. Jonathon Weiss did an amazing job of adapting an "unfilmable" piece of experimental fiction. He spent years working on the project. He taught himself filmmaking, set up a studio in Brooklyn and chose this text to work out his ideas. It made the film festival circuit and quietly dissappeared. Ballard himself praised the film highly.

A Dutch DVD company called reel23 chose this film as their first release. A nice effort with commentary track by the director and the author. Available only with European region and PAL encoding. So after much finagling with decrypters and encoders and threats from my computer about attempting to play a DVD from another region, I finally got the disc reencoded to play in my DVD player. An ordeal. All this for an American film mind you.

I've gone through this before for Chris Marker's San Soliel. Another film I admire greatly and could only find on a European DVD that I had to feel like a criminal to get converted to something I could watch.

I would be delighted to purchase American versions of both these films and was willing to spend a few Euros to get them despite the work involved.