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Irish Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
S/He Is Still Her/e review: Genesis P-Orridge film offers invaluable glimpses into a radical life
S/He Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary Director : David Charles Rodrigues Cert : 18 Genre : Documentary Starring : Genesis P-Orridge, Lady Jaye Breyer P'Orridge, William S Burroughs, Alice Genese, David J, Caresse P'Orridge Balpazari Running Time : 1 hr 38 mins 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. READ MORE 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 .
The Guardian
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
S/he Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Doc review – Throbbing Gristle's gender-challenging tabloid-baiter
Genesis P-Orridge was the performance artist, shaman and lead singer of Throbbing Gristle who was born as Neil Megson in Manchester in 1950, but from the 90s lived in the US. P-Orridge challenged gender identity but it is clear from the interviewees that there were no wrong answers when it came to pronouns: 'he', 'she' and 'they' are all used. This is a sympathetic and amiable official docu-biography in which the subject comes across as a mix of Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson and Screaming Lord Sutch. The 'P-Orridge' surname makes me suspect that Spike Milligan might have been an indirect influence, although there's also a bit of Klaus Kinski in there as well. Genesis P-Orridge, known to friends and family as Gen, started as a radical conceptual artist, rule-breaker, consciousness-expander and tabloid-baiter who with Throbbing Gristle influentially coined the term 'industrial music', a term later to be borrowed without acknowledgment by many. They were, in the words of Janet Street-Porter, shown here in archive footage, 'too shocking for punk'. P-Orridge formed a new band, Psychic TV, in the 1980s, and then also formed a group of likeminded occultist provocateurs called Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. (The film tactfully passes over how very annoying that spelling is.) At the beginning of the 90s, P-Orridge and his family, including first wife Paula P-Orridge, went to the US to escape a (later retracted) allegation of ritual sexual abuse. In the US, they were the guests of counterculture figure Michael Horowitz, father of Winona Ryder, and P-Orridge's career in art, music and peripheral celebrity blossomed. After divorce from Paula, P-Orridge married the artist Jacqueline Breyer, known as Lady Jaye, with whom Gen pursued a radical project of 'pandrogynous' fusion, involving breast and lip surgery. By the end, there is maybe a you-had-to-be-there factor with all this, and the film leaves you with a nagging feeling that P-Orridge was not seriously important in either art or music – but was pugnaciously sincere, too unselfconscious to be a narcissist and certainly a real one-off. S/he Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Doc is in UK and Irish cinemas from 20 June.
