Issue 5: Winter 2009 / '10
Vivienne Dick Now and All At Once
Maximilian Le Cain
The immediate impression received on entering the exhibition Between Truth and Fiction: The Films of Vivienne Dick could perhaps be expressed as ‘Vivienne Dick now and all at once'. This nearly complete retrospective of the work of the preeminent Irish experimental filmmaker was held in the downstairs space of the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, between September and November last year. Curated with boldness by Treasa O Brien, it concentrated more than two decades' worth of film and video work into one gallery, with projections on walls and suspended screens, as well as several wall-mounted monitors. Risking over-cluttered chaos, this multiple juxtaposition of complete works instead resulted in a surprisingly coherent two-sided experience. In spite of slight audio overspill, it proved quite possible to remain in front of any of the screens for the full duration of a film and to enjoy it with relative comfort. Such focus, on the other hand, seemed an unlikely prospect whilst moving around the space. Slipping between images, it proved hard to keep the eyes settled, with other screens impinging and enticing the gaze beyond the nearest film, shifting the attention from late ‘70s New York to ‘80s London and Ireland and, again, back to New York. This audio-visual overlapping, whilst rupturing the integrity of individual films, resulted in a restless continuum which offered an experience as distinct from that of any single work taken alone as from the sum of her oeuvre viewed sequentially. Although, with very few exceptions, all of the films included were initially created to be screened individually in cinema or cinema style screenings, or on television, their collective presentation in the Crawford amounted to an installation piece too conceptually appropriate to the style and content of Dick's work to be regarded as just a professionally mounted display. What this ‘concept' consists of is the further ‘opening up' through the exhibition layout of films that are already exceptionally ‘open'.
Donegal-born Dick's career began in the late ‘70s as an expatriate in New York with five short- and medium-length films created from within the No Wave alternative music milieu. She worked, and still works, in a very personal mode, utilising tools generally associated more with home movie making than professional industrial cinema: 8mm, 16mm, video... She has made the most of the relative immediacy of these formats in creating films from the places and with the people she has encountered in her life. As the title of the exhibition, Between Truth and Fiction, attests, her work is a classic example of the rich cross-pollination of fiction and documentary that has been much practiced in underground cinema. Yet, especially in her earliest works, this documentary / fiction fusion generally moved from the former in the direction of the latter. The realities of her time and place were asked to perform and the goal was decidedly more psychodrama than docudrama. Yet the transformation which reality underwent in her films was never as complete or direct as it was in, say, those by her friend Jack Smith. Her penchant for collage allowed her to draw more subtle and ambiguous shadings of identity from her performers and locations.
Persona and landscape: her approach to these crucial elements was defined in her first two films. Guérillère Talks (1978) consisted of a series of monologues by women directed at Dick's 8mm camera. These starkly announced the rich confounding and overlapping of confession and performance that would characterise much of her work, as well as her primary concern with women's experience. In this film Dick ascribes herself the role of listener, allowing her cast to present themselves as they desire. Although obviously still undeveloped here, this attitude has remained at the root of Dick's filmmaking: a sensitivity, an instinct, a capacity for tuning in to her surroundings that accounted for everything from her choice of material to her fertile complicity with her performers to the structuring of the films. This causes one to wonder if those who discuss her films as respresentative of DIY filmmaking, proving that ‘anoyone can do it', have actually seen them. The organising sensibility at work in them is as rare and particular as polished professionalism is common. And it is capable of using the most modest means to create hauntingly rich emotional textures, as well as to find a mysterious and completely unpredictable sense of balance in even the most apparently messy films.
If Guérillère Talks enacts the foundation of her relationship with performers, her five-minute follow-up, Staten Island (1978), gives a clear indication of her approach to landscape, which is nothing if not lyrically expressive. This quality was visible in the concluding segment of Guérillère Talks, which moved the film from apartment interiors to a desolate demolition site. But, in the subsequent film, the similarly bleak location of Staten Island becomes the film's raison d'etre. This wasteland appears science fictional, with an ‘alien' looking Pat Place adrift in its desolate space. Even if this character is, possibly, the only actual extra-terrestrial in Dick's ouevre, she is also a playfully hyperbolic indication of the social and psychological outsider status of Dick's characters in general, just as her surroundings emphasise the marginal, often somehow decaying places that they tend to occupy. A sense of exile runs through Dick's films, but it is without nostalgia. ‘Home' is ambivalent at best, and sometimes posionous and scarring.
Beauty Becomes the Beast
Recalling her time living in New York, Dick told Experimental Conversations: "...it was a fantastic era because you could really dress up in whatever your thing was, whatever your fancy was. Because in second hand shops you could find anything, old records, old clothes... It was dress-up time. So there was great material for filmmaking because you had all the clothes and all the bits'n'pieces and people dressed up their apartments in all stuff taken out of skips." Her films of this period certainly feel like an extension of this jumble sale aesthetic, yet they stand as a warning against confusing the playful with the frivolous. These are serious games in which identity itself is being negotiated through ‘dress up'. And the exiled status of cast-off items, already heavy with past association, being re-fashioned in accordance with current, fragile situations is nothing if not an extension of the existential content of Dick's cinema. Even the granular texture of her 8mm images carries the charge of second-hand home movies.
After completing the impressively moody, freewheeling She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978), Dick scaled the creative heights of her first two masterpieces, Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979) and Liberty's Booty (1980), with astonishing speed. In these dense, poetic, extremely fragmented collisions between psychodrama and essay film, she proposed a complex, impressionistic approach to narrative that privileges a viscerally reflective engagement with the moment over traditional narrative exposition. Beauty Becomes the Beast, a darkly gothic portrait of a troubled young woman, leans more towards fiction whereas Liberty's Booty, an ambiguously documentary look at prostitution, towards ostensible verité. But both share the thrilling feeling of being part of a much bigger reality, one that a single film could never encompass. Dick's New York appears as a city with stacks of striking and resonant images just dumped all over every apartment and on every street corner, waiting to be scooped up and discovered. On the one hand, this is due to her acute sense of atmosphere, her ability to seize on telling details of décor or setting. Her apparently casual filming style endows her scenes with a home movie offhandedness (albeit one always infused with tremendous energy) that allows for the intimacy of the home movie, as well as a deceptive sense of randomness. On the other hand, the fragmented, eclectic and generally oblique narrative design invites the spectator to freely explore both the image at hand and the feelings which it evokes. This is in contrast to most films, narrative or documentary, which essentially releive viewers of responsibility for their own reactions through coralling all the films' resonances into an easily digestable story format. Naturally, the work of exploration Dick's best films demand is never really complete. There is no tying up of loose ends in these films which reflect lives, and even life itself, as nothing but loose ends.
The relationship which Dick forges with her audience is actually much closer to that of a musician than a narrative filmmaker. Not that she's ever attempted to create an abstract ‘music for the eyes'. The evocative ‘lyrics' of narrative elements and the ragged, improvised structural ‘melody' propose something far rawer. After all, her New York films emerged from and were nurtured by the No Wave music scene. The intellectual and emotional give-and-take of her best work allows viewers uncommon latitude to put their own feelings into play with the film. This creates an impression more akin to the mental freedom of listening to a song than to the generally more overtly invasive experience of watching most films. It's possible to be with Dick's films as much as in them. And her mastery at integrating songs into her films is of the first order, the equal of anything Anger, Fassbinder or Scorsese have achieved. Yet her use of music works differently. Rather than locking a song into a tight, illustrative relationship with a specific narrative event, she allows it to hover as part of the scene's overall texture in a more Tarkovskian arrangement.
She Had Her Gun All Ready
Her return to Ireland saw the creation of another crucial work, Visibility Moderate (1981). This ‘state of the nation' collage enters the country through the comical route of a female American tourist's perception. But it soon broadens out to encompass an array of social and political situations at play in a rapidly changing Ireland. The intelligence, scope, wit and formal sophistication of this sometimes still frighteningly relevant film is so tragically distant from anything ‘visible' in Irish filmmaking today that it might as well be Martian. Visibility Moderate stands as arguably the finest Irish film of the past four decades.
After the three magnificent and elaborate works that were Beauty Becomes the Beast, Liberty's Booty and Visibility Moderate, Dick focused on smaller, more compact films for the rest of the ‘80s. Like Dawn to Dust (1983) transported Lydia Lunch, the iconic performer from three of her New York films, to the bleak Irish countryside for an affectingly melancholic reverie. Rothach (1985) proved a very different meditation on Irish landscape and one decidedly rooted in Irish culture. Images Ireland (1988) was a brief and sketchy return Visibility Moderate's concerns.
London Suite (1989) is the major work from Dick's time living in London in the ‘80s. Like Rothach, it did not feature as part of the main body of the Between Truth and Fiction exhibition, but was projected in parallel to the show as part of a number of scheduled 16mm screenings. It retains the patchwork format of her New York period, as well as the emphasis on quirky portraiture, but the energy is more relaxed. Witty and sometimes melancholic rather than overtly visceral, the emphasis is still very much on outsiders existing in a big city. The other London film from this period included in the exhibition, Two Pigeons (1990), harks back to the wasteland of Staten Island, although this time juxtaposing the post-apocalyptic scenery with the civilised spectacle of people relaxing in a park. The result is, as intended, a worthy tribute to Jack Smith. Dick returned to New York after a ten year absence with the 1992 video New York Conversations, which consisted of a series of interviews in which she catches-up with old friends. If the format harks back to Guérillère Talks and the conversations prove engaging, what has changed remarkably is the perspective on New York as a place. It is not only an outsider's perpsective, but now a city viewed from the outside: no more than the scene-setting background to a documentary.
The only other film featured in the central part of the gallery came from slightly later in her filmography. It was a tiny and exquisite gem called Two Be Two (1999). This simple, serene, hushedly private series of domestic images from the apartment Dick was living in at the time might have been easy to overlook amidst the general audio-visual bustle of the show. But those that paid it due attention might have also concluded that this miniature distillation of intimate quietude is the most hauntingly beautiful of all of Dick's shorter works.
Otherwise, videos from the later, less prolific period of Dick's career were exhibited slightly away from the main body of the show. A Skinny Little Man Attacked Daddy (1994), the major achievement of the latter half of her career, was tucked away on a small monitor in a far corner of the gallery. This distance seemed to imply an appropriate ambience of discretion around a film which brings the viewer so deeply into the home life of Dick's family in rural Donegal. This return to roots shows a powerful, tempered reformulation of key strengths of Dick's masterpieces of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s: a fragmented, emotionally charged narrative obliqueness, and a sensitivity to the potential power of what are now literally home-movie shooting techniques. On the one hand, the intimacy of what Dick shows us is sometimes extreme, even to the point of sharing a harrowing death bed vigil. Yet there is also great restraint, a formality that is sometimes almost Fordian in its instinctive respect for family ritual and tradition. What makes watching this film so disconcerting is that Dick never tells us what to think or feel. We are invited into the family home and then left there to observe fragments of family life that come with resonances that we, as outsiders, can sense but never even begin to determine. What scattered insights we do get are part of an emotional history so much vaster than what we have seen that there isn't even the temptation to try to extrapolate a complete picture from it. However uncomfortably intimate the scenes we are presented with might become, Dick allows her family to preserve its human mystery intact. She refuses to pretend that we can ‘know' her background by reducing her family to mere facts and this is the ultimate discretion. In place of the ‘facts' which an ordinary filmmaker would parade before us, we are given images that are allowed to resonate with our own experience of family, of others. Our lives are allowed to flow into the film and fill in the gaps, as it flows into the gaps that surround real-life encounters. It is the ultimate example of the exceptional respect Dick has always shown her audiences.
The three-channel video Excluded By The Nature Of Things (2002) was installed on three suspended screens in an anteroom opening off the main gallery. Comprised mainly of shots of the Irish countryside, it harks back to Rothach in its sidelining of human performance in favour of landscape. Yet its splintering of nature into a series of signs is a far more abstract project than the slow, claustrophobically rigorous 360 degree pans that constituted the earlier film. What human presence there is crosses the landscape without achieving any form of communication. In contrast, the most recent piece in the show, the unassuming Trisha's Song (2009), seems like Dick returning to the first impulse behind Guérillère Talks: a solitary woman given the freedom to perform for Dick's attentive camera. This simple, one-take video shows Trisha O Riordan singing on the other side of a busy country road from the camera, apparently unconcerned by the cars flashing past or the lightly falling rain. The soundtrack favours the voice of this robust looking, middle-aged Irish lady over the potentially obtrusive ambient noise. Her down-to-earth style couldn't be more different from the punky aestheticism of the New York ‘Guérillères' Dick filmed thirty years before. Nonetheless, this oddly charming video seems very much a restatement of the first principles of Dick's filmmaking.
As noted before, the main arena of the exhibition essentially showcased her work from '78 up to '92, concluding with her return to New York in New York Conversations. Her more recent works were given their own spaces, on the show's margins. Trisha's Song was even placed outside the gallery space, on a monitor in the hall. It's possible to speculate that this arrangement deliberately separates the prolific first half of her career from the more halting, less predictable rhythm of production that has characterized the last two decades. But situating Trisha's Song, Dick's most recent work and possibly a conscious reframing of her origins as a filmmaker for a newer place and time, at what is both the entrance to and exit of the exhibition can't fail to make one wonder with anticipation where her work will go next...
Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and cinéphile living in Cork City, Ireland.
Website: http://lecain.blogspot.com