Seated on the floor of a hotel room in the Austrian capital - where her first full-length documentary, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, was screened as part of the city's annual film festival - the Brooklyn-based French filmmaker Marie Losier is at a crossroads. Should she give in to her film-buff instincts and attend a screening of her compatriot Rabah Ameur-Zamaiche's Smugglers' Songs (see below), or return to her room and perform her duties (through an internet connection) as the film curator of New York's French Institute Alliance Francaise?
She eventually chooses the latter - a sign, perhaps, of the disciplined life she has led for the past few years, as she juggles her day job and her filmmaking. The past year has been especially taxing, Losier says: she had to take days off work to attend film festival screenings of The Ballad; she has already presented it in Berlin, Los Angeles and Buenos Aires to name a few.
Not that she has serious complaints about her new-found globe-trotting lifestyle, however, given that The Ballad (which will be screened on December 3 and 9 at the Space Museum as part of the French Cinepanorama festival) is a labour of love. Seven years in the making, the documentary is a record of the relationship between British musician Genesis P-Orridge and American artist Lady Jaye Breyer. Having met the former in 2004 at an exhibition opening, Losier was inducted into P-Orridge's circle and asked to film Psychic TV's European tour. What began as a music documentary, however, soon became something else as Losier discovered the close bond between P-Orridge and Breyer.
'When I was filming backstage, I saw these two blond ladies holding hands, and one was starting a sentence and the other was finishing it, and they were caring about each other in such a kind way,' Losier says of her first encounters with the pair, who had then already begun a project in which P-Orridge had breast implants so he and his wife could become a 'pandrogynous' being. The film has certainly revealed a side of P-Orridge which runs against his public persona as an artistic provocateur, someone called a 'wrecker of civilisation' by a British MP. P-Orridge's controversial music acts included COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle and Thee Majesty.
Losier says finishing the film was painful because of Breyer's death in 2007. 'It was very difficult to be both a filmmaker and their friend, and to be really a friend to Gen when Jaye passed away,' she says.
Losier will soon embark on a documentary about animator-cum-musician April March. More hotel rooms beckon - and more agonising instances of having to forgo film-watching for more work.
