I did make it to A WAY TO DIE: THE SHORT FILMS OF COIL, directed by Maxime Lachaud and Xavier Laradji, at The Mockingbird last night. The film is a not-quite-linear hybrid amalgamation of a brief documentary introducing the short films and videos made by Peter Christopherson (1955-2010) and John Balance (1962-2004), a long-term couple.
Christopherson aka ‘Sleazy’ was a member of Throbbing Gristle, credited with creating industrial music and a founder of Hignosis, a design firm credited with the covers of many 70s superstars (Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel). You might know him best for his video of Tainted Love or the ads he did with Joan Collins for the Bristol and West Building Society. Balance was the co-founder of Coil and publisher of STABMETAL, which focussed on industrial music and the cassette scene of the period.
The shorts are filmed in a variety of formats, Super 8mm, 16mm, 1 inch video, etc. and including ads, home movies, and experimental works that were made in the period that straddles the onset of AIDS and the coming of combination therapy in the late 90s. The individual films aren’t great works of art. But collectively they evoke a period, an attitude and a look– a queer perspective on the AIDS era filmed from within it — that are as powerful as I’ve seen.
The men in these movies look like they do in Derek Jarman films like ANGELIC CONVERSATION, young, close-cropped, chiselled faces, slim bodies, and hanted hungry eyes. A very young Marc Almond appears in several instances, with that startling early look that could be so beautiful from certain angles. The shorts have a punk attitude – one of the films is titled ‘The Industrial Use of Semen Will Revolutionise Society Alone’ — with a sensibility inspired by the likes of Genet and Bataille. An insistence on desire that embraces all the darker elements, and that speaks that urgency through evident layers of self-hatred: men take their clothes off, their bodies lusted for by the camera, only to be hung, beaten, electrocuted, set on fire.
One film is of a young man walking through a cemetery, meditating on the friends who have died of AIDS. Desire and suffering are inseparable, in the works as in the period. The passing of time is evident through dress, the wider jeans of the early 80s, Doc Martens, then skinheads and the look of Cazzo film pornstars of the period with even more extreme sexual representation: lots of electro, self-immolation, castration, death. A romantic fatalism where sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, become so united as to be indistinguishable.
After Balance died, Christopherson moved to Thailand and continued making music and videos, with no attempt to disguise a colonising gaze on what is meant to be sexual freedom, no awareness that it is so. It is disturbing to see all the undressed Thai boys under the direction – and control– of the by now middle-aged Englishman. But different audiences will find disturbing all the films that are not home movies or ads. Even the Thai work is in keeping with the messy truthfulness, the brave attempts at honesty, at exploring all the recesses of desire, that make for such powerful viewing. The film brought back the period – from a queer perspective – in ways that I found, sad and beautiful, powerful and moving.
José Arroyo