Issue 5: Winter 2009 / '10
Direct: Vivienne Dick's Work with Lydia Lunch
Chris O Neill
The exhibition Between Truth and Fiction: The Films Of Vivienne Dick (Sept-Nov 2009 - Crawford Gallery, Cork) was a welcome opportunity to reassess the Irish filmmaker's work in a new context. Placing material into a gallery installation that was made to be screened in something resembling a ‘traditional' cinematic arrangement - a venue projecting a single work on a big screen to a gathered audience - created a perverse and illuminating effect as the multiple screens of looped images and overlapping sounds melded into a chaotic collage. While watching Guérillère Talks, for instance, one of its performers, Lydia Lunch, who in the film is seen in a ruined urban landscape, could simultaneously be seen nearby on another screen in Like Dawn To Dust, which was shot six years later in rural Ireland. At any given moment, the nihilistic ‘Baby Doll' by Teenage Jesus & The Jerks from Beauty Becomes The Beast or the upbeat disco track ‘Ring My Bell' by Anita Ward which appears in Liberty's Booty could be heard thundering throughout the installation. By warping individual pieces into a collective whole, similar techniques and reoccurring themes could be seen developing, being redeveloped, crossed over- and thus reassessed to striking effect.
The most intriguing aspect of viewing this work is witnessing the progression of a personal filmmaking aesthetic. Dick is clearly fascinated with and respects the performers she films, so the unobtrusive yet hesitant documentation employed in her first film, Guérillère Talks - in which the subjects are allowed the freedom to do as they wish while Dick stands back and films them - begins to develop into a more intimate relationship between filmmaker and performer. This creative dynamic then expands to inform the structure, tone and overall content of the work. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in her collaborations with Lydia Lunch, a figure featured prominently in the exhibition and who perhaps left the most lasting impression. Although Lunch made memorable appearances in several pictures around this period, such as in James Nares' Rome 78 (1978), and Beth & Scott B's Black Box (1979) and Vortex (1981), no other filmmaker at the time made use of her presence as effectively as Dick. When watching the four pieces that they worked on together - Guérillère Talks, She Had Her Gun All Ready, Beauty Becomes The Beast (all 1978) and Like Dawn To Dust (1983) - it is illuminating to see how Dick's open-minded approach to collaboration not only allows for her own style to evolve but for the early manifestation of several themes and motifs that Lunch would later articulate in a more direct and aggressive manner in other works.
Lydia Lunch
Their first film, Guérillère Talks, consists of eight scenes, each featuring a different female performer, each captured on a single roll of Kodak sound Super-8 stock that lasts approximately 3 minutes. Profiled among others are an unidentified punk playing a pinball machine, Pat Place hanging around an apartment smoking and reading letters from her family, and a deadpan Anya Philips listening to a B-side by ? & The Mysterians while lighting up a cigarette and then walking out of frame. Lunch's sequence is the seventh. It depicts her standing among the desolate ruins of a torn-down building with only the crumbling shell of its walls still standing. Lunch, who was 19 at the time, wears sunglasses, a white sweater and a short leather skirt. While playfully grasping a fire escape ladder, she holds a microphone up to her face and, in mock news reporter fashion, announces "Hi, I'm Lydia Lunch reporting with Geraldo Rivera on the scene" and proceeds to perform the following text to camera:
"It's really a crime the way the youth of America are treated today. Just look at the recreational facilities we have, it makes you really angry to think that the only kind of toys you get to have is all the junk other people leave out. What else is there but violence and destruction and anger when you have nothing better to do but run around burnt playgrounds? I mean I wish I had a regular swing set like all the other kids but I got to hang from a fire escape. It's no fun being a teenager anymore. Look at my pet, he's gone, he died - he stepped on a broken nail and got infected. It's just no fun being a kid anymore, it's no fun at all."
Once Lunch has finished her piece to-camera, Dick continues to film, leaving the performer to wait until the film cartridge runs out (at one point the filmmaker can be heard announcing from behind the camera "Lydia, it [the roll of film] is three minutes - twice as long as the other one"). The effect recalls the frequent moments when Werner Herzog continues to film his subjects at the end of interviews as they awkwardly fall silent and politely wait to be told to stop ‘performing', even though they have nothing left to say. Dick's camera then roams around the building site, capturing the surrounding debris and an assistant who sits at a distance behind the camera, while the soundtrack only picks up the distant sounds of a dog barking and the handling noise of the microphone that Lunch holds while waiting for the shot to come to an end. The camerawork is handheld and the framing is rough and messy with constant movement. This creates a disarming intimacy often associated with the ‘home movie' status of Super-8. Not only does this style capture a sense of closeness to the subject but also accentuates the decaying-yet-poetic quality of her surroundings.
While Guérillère Talks may lack the multi-layered substance of their later collaborations, it does operate as a significant primer for the filmmaker and the subject to build on. Each person that appears on-screen in the film is a ‘character' that possesses a commanding screen presence simply by being themselves, yet there is something even more compelling about Lunch that makes her stand out from the others. Having seen her performing onstage in Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, as well as out-and-about on the alternative scene in general, Dick said "I was certainly taken with Lydia as a character. She was a very unusual persona - fierce yet vulnerable at the same time and really quite striking in the way she dressed, in the way she looked. Her whole manner was really tough". As a filmmaker, Dick is both visceral and receptive which means she is able to accurately capture this impression on celluloid. But, beyond the overall look and demeanour of her subject, it is ultimately her willingness to allow Lunch perform her material to camera which makes this segment succeed and stand out from the others. In its brief, one-minute running time this monologue acts as an early demonstration of several themes - anger, a traumatic upbringing, the corruption of childhood, injustice - that would be further nurtured in Lunch's collaborations with Dick, as well as in her other work in various art forms.
For her next film, She Had Her Gun All Ready, Dick brings back two performers from Guérillère Talks - Pat Place and Lydia Lunch - and places them in a narrative in which they play fictional characters that are clearly fashioned to suit their personas. The story is essentially that of a conflict between two characters in a relationship, although they share relatively little screen time. It ends with the weaker apparently killing the stronger. Although the film utilises the barebones of a melodramatic storyline, Dick dispenses with any specific explanation as to what is occurring, which means the film uses the familiarity of a narrative to explore the material in an ambiguous manner that is open to interpretation. Nor does the filmmaker define the precise nature of the relationship between the two characters, although ultimately this doesn't prevent a fundamental understanding of what is happening. The film is an exploration of the power struggle of identity between personas: one seemingly weak and ripe to be taken advantage of, while the other is overtly dominant and controlling. Place appears androgynous with a short haircut, no make-up (bar black eyeliner) and wearing trousers, while Lunch is markedly feminine with long hair, much make-up (white face, excessive eyeliner, red lipstick...), boots and a tight, very short skirt. Both represent contrasting depictions of sexuality that suggest they are intimidated by, or envious or dismissive of one another (or perhaps a mixture of all three). This recalls The Servant (Joseph Losey, 1963) and Performance (Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg, 1970). The ending - with the weaker character murdering and potentially replacing the dominant one - is particularly reminiscent of the final sequence between the two protagonists of the latter film.
Lunch is at her most nihilistic here and, in a superficial way, embodies the preconceived perception of what many people believe she represents. In the heated melodramatic atmosphere of this piece, Lunch portrays the classic female figure of the femme fatale. Unlike in the other Dick collaborations, she is without any vulnerability, and represents little more than an antagonist. By stripping her of any depth, her role becomes ambiguous such that the film can be read several ways. For instance, there is a possibility that most of the film is Place's character's dream or fantasy, or that the whole story shows one person confronting a split personality. In either of these interpretations, She Had Her Gun All Ready suggests that the character that Place is portraying has an unbalanced mental state and this, along with the fact that the first half of the film unfolds in a claustrophobic apartment, makes it reminiscent of Repulsion (1965), Roman Polanski's exploration of female mental illness that, incidentally, Lunch has referred to as a film she admires.
The longest of all of the films (at 41 minutes), Beauty Becomes The Beast is the final New York collaboration between Vivienne Dick and Lydia Lunch, and it is their most ambitious and fully realised project together. The unnerving tone is set by the opening credits which consist of text printed onto random tinted still images from the film while ‘Baby Doll' by Teenage Jesus & The Jerks screeches over the soundtrack. The film has two primary narrative strands within separate timeframes, both of which feature Lunch. The opening images of the first strand show her rambles along a desolate beach on a chilly winter's day. Wearing a heavy blue coat, Lunch's face is obscured by her hood and dishevelled hair. She clutches an eyeless, naked toy doll that she mumbles to and plays with, and she builds and smashes sandcastles. This childlike state persists as she hums to herself and makes unintelligible noises while wandering in and out of a house on the beach.
Beauty Becomes the Beast
The first images in the other timeframe, accompanied by ‘You Can Never Go Home Again' by The Shangri-Las are particularly telling and poignant, making clear reference to the other timeframe: a poster on a subway wall states ‘Help Destroy A Family Tradition - Prevent Child Abuse'; a subway turntable reads ‘Closed' and ‘Out'; piles of garbage overflow in a rubbish skip. Lunch, now clearly a young woman in mind and body, stands alongside a redbrick wall while steam drifts from manholes in the street behind her. She seems uneasy and edgy. Her dark hair is no longer dishevelled but her long fringe and heavy eyeliner obscure her eyes. She grows increasingly restless while telling herself, aloud: "I can't decide...I can't!"
The two narrative strands continue to cross-cut with a series of sequences and single images that in conventional cinematic terms seem random since everything is not explicitly linked together or put into a precise context. But, ultimately, these elements all coalesce to form a richly disturbing tapestry... TV imagery of comedienne Lucille Ball performing a caricature of a man selling meat in a butcher's shop; Lunch, dressed in green tights and an orange t-shirt advertising Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, curled up in a foetal position on a bed, playing with her pet cat, which eventually cuts to a close-up of her face looking at her bedroom door as the thudding sound of footsteps are heard approaching; newspaper headlines and radio reports documenting the Son of Sam killings which occurred in New York a year before filming; a fantasy sequence of a terrified Lunch with figures in garish make-up and sinister costumes looming over her, while overlapping voices repeat "confess...mommy forgives you" mingled with a Freudian description of adolescent female sexuality spoken by a Middle-European accented male voice; Lunch, leaning against a wire fence, looking directly into the camera and saying "I had a dream you sewed up my pussy, daddy...I don't want a corpse in my mouth!".
While She Had Her Gun All Ready has an unconventional structure that still retains the remnants of a linear narrative, Beauty Becomes The Beast has a far more splintered and fragmented form that initially seems ambiguous and evasive in comparison to the earlier film. But once one tunes in to its wavelength, Dick's intentions become very clear. It is pure visceral filmmaking that dispenses with traditional storytelling clarification and instead goads an emotional response through the constant juxtaposition of imagery and sound design. The themes of decay, sexuality, death and, most prominently, abuse, all mirrored against the breakdown of society, resonate powerfully throughout the film and articulate a frustrated anger that probably could not be captured by a conventional narrative. The closing shot of the childlike Lunch washing her eyeless toy doll is an image that lingers in the mind long after the film ends. As water pours from the empty eye sockets, Lunch says "All clean now" before violently dropping the doll into the bath. The image abruptly cuts to black, no end credits.
Beauty Becomes the Beast
Of their four collaborations, Lunch's contribution is most prominent in Beauty Becomes the Beast. On screen, she reveals a raw vulnerability that is only hinted at in Guérillère Talks and was purposely completely absent from She Had Her Gun All Ready. The childhood sequences are particularly effective. Lunch conveys the mixture of innocence and confusion of an abused adolescent with a power and insight that have rarely been matched. This courageous performance also appears intensely personal: to an extent, the film feels like a visualisation of Lunch's spoken word piece ‘Daddy Dearest' recorded in 1984, which addresses the subject of abuse in a markedly more aggressive and confrontational manner. According to Dick, the theme of abuse was never discussed during the making of the film but, as she states, "You see something that affects you - like her performance, her band - and it seeps into your skin pores, you take it in and without consciously or intellectually thinking it starts coming out in your own work".
There was a five-year hiatus before Vivienne Dick and Lydia Lunch shot their (to date) final collaboration, Like Dawn To Dust. While it may appear relatively slight when compared to the earlier works (the shortest of which ran 28 minutes, while this lasts only 6 minutes), the film succeeds as an exercise in mood and atmosphere due to its desolate rural imagery and an eclectic soundscape. It opens with a simple white-on-black title card that is accompanied by the jarring beginnings of Lunch's ‘Dance of the Dead Children', a mournful instrumental which continues to play over images of a burnt-out big house situated in the Irish countryside. The empty windows, framed by the black stains of fire damage, reveal the building has been completely gutted. Lunch, clad in a long gothic black dress, is visible through one of the windows. Within the house, burnt pages from a magazine are scattered amongst the rubble. In voiceover Lunch says "Cross deep - Part the Dead Sea in the centre of its forehead, banging at the temples - Simultaneous schizophrenia and the dance of the dead".
What follows is a fragmented series of images. Lunch wanders through woods and fields as the sound of wind fades in-and-out of the audio; an old cottage appears in shots that vary from overexposed to yellow-tinted; a white horse and a dark pony walk alongside each other across an otherwise-deserted road; spoken lines, delivered as either clean voiceover or direct to-camera with the sound of the Super-8 motor -"The brains have been changed to protect the innocent" and "I bit off all that I could chew and nearly choked to death. Emotional indigestion. We are our own worst enemies and we like it like that "; a close-up of Lunch's hand - the nails decorated with red varnish - moving over a rock and dipping into a stream as ‘In Heaven', the song also used in David Lynch's Eraserhead (1976), fills the soundtrack; a tightly framed close-up of Lunch's eyes staring intensely into the camera as she says "The past never dies, it just continually repeats itself". ‘In Heaven' again plays and persists over the film's final image, an out of focus shot of a glistening river.
Like Dawn To Dust is an important and illuminating film for both Dick and Lunch since it marks a significant transition in the work of both artists. Dick returned to Ireland following her time in America, and it is interesting to note that Liberty's Booty (1980) and Visibility Moderate (1981), the two films she made between this and her previous collaboration with Lunch, intertwine contrasting footage from both countries in a way that reflects changes in Irish culture that occurred during her absence. With Like Dawn To Dust, Dick appears to be moving towards an exclusively Irish film, one which contains only footage shot in Connemara. Yet it is still an American performer that she chooses to place in this landscape. Removing Lunch from her familiar urban background of 1970s New York City and placing her in the almost-timeless setting of the Irish countryside creates a strong sense of alienation and loneliness. This can be read as reflecting the filmmaker's own sentiments about returning to her home country. Visually, the film retains the rough Super-8 style of the earlier works but the edginess of the NYC films has given way to a sense of rustic tranquillity undermined by decay. This aesthetic approach was abandoned for her next project, Rothach (1985), an almost structuralist landscape film that also foregrounds the Irish countryside, but in a considerably more controlled fashion and on 16mm as opposed to Super-8.
What is most noticeable about Lydia Lunch in Like Dawn To Dust is how much she matured in the years following Beauty Becomes The Beast. On a superficial level, she appears, naturally, older and also slimmer, her clothes and hair now more goth than punk. But the most significant change is in her performance. Her voice is raspier and less shrill than before, her line delivery closer in tone to a whisper than to the aggressively loud manner familiar from the earlier films. This not only suits the material but also suggests that in the intervening years she became more conscious of and confident with her vocal abilities.
Like Dawn To Dust
It was during this period that Lunch appeared in The Wild World Of Lydia Lunch (1983), also partially shot in Connemara by American filmmaker Nick Zedd. This could be seen as marking Lunch's transition as a film actress to the next wave of New York underground cinema, the so-called ‘Cinema of Transgression' of which Zedd was a key figure. Generally far more nihilistic and extreme than the Lower East Side filmmaking group of the late 70s, Lunch's involvement was one of the very few common points between these two movements. Particularly significant are her collaborations with Richard Kern, such as The Right Side Of My Brain (1984) and Fingered (1986). In these, she explores many issues touched upon in her work with Dick but in a more aggressive and confrontational manner.
Chris O'Neill is a filmmaker and programmer who divides his time between London and Ireland.