"information is like a bank
our job is to rob that bank."

-Genesis P-Orridge
in Decoder

Film historian Jack Sargeant sees Decoder as a direct continuum in the beat tradition of Ron Rice, Jack Smith, Robert Frank, Antony Balch and their ilk. With the film The Cut-Ups (1967) directors Balch and Burroughs illustrated their theory and method of random cut-ups, and the result was sheer cinematic terrorism. It is practically impossible to follow the movie – instead, it “sends a message directly into the collective subconscious.”

Decoder takes the concept even further and delves into it with the means of a fictional story. In his novels The Job (1970) and The Revised Boy Scout Manual (1970) the beat icon Burroughs had already introduced his ideas of sounds as potential weapons of political struggle and the technical instructions for that particular brand of terrorism. Despite its brevity, Burroughs’ appearance in Decoder proves to be a key scene, as the whole movie is an implementation of the author’s idea: “Young people in the West have been lied to, sold out, and betrayed. Best thing they can do is take the place apart before they are destroyed in a nuclear war.” In Decoder, Burroughs’ The Wild Boys (1971) have been updated as characters in the post-punk and industrial scene in Berlin.

• Download the film
• music from the film (low quality real media) by genesis p-orridge, Einstürzende Neubauten, William S Borroughs and Dave Ball
  

previously on wtg:

• Burroughs, Balch, Gysin: Towers Open Fire
• Psychic TV's Catalan
• Brion Gysin's Poem of Poems

Filed in: genesisp-orridge williamsburroughs briongysin music video art