Friday 10 September 2010, 19.00

This screening includes a Q&A with Vivienne Dick and Nan Goldin, and a performance by Lydia Lunch.

Staten Island
Vivienne Dick, 1978, Super-8 / DVD, 5 min

A low budget sci-fi short, where an androgynous alien, played by Pat Place, emerges from the sea to sift through rubbish on a beach. This film was originally intended to be part of a longer collaborative work to be made by a group of women called Les Guérillères, after the radical feminist book of the same name by Monique Wittig.

She Had Her Gun All Ready
Vivienne Dick, 1978, Super-8 / DVD, 28 min

This noir psychodrama follows the relationship between two characters, played by Pat Place and Lydia Lunch. Set in the Lower East Side in New York, the film revolves around the power relations between two friends where one is dominated by, or in thrall to the other. The long drawn out scenes in the first half of the film reflect the paranoia and indecision of the weaker character. The relationship dynamic shifts halfway through  the film after a long mirror scene, after which the ‘victim’ begins to stalk her agressor. 

Beauty Becomes The Beast
Vivienne Dick, 1979, Super-8 / DVD, 41 min

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.  As in many of Dick’s films, it concerns itself with the position of woman as subject and the way women experience patriarchal law and the heterosexual order.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended
A season ticket for all six Vivienne Dick films can be purchased by calling 020 7887 8888. Price £20 (£16 concessions).

  

This event is related to the Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera exhibition