T.G.: Psychic Rally in Heaven

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film still
Courtesy James Mackay

Derek Jarman’s T.G.: Psychic Rally in Heaven is a tribute to the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which collaborated with the director several times. For example, the group contributed the soundtrack for Jarman’s 1970s home-movie project In the Shadow of the SUN. T.G.: Psychic Rally in Heaven was Jarman’s first production on Super 8, which he then completed on 16mm. Filmed on December 23, 1980 during a gig by Throbbing Gristle (together with the bands A Certain Ration and SPK) at the Heaven club in London, Jarman’s film extends the temporal dimension and the then—common esthetics of the music-video format, which he was to continue to influence during the Thatcher era with clips for The Smiths, Pet Shop Boys and Marianne Faithfull, among others. Jarman’s experimental techniques of retardation, the use of pulsating abstract flashes in warm orange and yellow hues, contrast with the radically cool electronic storm of sounds that is constantly interrupted by flickering close-ups of the seemingly rapt performer Genesis P-Orridge.



 

Workdetails
  • original Title: T.G.: Psychic Rally in Heaven
  • Date: 23.12.1980 – 23.12.1980 (?)
  • Genre: Short film

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