By Peter Keough

Director David Charles Rodrigues incorporates this wealth of material, a superflux of images generated by Genesis P-Orridge and the various artistic enterprises s/he founded, with concision and insight. The life and work of his subject is chronicled over the course of a lucid and kaleidoscopic 100 minutes.

S/He Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary. Directed by David Charles Rodrigues. Screens November 22 at 7 p.m. as part of the Wicked Queer Docs festival at the Institute of Contemporary Art and streams November 19-December 30).

A scene from S/He Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary.

The Wicked Queer Docs festival not only presents enlightening inquiries into exemplary LGBQT+ lives but also showcases films that demonstrate shrewd and tasteful judgement. In Michael Mabbot and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee’s Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story (2024), a documentary about the transgender R & B performer of the title, the lack of existing archival footage required the filmmakers to employ rotoscoped reenactments. Though this device is often abused in some documentaries, in this film it is used to good effect.

But there is no need for re-enactments (though there are a couple) in David Charles Rodrigues’s S/He Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary (2024), another festival film about a transgender artist. In fact, in this case the opposite might have been the case, a superflux of images generated by Genesis P-Orridge and the various artistic enterprises s/he founded and dominated over the course of a five-decade-long career.

To his credit Rodrigues incorporates this wealth of material with concision and insight in relating the life and work of his subject in a lucid and kaleidoscopic 100 minutes. The items he draws from range from home videos of P-Orridge’s two young daughters playing in Winona Ryder’s father’s house, to snippets of tapes allegedly of activities by P-Orridge’s arts and magic network Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY) which were used by Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad to charge h/er with sex crimes. The latter allegations, which proved to be false, compelled h/er to flee Britain and go into exile in 1992. But at the center of the film is P-Orridge h/erself in 2019, attached to an oxygen tank and posing for a portrait, baring h/er formidable torso with its piercings, augmentations, and tattoos (skin illustrations of h/er life, loves, and obsessions), as s/he tells h/er story.

S/he was born Neil Andrew Megson in 1950 in Manchester, England into an unremarkable middle class home, to parents who were admirably tolerant of h/er esoteric interests in Eastern philosophy, occult writers like Aleister Crowley, and other unconventional tastes.

A sickly child, s/he suffered a near death experience in which s/he saw h/erself floating above h/er body while doctors and nurses argued over who to tell h/er parents that s/he was dead. As a result s/he began to feel alienated from all accepted social norms. In another out-of-body, visionary experience reminiscent of William Blake, s/ he was driving in the countryside with h/er parents when s/he floated above the car and saw cryptic symbols and the word “Cosmosis.” S/he took from this experience a conviction that someone out there would be h/er “Cosmosis,” h/er soul mate.

It was a version of the Platonic notion of a primal, unified androgynous being split into separate male and female genders with the separate halves forever seeking one another. For P-Orridge this vision prove to be transformative. Perhaps more than h/er penchant for transgression, h/er defiance of established order and authority, this pure, almost naïve idealism would persist for the rest of h/er life.

A scene from S/He Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary.

Other influences would include William Burroughs and Brion Gysin (the latter’s Dream Machine, a primitive spinning magic lantern whose whirling lights and shadows are meant to trigger mystic experiences, is a recurring motif in the film). Their cut-up technique of deconstructing and rearranging texts for radical new meanings P-Orridge took to heart — even to the point of eventually applying them to h/er own bodies.

In 1969 s/he founded the art collective COUM Transmissions where s/he applied some of those principles. As seen in clips, the group’s performances are so transgressive and frankly revolting that even as redoubtable a figure as Chris Burden walked out of one in horror.

Perhaps seeing that such assaults on sensibilities were not the best way to enlighten audiences, P-Orridge decided that music was the medium best suited to h/er purposes. In 1976 s/he founded Throbbing Gristle with a bunch of non-musicians and they produced a cacophonous, incantatory sound that one band member describes as “terrifying.” They would label their creation “Industrial Music,” a genre that would live on, taken up by the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, and Marilyn Manson, after the band’s demise in 1981 (“We hated each other,” P-Orridge explains). S/he would next form Psychic TV and continue performing with this ensemble for most of the rest of h/er life. Both bands seemed to share the credo proclaimed by Mick Jagger’s Turner in Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970): “The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.”

But instead of madness P-Orridge finally found h/er “Cosmosis:” Jacqueline Breyer, a.k.a. Lady Jaye, a nurse and dominatrix. They collaborated on art and music projects but also, like characters in a David Cronenberg film, decided to undergo cosmetic surgery to resemble one another more closely. As they put it, they were “cutting up the identity to form a third being,” a new entity dubbed “Breyer P-Orridge,” in what they called the Pandrogyne Project.

But Lady Jaye would die suddenly and unexpectedly in 2007 at 38. Devastated, P-Orridge would thereafter refer to h/erself in the first person plural to indicate that the two were still one, that s/he was merely the half that still lived on this side of the grave.

“The body is like a cheap suitcase,” s/he says early in the film, quoting a favorite expression of Lady Jaye. But the body, it seems, has the last word. P-Orridge died in 2020 at 70.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).