Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s Film: Ghosts#9

P-Orridge usually gets the credit, along with his bandmates in Throbbing Gristle, of creating industrial music.  However, P-Orridge is also one of the great minds of the 20th century, involved in the art of alchemy, anarchy and pandrogyny.

“Ghosts#9″ is salvaged from material found in London Soho in the 1980′s.

The footage contains edited 35mm film shot by Antony Balch, who had filmed William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in the 50′s and 60′s.  It was all about to get trashed before Burroughs rung up P-Orridge and asked him to save the film–which he did with a government check no less.

Antony Balch was interested in exploitation and horror films, but a lot of this footage, according to P-Orridge, was shot by Belch with a 35mm camera in cities like Tangiers, Paris and London.  Balch edited the footage according to the Burroughs/Gysin cut-up technique, which has its origins in the Dada experiments pioneered by Tristan Tzara.  Gysin, sadly, does not get the credit that is due to him for influencing Burroughs with this technique, nor for his painting and writing either.  He was, perhaps even more so than Burroughs, the connective tissue between Dada/Surrealism and the punks.

P-Orridge explains used the Cut-Up technique, as envisaged by Burroughs and Gysin, to edit “Ghosts#9.”

“It was done in the tradition of The Cut-Ups, at random. There’s a deep magical reason. William and Brion had a really deep belief the Cut-Up was a way of revealing the nature of reality. That if you consciously structured something you were influencing it with your own particular life and prejudice and it couldn’t be pure and wouldn’t necessarily tell you anything new. They leave it to the material itself to explain or reveal connections and collisions that otherwise would never occur. It’s the product of this collaboration, the third mind, and that’s been so influential on my life, with myself and Lady Jaye. We decided to apply that to the body and identity and create a third being that was the combination of two.”

The soundtrack to “Ghosts#9″ was created by P-Orridge and others from sound collages recorded by Burroughs.

[Via Dazed Digital]