The Atrocity Exhibition (Weiss, 2000)

When film adaptations of J.G. Ballard’s work are discussed, Crash and Empire of the Sun are always mentioned but never Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition. Now, thanks to the Dutch film company Reel 23, we can see what Weiss was up to — they’ve recently released this buried work on DVD (and it’s a beautiful piece of packaging, too, filled with cut-up imagery and a revealing essay on the film’s genesis from Weiss himself).



According to Fright Site, the film “was shot over a two-year period in a number of disparate locations, from junkyards to abandoned military installations to the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art. It was initially completed in 1997, but reedited from a near two-hour running time down to 105 minutes for screenings at the 1999 Slamdance and 2000 Seattle Film Festivals”.