New York Conversations

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

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.

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.

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.

Augenblick reflects on what it means to be human in a post-human world. Moving from The Age of Enlightenment into a digital world, what becomes of out relationship to each other and to the earth?

Bette Gordon describes her first feature film as “a narrative derived from film’s own material and my concern for exploring issues of representation and identification in cinema."

A sumptuous and passionate reimagining of Claude Cahun's life.

Sumptuous nature is artificially created from the female imagination as if the Garden of Eden was made for the pleasure of women only. The female inhabitants perform to a soundtrack that is radically classical or vice-versa.

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.

A short film about a domestic cat which also comments on homo sapiens, the most predatory and destructive animal on earth.

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.

"This experimental film embodies an implicit critique of the male paradigm where the fetishisation of property and privilege has resulted in a global ethical deficit."

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.

New York Our Time is an ethnographic look from the inside at a particular community and period in the history of a great city, and a meditation on the passing of time. Interviewees include photographer Nan Goldin, performer Lydia Lunch, and post-punk feminists Bush Tetras, as well as representatives of a new generation, the children of that 1970s era of free expression, now finding their own way through a city increasingly in thrall to market forces.

Liberty’s Booty is an investigation into prositution from a female perspective under a late capitalist economy. The film is also a document and a celebration of a New York subculture in the late seventies. With a dense mix of real testimonies, verité footage and acted out scenarios, this film examines power relations and the commodification of the body. The film alludes to a growing globalisation with its reference to a MacDonalds strike in Dublin and imagery of Pope Paul’s visit to Ireland in 1979 which in retrospect, is seen as marking a final attempt to halt the transformation of Irish society.

A kaleidoscopic film depicting Ireland in the early 80s. These fragments of rural and urban life blend document with fiction showing a teenager in love, a riot outside the British Embassy, a picket at Mountjoy prison, dinnertime in Cork with Nell McCafferty on the radio. Soundtrack by Steve Nieve.