Continuing our month-long Summer Music Festival, we turn to the love affair of Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, two one-of-a-kind artists who found a perfect match in one another.

French filmmaker Marie Losier documented industrial music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and h/er spouse Lady Jaye Breyer over seven years, as the duo embarked on their shared project of “pandrogyny.” Their romantic/artistic project involved a “cut-up” process influenced by the theories of artist Brion Gysin in which their ultimate aim was to fuse as one single being through plastic surgery and fashion. In her documentary, Losier films the couple’s intimate relationship, showing how the love they had for one another reflected their shared consciousness and closeness.

Using footage she filmed on a day-to-day basis and archival videos of both P-Orridge and Breyer, Losier stitches together a shapeshifting portrait of the duo that reflected their respective histories in the United Kingdom and New York’s avant-garde art scenes. P-Orridge, who is best known for h/er involvement with radical art and music groups like COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, offers a personal run-down of h/er history as an artist.

H/er stories feature cameos from the likes of William S. Burroughs and Derek Jarman, who collaborated with h/er back in Britain. Meanwhile, rare footage of Breyer’s confrontational art performances in the East Village point to a parallel history of uncompromising art in the U.S. Losier’s juxtaposition of this footage, alongside her vignettes of the duo’s daily activities, make it seem as though it was destined the two would meet.

“Lady Jaye pointed at me and said to Gen, ‘She is the one!’ Genesis said, ‘Yes, of course.’ I asked softly to them, ‘I was the one for what?’ They responded at almost the same time that I was the one who could film them and their project of pandrogeny…. I said yes, and I rushed home, bought 20 rolls of 16mm film, and arranged a leave with my job.” MARIE LOSIER

Losier has described her first encounter with P-Orridge as a “miraculous New York City coincidence.” After seeing h/er perform at the Knitting Factory in Williamsburg, Losier bumped into P-Orridge at a tiny art gallery opening in SoHo. Due to the smallness of the space, she accidentally stepped on h/er toes and when she turned around to apologize “felt something special had passed between” them. “Whether it was fate or pure clumsiness,” Losier has said, it “marked the beginning of an artistic collaboration that would develop into a close friendship.”

Marie Losier was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1972. She studied literature at the University of Nanterre in Paris, and then moved to New York, where she earned an MFA from Hunter College and became involved with the Ocularis screening series in Brooklyn. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye was her first feature film. It earned the Caligari and Teddy Awards at the 2011 Berlinale, as well as the Grand City Prize at IndieLisboa and Louis Marcorelles Award at Cinéma du Réel. Losier has since had retrospectives at MoMA and Jeu de Paume, been awarded a prestigious DAAD Residency Award and Guggenheim Award, and continued to make documentaries about musicians including Alan Vega, Felix Kubin, Peaches and more.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer.