V Visual · IV · Film

Hardware.

Directed by Richard Stanley · United Kingdom · 1990 · 94 minutes · with cameos by Iggy Pop and Lemmy · soundtrack features Public Image Ltd, Ministry, GWAR

filed under
visual · film · the influenced field · cinema adjacent to the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition
V·IV · 1990 · filed
TitleHardware
DirectorRichard Stanley
Year1990
CountryUnited Kingdom
Runtime94 minutes
Format35mm colour
Filed asThe influenced field · cinema adjacent to the tradition, not of it
StatusFiled
Filed atVisual · Film · V·IV · hardware.html
Editorial · the influenced field filed

Post-apocalyptic machine dread with an industrial-adjacent texture. A self-repairing combat robot reactivates in a scavenger's apartment; the soundtrack and visual grime sit squarely in the industrial sensibility.

Why the Bureau files it. The soundtrack is the connection, and it is unusually direct. Richard Stanley scores the film with industrial-and-adjacent music, including Ministry, whose Stigmata plays over an on-screen appearance by GWAR, and Public Image Ltd, whose Order of Death and its refrain "this is what you want, this is what you get" runs through the film. Ministry is filed in the archive; the tradition is not referenced here so much as used as the film's own voice.

Stanley came from music video, having directed clips for Fields of the Nephilim and Public Image Ltd, which is why the film carries the cameos it does: Carl McCoy of Fields of the Nephilim as the nomad who finds the robot, Iggy Pop as the radio voice Angry Bob, Lemmy of Motörhead as a water-taxi driver. The post-apocalyptic grime, the self-repairing M.A.R.K. 13, the machine that reassembles itself and turns on its surroundings, is the machine-dread imagery the tradition has worked since the first wave.

The film belongs to no tradition figure, but its soundtrack and its world place it closer to the industrial scene than almost anything else in the influenced field. The Bureau files Hardware for that soundtrack above all, a commercial genre film carrying the tradition's music as its own.

This film is filed in the influenced field: cinema that shares the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition's sensibility without being made by tradition figures. It is adjacent to the tradition, not of it. The canonical Film entries (Decoder, Halber Mensch, Pig) are tradition-internal works made by or with tradition artists; the influenced field collects the cinema that runs alongside the tradition and feeds the same imaginative reservoir.

Cross-references filed
REF Ministry · Stigmata on the soundtrack, over the GWAR scene
REF Industrial rock · the machine-dread mode the film carries
DEP Visual vein · filed at V·IV in the Film sub-section, the influenced field

Bureau filing footer

File · Hardware · dir. Richard Stanley · 1990
Department · Visual · Film
Position · V·IV · the influenced field
Status · Filed
Filed by · Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene

Department index · Visual · all files.