Monday, March 12, 2012
Genesis & Lady Jaye: The Fiction of Self
Posted by Gina at 2:13 PM
http://skipthemakeup.blogspot.com/2012/03/genesis-lady-jaye-fiction-of-self.html"The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye," French-American filmmaker Marie Losier's full length documentary, concerns the intense relationship between Industrial musician Genesis P-Orridge (of the influential cult bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV) and Genesis' wife/partner, American performance artist and pro-dom Lady Jaye Breyer. It's a meditation on rebellion, individuality, gender, connectiveness, love, art, bohemianism and ultimately, death and loneliness. As with so many great romances, one of the lovers doesn't survive to the end and the film is a elegy to their love.
The film's central figure is Genesis P-Orridge, going from his beginnings as a picked-on androgynous schoolboy growing up in hardscrabble Hull, England to, at the tender age of 17, being involved in a controversial artistic cooperative starting in 1967 called COUM Transmissions. Their subject matter included BDSM, pornography, serial killers, occultism (P-Orridge had a lot to do with the cultural resurrection of 1920's mystic, Aleister Crowley) and P-Orridge's own exploration of gender issues, which were way ahead of their time. At one point in the late-60s/early-70s, P-Orridge was one of the most reviled artistic figures in the UK (a point Genesis gleefully makes clear by showing us a tabloid broadsheet from 1970 proclaiming them as a social menace).
