A Way to Die: The Films of Peter Christopherson and John Balance

Founders of Coil—Peter Christopherson and John Balance—these visionary figures behind the experimental industrial British music scene, also helmed films from 1970 to 1980 that have been exhumed and restored by Timeless. Filmed in 8- and 16mm, these enigmatic, subversive works defy classification: unsettling, hypnotic, and rendered in gay masochist aesthetics. They function as family cinema, performances, body horror, and urban nightmares, animated by a tormented imagination that intertwines Eros and Thanatos with an insatiable fascination with death. The empty space once occupied by Antony Balch, Derek Jarman, and Jean Genet is no longer vacant. Maxime Lachaud and Reivaks Timeless deliver a singular document, haunted by the duo’s music, a one-way voyage into limbo, where they are joined by Monte Cazazza—the recently deceased pioneer of industrial music.