Vivienne Dick
2021The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin, Kenny Angelico
Nan Goldin's slide show “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” converted, mixed and screened as a film by the artist, portraying the American underground culture, the no wave scene, post-Stonewall gay subculture, among others.
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
Beauty Becomes the Beast
Vivienne Dick
Adele Bertei, Lydia Lunch
Beauty Becomes the Beast describes a random access world mediated by TV images and shards of popular culture. The film features a powerful performance by Lydia Lunch regressing from adulthood to childhood, hinting at a sexually abusive past. It concerns itself with the position of woman as subject and the way women experience patriarchal law and the heterosexual order.
Beauty Becomes the Beast
Blank City
Celine Danhier
Amos Poe, Ann Magnuson
In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of their best works. Taking their cues from punk rock and new wave music, these young maverick filmmakers confronted viewers with a stark reality that stood in powerful contrast to the escapist product being churned out by Hollywood.
Blank City
Letters to Dad
Beth B, Scott B
John Ahearn, Ida Applebroog
The almost lyrical Letters to Dad, is a meditation on authority that superimposes the spectre of Jonestown over the relatively fresh faces of the parapunk art world; the film takes on a musical form - like a 20th-century ballad composed of subliminal behavior cues, advertising testimonials, and the text of the National Enquirer
Letters to Dad
She Had Her Gun All Ready
Vivienne Dick
Pat Place, Lydia Lunch
Two women – one passive and resigned, the other aggressive and domineering – interact in various locations in New York city. The film explores the dynamic between them before ending with a showdown at the roller-coaster on Coney Island.
She Had Her Gun All Ready
Guerillere Talks
Vivienne Dick
Anya Phillips, Lydia Lunch
This experimental short consists of eight unedited rolls of super-8 film, each of which profiles an individual woman in real time. The women engage in everyday behaviour, such as playing pinball or reading a letter aloud.
Guerillere Talks
A Skinny Little Man Attacked Daddy
Vivienne Dick
'The films I make are about my life and the people around me. I want to awaken the fearless self. A Skinny Man Attacked Daddy takes a look at the family and the place where I grew up. So much of what is 'me' comes from attitudes, expectations, fears, habits, beliefs that I inherited from my parents (and they in turn from theirs). The video is about separation form the family. My work is to try to know myself - the only way to change inherited patterns.' - Vivienne Dick
A Skinny Little Man Attacked Daddy
Visibility: Moderate
Vivienne Dick
Jackie Crawford
Vivienne Dick's first film after the New York series takes her back to her native Ireland. Using Super-8 film as a parody of the 'travelogue' or home-movie style film, Dick takes a expatriate, tourist look at her homeland. The narrative follows Margaret Ann Irinsky as the American tourist trekking from a Dublin populated by Hare Krishnas and rock music, to the horse-drawn carriages in the west of Ireland and the kissing of the Blarney stone. The quaint perception of Ireland and the Americanization of the native culture are contrasted with interviews from sectarian prisoners and footage of political marches. As in all her work, Dick uses a mixture of verité shots which capture the essence of the locality and intersperses them with images which have a totally different feel. This method is used to highlight issues in a subtle way wherein the camera takes an active rather than a voyeuristic role.
Visibility: Moderate
London Suite (Getting Sucked In)
Vivienne Dick
London’s cultural diversity unfolds as Vivienne Dick portrays her friends, their lifestyles, what they talk about and how they talk. In this kaleidoscopic arrangement of encounters and re-enactments, equal weight is given to the passionate and the banal. The camera’s sudden hops from one reality to another and the disjointed conversations are drawn together by the musical score and the film’s internal rhythm.
London Suite (Getting Sucked In)
New York Conversations
Vivienne Dick
Produced over the Christmas of 1990, New York Conversations explores the lives, fears and work of six New Yorkers in a series of video verite interviews. Frequently funny, often life affirming, sometimes bizarre insights into the lives of the real ‘thirtysomething’ generation.
New York Conversations
