John Maybury
in the 1980s
Resistance, Connection, Enclosure:
Saturday 28 November 2026, 20:00
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Cinema 1
+ Introduction + Q&A
John Maybury’s exuberant films frequently revolve around style and self-fashioning as means of expression and resistance. Combining Super 8 and video, original and found images, and reliant on intricate editing and layering, they are testimonies of 1980s post-punk queer defiance. They speak of the revolutionary power of pleasure, of the subversive energies of the body, and of the ways in which style can help create alternative communities and carve out autonomous spaces against an invasive, trivialising mainstream.
The Technology of Souls (1981)
UK, 11 min
The Technology of Souls captures moments of exquisite languor: a woman poses in a shimmery robe and sits next to a headphone-wearing bonsai. Title cards including ‘Silence’, ‘Violence’ and ‘Love’ periodically flash the film’s themes, whose rendition is rather elliptical – except for ‘Elegance’ and ‘Glamour’, which infuse every frame.
The Court of Miracles (1982)
UK, 44 min
Dreamy, speculative, and melancholic, The Court of Miracles foreshadows Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983) in a queer-punk register. Shifting between private and public space, solitary withdrawal and the search for community, the film ponders the fate of experience in a world where visual technologies permeate our most intimate recesses and where individual style is a last-ditch resistance against a homogenizing environment.
The Union Jacking Up (1985)
UK, 18 min
Also known as ‘The Union Jack Up’, this film vindicates the political stakes of 1980s club culture. Like much of Maybury’s work, it juxtaposes a hostile exterior world – street riots, tabloid headlines, police violence – with interiors that harbour love, community and creativity, often expressed through alternative fashions and corporeal styles. It features Leigh Bowery and Michael Clark among others, both frequent collaborators in Maybury’s films and videos.
Rifat Ozbek fashion video (1989)
UK, 7 min
Lush graphic effects highlight the sinuous elegance of an early Ozbek collection presented at London Fashion Week in 1989. Alongside conventional catwalk shows, Ozbek sometimes used video to showcase his work, enlisting John Maybury, a fellow former student at St Martin’s, for this purpose.
The screening is curated by Juan A. Suárez, who will be in conversation with John Maybury following the screening.
John Maybury is a British filmmaker and artist whose work spans experimental cinema, music videos and feature films. Emerging from London’s punk scene, he became a leading figure in British underground cinema during the 1980s, making visually inventive shorts including Tortures That Laugh (1986) and collaborating with Derek Jarman. He later directed Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ video and the features Love Is the Devil (1998), The Jacket (2005) and The Edge of Love (2008), alongside painting and television work.
Juan A. Suárez is a Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Murcia. He graduated in English Studies at the University of Murcia and completed an M.A. (1990) and PhD (1994) in Comparative Literature and Film Studies at Indiana University, where he was a Doctoral Research Fellow and a holder of a Film Studies Doctoral Dissertation Write up Grant. His fields of research are the US literary and visual avant-gardes, with particular focus on experimental cinema, and American modernist and contemporary literature.