The Timekeepers of Eternity: Cinematic Ballard and Ballardian Cinema

My project concerns a methodology to create Ballardian cinematic landscapes through the appropriation of the film The Langoliers (1995) as a case study. I look in detail at the landscapes of evocative fictions by author J. G. Ballard, looking into how their intrinsic cinematic qualities have influenced and have been influenced by cinema. By means of exploratory research and practice, I examine the literary mechanisms inherent in the creation of written and visual Ballardian worlds and reflect critically on the methodologies followed either by the film adaptations (Empire of the Sun, Crash, Atrocity Exhibition, High-Rise) or J. G. Ballard himself.

My point of view is one of a practitioner/filmmaker, looking for a personal methodology to understand, dissect and reconstruct Ballard's-and eventually my-inner landscapes successfully for cinema. I follow the path of found footage film appropriation and I rework The Langoliers, a science fiction monster time-travel B-movie, exploring the ways it engages with genre concepts of time, space, and identity. Because of the central villain's addiction to ripping paper, the footage allows me to assign a paper materiality that emerges from within the story, in turn reflecting the disturbed encephalograph of the protagonist. I am able to create a new cinematic landscape by printing each frame on A4 paper, and with the use of tears, creases and juxtapositions I re-photograph the film; the villain struggling to escape his obsession with torn paper.