Founders of Coil, a cult entity of experimental industrial British music, Peter Christopherson and John Balance also directed films from 1970 to 1980, exhumed and restored by Timeless. Shot on 8 and 16mm film, these unclassifiable subversive marvels, unsettling and trippy, garbed in gay masochist aesthetics, are as much family films, performances, body horror and urban nightmares. They're above all characterized by a tormented imagination under the sign of Eros and Thanatos with an irrepressible taste for death. There was an empty space next to Antony Balch, Derek Jarman and Jean Genet : it's no longer vacant. Maxime Lachaud and Reivaks Timeless deliver a unique document, haunted by the duo’s music, with this one way journey into limbo, where they’re joined by the recently deceased Monte Cazazza, a founding father of the concept of industrial music.
Hull, England, 1970. In a run-down commune in a tough port city, a group of social misfits - mostly working class, mostly self-educated - adopted new identities and began making simple street theater under the name COUM Transmissions. Their playful performances gradually gave way to work that dealt openly with sex, pornography, and violence. COUM lived on the edges of society, surviving on meager resources, finding fellowship with others marginalized by the mainstream. At the core of the group were two artists, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti. As their work evolved, Cosey embarked on a career modeling for pornographic magazines, which she claimed for herself as a conceptual artwork, using it to forge a specific position in relationship to 1970s feminism. In performances, Genesis pushed himself to extremes, testing the limits of the human body.
16 DVD boxset by Threshold House, containing video registrations of the following Coil performances: Air Gallery, London, 24-08-1983 SONAR, Barcelona, 17-06-2000 Convergence, New York, 18-08-2001 DK Gorbunova, Moscow, 15-09-2001 Teatro Delle Celebraziani, Bologna, 06-04-2002 New Forms, Den Haag, 07-06-2002 Vagonka, Konigsberg, 29-09-2002 Ydrogeios, Thessaloniki, 05-10-2002 Flex, Vienna (+ Prague), 29-10-2002 La Loco, Paris, 23-05-2004 Mutek, Montreal, 29-05-2003 Melkweg, Amsterdam, 03-06-2004 (Selvagina), Jesi, 11-06-2004 City Hall, Dublin, 23-10-2004 The Coil Reconstruction Kit (2 discs)
Live music and interviews with Filter records in Dublin, Ireland, and San Francisco. Songs Included are: Welcome to the Fold, One, Hey Man Nice Shot, Stuck in Here (Live - Dublin, Ireland), Dose, Under (Live - Dublin, Ireland), White Like That (Live - Dublin, Ireland and San Francisco, CA), Stuck in Here, Jurrassitol, Hey Man Nice Shot (live).
A first person narrative of the exploits of a gay serial killer in deeply disturbing, controversial drama about violence, sexuality, and the imagination. Dennis, the main character, whose lead we follow on this path between what is real and what we can only hope is surreal. His friends attempt to determine if he's truly a psychopath.
Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.
Instructional documentary produced in association with the Terrence Higgins Trust.
This documentary shows the mindset of the some of the most original and influential artists of the experimental scene (Coil, Current 93, Foetus, Test Dept.). An unprecedented insight into the workings, the methods and the ideas that made these names legendary. Filmed in Hamburg, Amsterdam and London, 1985-1987.
The Angelic Conversation is a lyrical, haunting film about a young man’s search for love in a dreamlike landscape. Its tone is set by the juxtaposition of slow moving homo-erotic images and opaque landscapes through which two men take a journey into their own desires. Offscreen, Dame Judi Dench recites a sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets that counterpoint the action. Jarman called it, “My most austere work, but also the closest to my heart.”
For over 30 years, the so-called First Transmission video from Psychic TV, has been the stuff of, well, “snuff film” legend. First advertised in the back pages of Thee Grey Book , The First Transmission was an ultra weird touchstone of the underground VHS tape trading scene of the 1980s.
An experimental film of the group Throbbing Gristle in concert.
'The Shadow of the Sun' draws upon Derek Jarman’s interest with alchemical processes as a metaphor for reprocessing Super-8 film. Jarman once described film’s union of light and matter as “an alchemical conjunction” and experimented throughout his career with creating dream symbolism through the superimposition of image and action. Originally called English Apocalypse, the film’s final title is derived from a 17th Century alchemical text that used the phrase as a synonym for the philosopher’s stone – the highly sought substance that turns base metals into gold and silver. The film was intended as a step toward the idea of an ambient video, that like its musical counterpart, was designed to enhance an environment.