Resistance, Connection, Enclosure: John Maybury in the 1980s + 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.

Programme

The Technology of Souls, dir. John Maybury, UK 1981, 11 min.

The Technology of Souls captures moments of exquisite langour: 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, dir. John Maybury, UK 1982, 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 homogenising environment.

The Union Jacking Up, dir. John Maybury, UK 1985, 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, dir. John Maybury, UK 1989, 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. Martins, for this purpose.

This programme is curated by Juan Antonio Suárez.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between Juan and John Maybury.

This screening is part of 20 Years of Fashion in Film Festival: The Party and the Guests, taking place across London from Saturday 28 November to Sunday 6 December 2026. Full programme here.

Juan Antonio Suarez 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.