The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

2011, France, Marie Losier, 72 min.

Viewer discretion is advised: contains adult content and nudity.

As reviewed in The New Yorker:

In the early nineties, the industrial-rock pioneer Genesis P-Orridge, of the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, came to New York, where he met and married a young dominatrix who called herself Lady Jaye. Their romantic and artistic partnership is depicted—tenderly, unstintingly, and in surprisingly intimate detail—by the director Marie Losier, who spent plenty of time in their company and unfurls the remarkable range of their activity, in public and in private. The couple played music together, but their key project—which they named “Pandrogeny”—involved extensive plastic surgery that made them resemble each other (P-Orridge even got breast implants). The dual portrait, using home movies, archival footage, Losier’s own ecstatic images, plenty of the bands’ music, and extensive interviews with P-Orridge (Lady Jaye died in 2007), brings some amazing stories to light, such as the older artist’s public art scandals of the mid-seventies and his crucial association with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. P-Orridge is revealed as an innate artist who inflects and illuminates every aspect of existence, high and low, humble and exalted, with a singular sensibility; Losier’s film captures the poignant paradoxes, the ecstasies and burdens, of the transformation of life into art.