Website launched for the forthcoming BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE film.
Upcoming german screenings...keep checking the site for more info!
“He’s the only person I’ve ever met who I’d hero worshipped, that was exactly how I’d expected him to be. He was everything that I’d hoped him to be. Which was incredible. Inhumanly intelligent. I was interested in him primarily as a character, the way he lived, he was a ‘more than real’ real life character. A phenomena. I was already into he idea that the most important work is the way you live and you should live it as a work and try to make each aspect of it as interesting as you can.”
–William S. Burroughs on Genesis P-Orridge
“Your film is a lovely, fragile & tough piece of art. The most newest documentary and most newest musical and most newest slapstick-avant garde-cinema verité that contemporary cinema can give to the world. This kind of joycean monologue, this incredible and touching people, the other side of our terrible consume societies, thinking, loving, laughing…
Maybe you can make an injectable version? We need an injection of this kind of life every morning just before to heading out to face the world!”
Sergio Wolf, Director of BAFICI, Buenos Aires Film Festival, 2011.
Marie Losier’s “The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye” is a totally
unusual “home movie” about a totally unusual home; a fantastical love
story about a fantastical love that dares to speak its unusual name:
“Pandrogyny. Like Balzac’s Séraphita-Séraphitus, Genesis-Lady Jaye
attempt to pass beyond earthly love on a journey that takes them , in
Balzac’s phrase, “on the road to the skies.”
Jonathan Cott, Author of “Dylan,” and “Conversations with Glenn Gould”
Marie Losier's "My story with Genesis P-Orridge"
I first saw Genesis perform seven years ago, at the Knitting Factory, the now legendary club in Tribeca. Watching him perform was pure enchantment. His words from the stage hovered somewhere between song and speech, deeply poetic, primitive, at times frightful. It completely hypnotized me. I knew immediately, I had to film this perplexing and powerful figure, perhaps as a way of understanding what I had experienced, but moreover to have proof of the existence of a being I was convinced had arrived from somewhere else!
In a typically miraculous New York City coincidence, I met Genesis at a gallery opening in Soho, in one of those sardine-can spaces where you can barely walk and hardly breathe. Being relatively small, I got pressed into a corner where I inadvertently stepped on someone’s toes. I turned to apologize and there was Genesis smiling, his goldcapped teeth glittering down over me. We spoke briefly, but in that time I felt something special had passed between us. He asked me about my films and gave me his email. Whether it was fate or pure clumsiness, this marked the beginning of an artistic collaboration that would develop into a close friendship.
Like many others who have encountered him, I saw in Genesis the simple and profound notion that the manner in which you live your life is the highest and most unimpeachable form of art that exists.“My project is not about gender” he said. “Some feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body, others like a woman trapped in a man’s body. The pandrogyne says, I just feel trapped in a body. The body is simply the suitcase that carries us around. Pandrogyny is all about the mind, consciousness.” Both Genesis and Lady Jaye were born with life changing illnesses, imprinting upon them from an early age an incredibly complex relationship to their bodies. Later in life, they became gender variant activists, their mutating appearance based on gestural aesthetics, a living project documented through their collaborative paintings, photographs, writings and performances.
The passing of Lady Jaye is central to my film. I thought this tragic event would prevent me from continuing to shoot, but to Genesis, the completion of this film would be the most appropriate way to honor his love and life with Jaye, a message of hope and solidarity with artists and lovers everywhere, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. By allowing me unprecedented access over these past many years to film their professional and personal lives, I believe I have material that transcends most fiction films, but whose message is ultimately grounded in the most humanistic and basic of desires: the affirmation of love.
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