A pseudo snuff film made around an EP, directed by a founder of the industrial tradition for its largest commercial inheritor, and withheld for being exactly what it was asked to be.
The Bureau files Broken not for its violence, which is considerable and which the archive sees no reason to itemise, but for the company it keeps. The film was conceived by Trent Reznor as a companion to the 1992 Nine Inch Nails EP of the same name, and Reznor used it, by his own telling, partly as an excuse to work with a personal hero: Peter Christopherson, who had been a founder of Throbbing Gristle and Coil and a member of the Hipgnosis design house, and whose Coil had already remixed the band. That is the crossing the film records: the foundational underground and its largest commercial inheritor in the same room, the older man directing the younger.
The conceit is a found amateur tape. A man is abducted and killed by a masked figure, and the EP's promotional videos play within the fiction, so that Pinion, Wish and Happiness in Slavery become things the captive is made to watch. The casting matters more than the gore. The victim is Bob Flanagan, the performance artist who built a body of work from chronic illness and masochism, and whose presence pulls the film toward the lineage of body-based performance the archive files in the Visual mode rather than toward simple provocation.
It was held back. Considered too extreme to release, Broken was never officially issued at the time and circulated for over a decade as a traded bootleg, a clean copy surfacing online in 2006. Its scarcity made it a rumour before it was a film.
The Bureau's reading. Broken is filed in the Film section as the single clearest point of contact between industrial rock and the tradition that produced it.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene