David Cronenberg''s Crash (1996) brought down a storm of controversy and opprobrium when it was first screened in London. And yet it''s a cool, controlled, formal film, unsensational, more analytic than titillating, a brilliant exposé of modern pathologies. It has almost none of the violence and explicit sexual content of the J.G. Ballard novel from which it is adapted. What is the relationship between Ballard himself and the character ''James Ballard'' in C rash?

In this book, which includes an exclusive and revealing interview with Ballard, Sinclair explores the uncanny temporal loop which connects film and novel. If Cronenberg''s ''adapted'' C rash, he also absorbed it, ingested it, made it into something new. But, on the other hand, the novel controls the film, or uses the film to disguise its truly subversive intent. And, for Sinclair, there are more startling permutations still. To what extent, for example, is Crash a premonition of some of the more remarkable media events of recent times?