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Four BFI Modern Classics
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)

Crash
Iain Sinclair
paperback, 128 pages, £7.99
ISBN 0 85170 719 X

Seven
Richard Dyer
paperback, 88 pages, £7.99
ISBN 0 85170 723 8

Caravaggio
Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit
paperback, 88 pages, £7.99
ISBN 0 85170 724 6

WR: Mysteries of The Organism
paperback, 96 pages, £7.99
ISBN 0 85170 720 3

David Cronenberg’s Crash is a scary movie. It scared critics and audiences alike. That’s why they behaved like they did: it scared them, and being scared, they mocked. They didn’t want to recognise the mathematical precision of its sounds, of the blanked-out performances, of the clinical language, the mapping of wounds, the sheer bloody-mindedness of its porno-chic (look again, it’s probably a lot more explicit than you think). So they giggled, they yawned, feigned boredom. Had they got what the tabloid-wrapping promised – blood, guts, gore; a Dodi and Di mid-coital collision – they would have been outrageously happy. Outraged, but happy. They wanted Jerry Bruckheimer and got a Godard stroke movie.

Iain Sinclair's addition to the BFI’s Modern Classics is their best yet; a witty, hyper-intelligent, singular look at one of the key cinematic texts of the 1990s. But not just that: Sinclair has expanded the remit. Where many are content to recite plot, maybe interview the director, Sinclair has bigger fish to fry. Crash is a book determined to put the literary back into film. It’s an interview with JG Ballard that he secures, not Cronenberg. And it’s to his contemporaries and Ballard thinkers that he turns for perspective: Michael Moorcock, Chris Petit and producer Sandy Lieberson. Sinclair is on a mission and it’s one that, thankfully, skirts the pathetic, tiresome tabloid controversy. Thus, no mention of the moralist muppets of Westminster Council or the acres of newsprint expended in the run-up to the film’s release. (Although this very magazine’s coverage and the post-Di fall-out is cited twice.)

Instead, Crash is the book that completes a thirty year cycle: from the hints towards it in New Worlds and The Atrocity Exhibition; through Ballard’s Arts Lab showing of crashed cars (talked-up by its curator and hilariously deflated by Moorcock); into the novel itself; through earlier attempts at visualising Ballard’s auto-erotic world; and back to Cronenberg’s astonishing film. Sinclair has finally returned Crash to literature. It’s a vivid journey.

For example, he draws comparison (entirely valid) between Cronenberg, with his motorways and car parks and underpasses, and the spatial cinema of Antonioni; a cinema of architecture. He notes how, if Ballard explicitly identifies himself with the lead in both book and film, we should be reading self-styled ‘hoodlum scientist’ Vaughn as David Cronenberg. He cites the work of Monte Hellman (the brilliant Two-Lane Blacktop) and Chris Petit (author of the only truly great British road movie, Radio On). And, unlike many reviewers at the time, he clearly identifies the writer-director’s purpose: ‘His film, more than any other of recent times, scrupulously avoids drama.’

And he pours cold water on Ballard’s frequent protestations that the celebratory Crash is a cautionary text. In fact, despite having landed an extensive interview with the ageing author, Sinclair has no compunction in not bowing at the master’s knee. Many will no doubt find his take on Ballard – ‘well-honed techno-babble riffs delivered in the tones of Frank Muir in his ripest clubman mode’ – not a little irritating, but the distance offered is refreshing in its irreverence. Especially in its willingness to finally force Ballard into confronting the explicit parallels between his work and the squalid last bow of Our Lady Of The Landmines. The author, we sense, is squirming under Sinclair’s interrogation.

(Wonderfully, Sinclair makes the point explicit even if Ballard is reluctant, drawing comparison between Deborah Unger in the film and the dead princess, and identifying James Spader as ‘the soft-focus type of Di’s brother, Charles Spencer; highbred, insecure, a bit of a chancer with potentially one good speech left in him.’ Spader and Unger, he concludes, ‘were the golden couple condemned to limbo, acting out a cycle of necrophile passions.’ Towards the end he publishes a strikingly precise, starkly beautiful shot of the can-crushed Mercedes.)

Oddly, though, Sinclair ultimately doesn't seem to like the film very much, criticising Cronenberg for jettisoning all the baggage – the Englishness, the assassinations, the mass media – that fuelled the novel’s birth. But that, in a sense, is the point: Crash is not a film that can be divorced from its source. Not to know the book, not to know the genesis of the book, is to read the film blind. What Sinclair has done – and done brilliantly – is give us that baggage in 128 pages of cantankerous thought and crafted language. His sublime study of this ‘treatise on Zen and the art of motorway maintenance’ is the first essential read of the year.

And much better than Richard Dyer’s Seven. Not that it’s entirely Dyer’s fault, but he did choose the film himself. Try as he might, he is unable to convince us that Fincher’s po-faced, gorgeously dowdy picture is anything more than what it appears – a grim, super-charged piece of superior thrillerdom. Dyer, unfortunately, mistakes dropping Dante and de Sade for learning – ‘on the high side of culture’ – rather than what it is, clever shorthand. Just as quoting the Bard didn’t make Theatre of Blood Shakespearean, so Paradise Lost will not remake Seven (preferred spelling) as Milton. Likewise, he displays an ignorance of what he calls its ‘post-modernism’ by incanting the name of preening sad-lads Nine Inch Nails as though he recognises within it alchemical authority. No one takes them seriously, Mr Dyer, and your discussion of their music and motives is, frankly, wrong. It’s typical of this ill-imagined book.

Whatever it's faults, however, Dyer at least communicates a love for his subject. You might find his analysis facile, but his fanaticism (and beautifully reproduced stills) send you back with renewed enthusiasm. Not so Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s study of the late Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio. Of course, your shields raise immediately you realise the authors figure this for Jarman’s best. It isn't, although it is among the most accessible. And thereafter, for every right point the pair raise – identifying, for example, how the late filmmaker constructed his film almost purely from a reading of the paintings themselves – they throw a curve ball that lands far off-target.

Even with (a rare and welcome) reading of Jarman’s considerable written work, they seek to label much of the film as crude agitprop without appreciating that the artist had already tagged it himself. Jarman, by his own admission, had become for better or worse a polemicist, and he’d long since abandoned any pretence towards perfectionism. More than once they accuse him of misogyny without producing evidence beyond an (understandable) affection for making films about pretty gay men. Their reading of Tilda Swinton’s queen (sic) in the angry, compassionate Edward II has all the hallmarks of confusing character and motivation. Caravaggio keeps you reading to the end, but it’s the safe choice, the least-threatening of the canon. It would nice to see something like the same care and attention lavished on the Ballard-apocalypse of Jubilee, the naked Englishness of The Garden, or the just plain nasty The Last of England.

And finally to Raymond Durgnat’s take on Makavejev's ‘controversial and explicit’ WR: Mysteries of The Organism. The book meticulously deconstructs the film’s contrast of Cold War Yugoslavia and hippie America, but is frankly even more tedious than Makavejev’s aged film. Example: ‘Although very well-constructed, WR is thoroughly ‘postmodernist’, in the sense of heteroclitic, multi-idiomatic, and anarchically ‘equalising’ documentation and fantastication.’ If that gets your juices flowing, you and Durgnat deserve each another.