"The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye": Dissecting Two Lives

Comments (0) By Karina Longworth Wednesday, Mar 7 2012

Jacqueline Breyer and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

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Embarcadero Center Cinema

1 Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, CA 94111

Category: Movie Theaters

Region: Embarcadero

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Not rated. Opens Friday at the Embarcadero.

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Directed by Marie Losier, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye chronicles Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle founder Genesis Breyer P-Orridge's recent career and second marriage, both defined by P-Orridge's surgically aided transformation, from a man who occasionally dressed as a girl into a "pandrogynous being" who shared physical characteristics (including blond bob, artificially plumped lips, and breast implants) with wife Jacqueline Breyer, aka Lady Jaye. The defining aesthetic of P-Orridge's work comes out of the cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, whose mentorship of Genesis is documented in Ballad. P-Orridge's deep romantic and creative bond with Jaye became both the site and the subject of his most elaborate radical collage. Ballad is an homage to that collage, a nonlinear patchwork of Losier's intimate 16mm footage of the couple's home life (all of it captured without sync sound), threaded with archival material and documentation of art and music performances, glued together by Genesis' narration. This impressionistic approach eschews traditional biography, instead giving the viewer the feeling of being inside a moment, without all the information we might need to contextualize what we're seeing. Just like in her previous shorts (made in collaboration with Guy Maddin and the Kuchar brothers), Losier borrows stylistic signatures of her subject's work, but always circles back to her own interest in the mutability of gender and sexuality.