In her first film, Guerillère Talks, Vivienne Dick updates the screen-test format in a punk home movie profiling eight women from the music scene, including Adele Bertei, Lydia Lunch, Anya Phillips, and Pat Place. Individual reels of Super8 film capture subjects in real time and are spliced together with the leader—Dick had come to New York without a background in film and happened upon a course at Millennium Film Workshop—creating an intimate, avant-garde communal portrait. In a contrasting view, the intervening Staten Island casts Place as an otherworldly creature in a post-apocalyptic beach setting. Dick brought a vérité approach to the exploration of female objectification in her last New York film, *Liberty's Booty*—a subject later echoed in film projects centered on sex workers by scene cohorts Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Lizzie Borden. The frank and unsentimental documentation of a Lower East Side brothel housing middle-class, white call girls suggests links between American capitalism and desire, with the Statue of Liberty cast as the greatest madame of all. The film had its debut at Club 57, a rare instance of the alternative repertory venue premiering No Wave work, after which it was described by the East Village Eye’s Leonard Abrams as being full of “strength, humor, sleaze, individuality, self-reliance.”
Guerillère Talks. 1978. USA. Directed by Vivienne Dick. With Adele Bertei, Lydia Lunch, Beate Nilsen, Anya Philips, Ikue Lle. Digital video from Super8mm. 24 min.
Courtesy of LUX.
Staten Island. 1977–8. USA. Directed by Vivienne Dick. With Pat Place. Digital video from Super8mm. 5 min.
Courtesy of LUX.
Liberty’s Booty. 1980. USA. Directed by Vivienne Dick. Digital video from Super8mm. 48 min.
Courtesy of LUX.