THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE directed by Marie Losier. 72 minutes. A FilmsWeLike release. Opens Friday (March 16) at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See Times.
Marie Losier is blunt about why her documentary The Ballad Of Genesis And Lady Jaye looks like no other.
“I’ve never been to film school, so I don’t have any rules,” she says on the phone from her offices in New York City.
Also essential to the director – who lives part-time in Paris – is her Bolex camera. It helps create real intimacy in her film about the relationship between art provocateur Genesis P-Orridge and her lover and art soulmate, Lady Jaye.
“You only have three minutes to shoot and you can’t see what you’re shooting, so you focus in a different way. It’s not like video, where you can shoot and shoot and shoot.
“So I don’t sit people down and do long interviews. I wasn’t interested in where Gen was born and when. It’s more about her love story.”
Losier’s biggest difficulty was Lady Jaye’s elusiveness. Then Jaye suddenly died suddenly in 2007.
“It was hard to get her to sit down and talk,” says Losier. “She was almost like a butterfly. She would float around and dance and bring things in and out. She was very secretive.”
Fortunately, Losier had the much less reserved, very camera-friendly Genesis ready to talk about anything at all. She’s funny, open, outrageous and more than willing to discuss the surgeries she undertook to further her ultimate art project: to make her and her lover look alike.
Calling Genesis, who was born Neil Andrew Megson, trans makes her sound more orthodox than she is. Genesis and Lady Jaye wanted to go beyond convention to fashion a new gender they called pandrogyne.
On whether to call Genesis he or she:
So committed were they to this project and its importance that they asked Losier to film some of their surgeries. While a more exploitative filmmaker might have said, “Hell, yeah,” Losier refused.
“I wasn’t into it at all,” she says adamantly. “That’s their project. My project was how I relate to them and my discovery of their work, not the cliché of transformation by surgery. That falls into the paparazzi category. I don’t want to be a voyeur.”
On showing respect for her subjects’ relationship:
Genesis loved that about her and was more interested in the filmmaker as artist than as someone in thrall to the couple’s vision.
“That’s why it worked,” explains Losier. “I wasn’t a fan and have never been a fan. I wasn’t following them or needing something – there was nothing I wanted to steal away from them.
“Gen loved that I had my own vision and personality.”
susanc@nowtoronto.com
