S/HE IS STILL HER/E - The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary review - a shapeshifting open window onto a counter-cultural radical

“I like guns. At school we had to fight with guns in the army cadets. I’m actually a first-class sniper. I could shoot people from half a mile away.”

So says Gen, AKA Genesis P Orridge, AKA Neil Megson, in David Charles Rodrigues’s intimate portrait, filmed toward the end of his/her life, bare-chested, huge of torso, talking while posing in an artist’s studio for a larger-than-life portrait, getting up from the chair to gaze at their own image, tracing the contours of blue tattoos on the arms and torso, including that of a gun.

This is a human being who, by their own account, died twice. Once after an asthma attack in childhood, having just discovered Tibetan meditation, the other jumping from a burning building – Rick Rubin’s home in Laurel Canyon in the Nineties. Somehow, in this film account of his life – and it’s the life, more than the work – those NDEs feel like book-ends for a self-made shaman’s journey of transgression and breakdown that pulls you apart and put you back together again, but not in the same order.

In between, and hung, dawn and quartered throughout this film, you will find magick, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, the dreamachine, the cut-ups, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, industrial music, sex work, body modification, cultish control, fun and games, and life outside "control". Under the guise of 1970s Throbbing Gristle, 1980s Psychic TV, and the 1990s "cosmosis" with Lady Jaye, his lover-nurse-muse-twin. They dressed the same, cut their hair the same, starting modifying their bodies so that they looked the same. “The body is just a cheap suitcase you carry around with you,” she told him. It’s how they packed it.

I never saw Throbbing Gristle, Gen’s first proper band after the earlier Coum collective in Hull – both well documented with archive material here – but I did see Psychic TV a few times. The first, at Camden’s Dingwalls in the late 1980s, Gen among a line of young skinheads on stage, dancing repetitively to a PSTV version of house music, dogs wandering around the stage and audience, not an instrument in sight. They were generating power, and storing it in the audience.

Roll on a couple of decades and Gen, Lady Jaye, and the band are on stage at the Astoria. They are all dressed in nurse’s uniforms, playing Sixties psychedelic garage songs – Nuggets-era music, Syd Barrett – to a video backdrop combining hardcore porn and medical procedures. Gen and Lady Jay had the same tits, lips, hair and nurse uniforms. Two into one, united outside of gender, identity and control. Pandrogyny. Love, actually.

Tragically, Lady Jaye died suddenly soon after that Astoria gig, in 2007. Gen continued exhibiting and performing and living the Pandrogyne Project through body modification through the next decade, before he died in 2020. I recall a heavy, psychedelic set of Sixties Nuggets freakouts in a dangerously overpacked Jamm in Brixton in 2016, and absorbing, freewheeling discourse delivered at London’s October Gallery a year earlier, during their Burroughs centenary show. And it’s that figure, that voice and ranginess of discourse that’s set before this film’s canvas and fills this illuminating, weird, disturbing, absorbing, hagiographic, biographical portrait. Cosey Fanni Tutti appears, from the Throbbing Gristle years, and there are interviews and lots of footage with Gen’s two daughters, who seem loving, unconditionally loved and well-formed human beings. Your best works of art, Gen.

There’s some grainy Gristle footage, plenty of early "at homes" with PSTV on Beck Road in Hackney, with razor blades, bleeding forearms, magical sigils, sex magick and, at the turn of the Nineties, Satanic panic and flight to Nepal, then America’s west coast to shelter with Winona Ryder’s dad. There’s a lot of the royal "we" throughout, and the reminiscing can get samey, oddly, given the out-there contexts in which Gen lived out life and art. In short, a real head.

I’d have like to have seen more on the making of the work, the music, the noise, the performance, the coercion, the method, the Crowleyesque, Burroughsian core. There are not many live clips beyond the Gristle days – no emaciated-looking skinheads dancing with dogs all night at Dingwalls.

Still, it’s a fascinating shapeshifting open window onto a counter-cultural radical ahead of their time but like all us, firmly, irrevocably embedded in it, a cheap old suitcase to drag around, and no clear escape route either. So make one. I think that’s what this film says.

• S/HE IS STILL HER/E is screening until 5th September before streaming from mid September

• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk
• More film reviews on theartsdesk
• Tim Cumming's website

@CummingTim