The Marionette. (Patreon)

It's hard to imagine a time when body suspension video wasn't damn near ubiquity; before I left Facebook there wasn't a day that went by where at least a few different videos (or photosets) of folks documenting the suspensions they did, facilitated, or were present for ended up in my stream. 

In the like economy, the process was usually to watch a few seconds, click like, and move on to the next thing. 

That's probably a bad thing, all told- that something as potentially life changing as a suspension had become something your friends did, mixed in with what they had for dinner, pictures of their pets being cute, and more likely commentary on the latest outrage that will be news for a few days then forgotten, replaced with the next and the next after. 

But back in the 80s and 90s, if you'll forgive my "we walked a mile, barefoot, in the snow to school" nostalgia- when you'd get one or two bits of suspension documentation over the course of a decade (which is roughly the timespan between the Jury Brothers classic Dances, Sacred & Profane and Xeon McManus's The Marionette) there was something really special about being able to sit down and pay attention to the entirety of a thing. 

You valued it. Obsessed over it. A quarter of a century later and I'm still able to recall from memory which issue of PFIQ featured, say, the first appearance of A. Viking Navaro despite not remembering what articles are in the first issue of my own Nodal Points. 

Nostalgia may be affecting my affection for THE MARIONETTE, but I think it's objectively a pretty impressive time/place film regardless of it's subject matter. That Xeon was part of the early American suspension community allows for an intimacy with the film's subject (Allen Falker) that allowed him to show suspension and the people who do it as something other than sensationalism, and provided a great time capsule that shows the transition of it from spiritual rite to what it's become. 

Back in 2018 I wrote this review- 

None of this would be possible without the contributions of Sean McManus (director) and Allen Falkner (primary subject) of The Marionette. Sean's film- back when films were actually shot ON film- is a nodal point in the advancement of body ritual/body art in Western Culture. And it was a by/for production; the people involved in the film were also involved in body suspension. Predatory media often sees body modification as a quick and lurid bit of exploitation. "Look at the freaks" is a call older than Barnum. What The Marionette achieves is the removal of the shock value of a pretty shocking process. It's accessible. At times emotional. And always entertaining.  The suspension community has changed a lot since it's filming, but anyone who is interested in body-as-medium owes a great debt to this film, and you should absolutely have a copy in your collection.

If you'd like to add a physical copy to your collection- Sean is selling them here.