The challenge of distilling the life of the occultist, performance artist, avant-garde musician and pioneering pandrogynyst Genesis Breyer P-Orridge into a single documentary is akin to bottling lightning.
Until s/he – their preferred pronoun – died, in 2020, P-Orridge lived not just many lives but many selves, spanning punk rebellion, gender reinvention, occult philosophy and tender parenthood.
David Charles Rodrigues’ S/He Is Still Her/e arrives with the blessing of P-Orridge’s daughters and access to personal archives. Yet for a film about an artist so defiantly experimental, the final cut is surprisingly conventional.
Rodrigues structures the film around a late interview with P-Orridge during treatment for leukaemia, marrying archival footage with bursts of DIY psychedelia. The result is reverent and heartfelt but stylistically conventional and unlikely to be mistaken for a transgressive mirror of its subject.
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S/He Is Still Her/e review: Genesis P-Orridge film offers invaluable glimpses into a radical life
Taking (some) cues from Brion Gysin’s cut-up aesthetic, the film’s rhythm falls into familiar talking-heads territory, a binding form ill suited to an artist who believed the body was a prison and gender a fiction.
But S/He Is Still Her/e nevertheless provides invaluable glimpses into a life that collided with everyone from William S Burroughs to Timothy Leary, and from Psychic TV to Nepalese monks. Most striking is the film’s treatment of the Pandrogeny Project, P-Orridge’s radical partnership with Lady Jaye Breyer, in which the pair surgically altered their bodies to become one “pandrogynous” entity.
It’s a concept far ahead of its time, less about trans identity than about dissolving identity altogether.
Allegations of manipulation and abuse by Cosey Fanni Tutti (aka Christine Carol Newby), P-Orridge’s former creative and domestic partner, are glossed over in an intertitle.
We get the Scottish Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn’s description of P-Orridge and Tutti as “wreckers of civilisation”. But not nearly enough space is afforded to the music or to the absurd Channel 4 Dispatches documentary that alleged, in 1992, that s/he had been involved in satanic ritual abuse. The fallout was serious enough for P-Orridge and family to remain in exile in – wait for it – Winona Ryder’s old bedroom.
The footage was later revealed to have come from a 1980s art project that turned out to have been partly funded by Channel 4.
