Founders of Coil, a cult entity of experimental industrial British music, Peter Christopherson and John Balance also directed films from 1970 to 1980, exhumed and restored by Timeless. Shot on 8 and 16mm film, these unclassifiable subversive marvels, unsettling and trippy, garbed in gay masochist aesthetics, are as much family films, performances, body horror and urban nightmares. They're above all characterized by a tormented imagination under the sign of Eros and Thanatos with an irrepressible taste for death. There was an empty space next to Antony Balch, Derek Jarman and Jean Genet : it's no longer vacant. Maxime Lachaud and Reivaks Timeless deliver a unique document, haunted by the duo’s music, with this one way journey into limbo, where they’re joined by the recently deceased Monte Cazazza, a founding father of the concept of industrial music.
Editing
Restoration preserves decay as aesthetic—time as collaborator.
Score
Coil's music haunts every frame like a séance.
Production
8mm and 16mm textures that digital cannot fake.
Director
Reivaks Timeless
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This finally places Coil's visual work alongside the underground canon they've always belonged to—Jarman, Genet, Balch—rather than treating their music as separate from their filmmaking.
Christopherson and Balance's films were literally rotting in storage; the restoration process itself becomes part of the art, preserving not just images but their physical deterioration as historical record.
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