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BFI Film Classics
Crash
In this book, which includes a new interview with Ballard who wrote the book on which the film was based, Sinclair explores the temporal loop which connects film and novel, and asks questions such as to what extent is Crash a premonition of some of the more remarkable media events of recent times. In the BFI MODERN CLASSICS series.
- GenresFilmNonfiction
112 pages, Paperback
First published May 27, 1999
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About the author
Iain Sinclair
120 books342 followersIain Sinclair is a British writer and film maker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 8, 2014
Overwrought and no where NEAR as-smart-as-it-thinks-it-is, this is a poor book.
It would have benefited if Sinclair had not spent only 30% of the book actually talking about Crash instead of examining Ballard's other works and forays into TV and independent features.
Remember what your book is meant to be about, Mr Sinclair.
If you're expecting a deep and heavy analysis of Cronenberg's Crash, you WON'T find it here.
A complete let down.
It would have benefited if Sinclair had not spent only 30% of the book actually talking about Crash instead of examining Ballard's other works and forays into TV and independent features.
Remember what your book is meant to be about, Mr Sinclair.
If you're expecting a deep and heavy analysis of Cronenberg's Crash, you WON'T find it here.
A complete let down.
October 8, 2025
I haven’t seen the film ‘Crash’ which is the subject of this essay on the Cronenberg film. I am looking forward to seeing it this week yet my not seeing it didn’t lessen my enjoyment of this text.
That’s because this essay is one of the best critiques of the author of the novel the film is based on. J.G. Ballard is a British writer who locates the psychic hollowing of humanity in the brutalist landscape of the highway cloverleaf nestled against the concrete ugliness of large international airports.
That’s not to say he is a satirist or strictly a critic of modern life in the West. Ballard loves his subject matter like the way humans revert to their animal, feral nature and not necessarily as a sign of simple savagery. While this book appreciates the Cronenberg film, it centers the novel as the creative heart of the experience. The film drops Elizabeth Taylor as a muse while suggesting cinematically that was necessary and yet still regrets the loss.
Ballard as a writer can’t be reduced to Crash and yet Crash maybe the most succinct distillation of his themes. Before Crash he wrote the Atrocity Exhibition which spools out the themes of celebrity, car crash sex and technology and while it doesn’t quite work, it sets the stage for Crash.
That’s because this essay is one of the best critiques of the author of the novel the film is based on. J.G. Ballard is a British writer who locates the psychic hollowing of humanity in the brutalist landscape of the highway cloverleaf nestled against the concrete ugliness of large international airports.
That’s not to say he is a satirist or strictly a critic of modern life in the West. Ballard loves his subject matter like the way humans revert to their animal, feral nature and not necessarily as a sign of simple savagery. While this book appreciates the Cronenberg film, it centers the novel as the creative heart of the experience. The film drops Elizabeth Taylor as a muse while suggesting cinematically that was necessary and yet still regrets the loss.
Ballard as a writer can’t be reduced to Crash and yet Crash maybe the most succinct distillation of his themes. Before Crash he wrote the Atrocity Exhibition which spools out the themes of celebrity, car crash sex and technology and while it doesn’t quite work, it sets the stage for Crash.
May 18, 2018
Poet/novelist/essayist/filmmaker Iain Sinclair, in his BFI Film Classics book about David Cronenberg's Crash, takes a more imaginative, literary approach than the academic analysis, film criticism, and/or journalism favored by most of the other writers in the series. Sinclair absorbs Cronenberg's 1996 adaption of J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel into his own (and Ballard's) interests in the connections between the occult, psychogeography, the suburbs, cars and car crashes, airports, celebrity, sexuality, and art as a premonitory force, and the life and work of Ballard as a whole, including every Ballard television and film adaptation up to the date of publication. It's fascinating stuff, but Cronenberg's film makes only brief but important appearances. Sinclair is more interested in Ballard than in Cronenberg, while I'm the opposite.
April 12, 2019
It's interesting in that it examines the work of CRASH as a whole -- both Ballard's novel and Cronenberg's film -- but it's not nearly as smart nor as successfully academic as it believes it is, which makes large chunks of it extremely tiresome.
June 3, 2024
Bearing in mind he doesn't much like Cronenberg or his 'Crash' (too clean, not London enough) this is absolutely vintage Sinclair firing on all cylinders. A great piece of hackwork with excellent interviews (especially with a very very sceptical Michael Moorcock), superb scene-setting and atmosphere (the authentic smell of West London circa 1996!), and that sense of looming dread he once had down pat. Well worth reading for any Ballardists and also, if you've forgotten why Sinclair was considered interesting in the first place.
June 6, 2025
Sinclair is clearly biased toward the book and while there’s interesting trivia and analysis of the world where Crash takes place it really didn’t touch on the film, or Cronenberg in general, as much as I was hoping for.
February 13, 2017
A rhapsodic meditation on the mythology of Crash in its entirety.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews