Issue 8: Winter 2011
Crash (1971)
The film begins with no titles or credits. There's a heavily granulated off-black screen before cutting to a tight close-up of a woman in profile (facing left), who turns and looks into camera with an emotionless gaze. On the soundtrack, there is an unsettling electronic drone, which fades away over the next image of a man in close-up profile (facing right) who appears to be standing on the top floor of a multi-storey car park. This image is repeated several times while intercut with scratchy black and white stock footage of (large American) test cars colliding and shattering into each other. But each time the image returns to the screen, a little more is revealed, now backed by a dry voiceover: next time the camera quickly moves from the man's face to reveal the woman standing behind him, far away ("In slow motion, the test cars moved towards each other on collision courses, unwinding behind them the coils that ran to the metering devices by the impact zone"); the camera quickly moves to reveal the woman standing behind him and next to her what appears to be a parked automobile ("The cars rocked against each as they continued on their disintegrating courses"); Finally the camera moves to reveal the woman standing behind him, far away, and next to her a parked car now in full view ("In the passenger seats the plastic models transcribed graceful arcs into the buckling roofs and windshields...").
The above describes the first 60 seconds of a 17 minute short film. The remainder of the piece follows much of the same route: wonderfully textured 16mm film stock; a large American automobile framed within the concreted surroundings of motorways and multi-storey car parks of Britain; the contrast of the man's thoughts on the significance of the motorcar in then-modern society ("The experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives") and an anonymous narrator's cold descriptions of on-camera action involving the female character, who is framed with clinical abstraction ("Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door. The overlay of her knees with the metal door flank"); backed by the unnatural sounding electronic music score which creates a sense of unease.
Made for the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1971 and screened as part of a series called Review, the film originally would have had been prefaced by an introduction from James Mossman, a man Wikipedia describes as a "British journalist, broadcaster, a TV reporter, film-maker, interviewer and former MI6 agent with a famously acerbic interviewing style". Without the presence of a presenter to put it into context, the version of the film this writer viewed begins in abrupt fashion: there are no technical credits at the start or the end of the film, making it appear authorless, a discovered piece of found footage. But the film is in fact Crash! The man is author James Graham Ballard, the woman is actor Gabrielle Drake, and the director is an American named Harley Cokliss. There are various sources on the internet who can relate this film to the rest of Ballard's ouevre (Simon Sellars' Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon in paricular is well-worth a read), and put into this context it may be a mere sketch of what was to come, but Crash!, on its own merits, is a fascinating piece of experimental filmmaking. Mind-boggling to think that forty years ago it aired on BBC2 at 8:30pm Friday night.
- Christopher O'Neill