Tsukerman: Liquid Sky (1982)

One of the more hallucinatory sci-fi films of the 80s, Liquid Sky sees New York ravaged by aliens bent on harvesting heroin from the city’s punk and new wave subcultures. Since heroin tends to be most potent during orgasm, the aliens quickly learn that it’s going to be more economical to simply harvest orgasm itself, and Tsukerman follows suit, immersing us in a feverdream dancefloor that quickly exceeds the film, challenges the film to keep up, as its beats and lasers catapult us beyond the highest, remotest spires of Manhattan, into a skyline so ephemeral that the aliens seem to spend most of their time figuring out just the right sightline to distill it from. At those altitudes, the story spirals out into something like an avant-garde nightclub act or an underground fashion shoot – less a film than a happening, it stimulates your opiate receptors more than your eyes, saturating them with such an unbelievable variety of tones and colours that it’s almost as if it’s hinting at a part of the spectrum we can’t see yet, something just beyond the ultraviolet-infrared thresholds that fringe every scene and sequence. An alternative, androgynous mode of perception spreads out across everything, settling in the pores between Tsukerman’s percussive, polygonal score, until it’s impossible to distinguish between sentience and synthesizers, music and muscle, let alone the sex of most members of the cast, who take their cues from Anne Carlisle’s incredible, gender-bending double performance. And that’s perhaps why it still feels futuristic, or why the future it envisages still feels open, even if lots of the fashion decisions have dated quite drastically. Like some of the strangest sci-fi films, it is really less about the future than futurity itself as a new kind of sensual and sexual orientation, a potent drug cocktail circulating among the scenes and subcultures of the present.