MAC DONALD: How about the title Visibility: Moderate. Does it refer to the view from the [World] Trade Center? DICK: No, just to the weather reports you hear all the time on the radio: 'visibility moderate to fair'. It's like a little comment of my own on the film, which I felt was really a surface thing; it was the best I could do under the circumstances, moneywise and with the pressures on me. While I was doing it, and as I was finishing it, I met all these other people; it could have been quite different. I was just getting into living in Ireland again. I want to make more films there, better films.
Vivienne Dick interviewed by Scott MacDonald (2)

At the beginning of the 1980s the Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick was perhaps the most celebrated figure in New York's 'No Wave' or Punk cinema. She had produced a series of Super-8 film narratives, which were 'hailed as contemporary underground classics'(3) and her work featured prominently in a special 1982 issue of the journal October, focusing on contemporary developments in avant-garde film. It included an interview, by Scott MacDonald, and an article by Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, dealing with the development of No Wave cinema since its emergence in I978.(4) Yet, as the above quote suggests, the focus of Vivienne Dick's work was already shifting towards Ireland and in the same year she left New York for Dublin.

Another journey is also signalled by this special issue of October; the migration of No Wave cinema from its birthplace in the bars and rock clubs of the East Village, towards the established institutions of avant-garde film. No Wave cinema did not retain its position at the critical edge of avant-garde practice for very long. By 1984, the movement (if it ever had any such coherency) had dissipated and its history was being re-written by formerly supportive critics such as Hoberman. In an overview of developments in American filmaking, entitled 'After Avant-garde Film', Hoberman dismissed No Wave cinema as a 'postmodernist repetition' of an earlier cultural moment, associated with pop art and underground film and compared this repetition to the nostalgic 'genre pastiches', such as American Graffiti, Star Wars and Body Heat, produced by Hollywood during the same period.(5)

The No Wave movement retains a place within American film history, however, and in recent years a number of major retrospective exhibitions have been staged. Vivienne Dick's work has featured in two: No Wave Cinema,1978-87 at the Whitney Museum (1996) and Big as Life: An American History of 8mm films (1999), at the Museum of Modern Art. Even though she has not lived in the US since 1982, these events have confirmed her status as an important 'American' filmmaker. But Dick's prominence within the No Wave has also worked to limit analysis of her work in the US and in Ireland. For the most part, American curators and critics have paid little attention to her later films, made in Ireland and in London.(6)

No Wave cinema has always been theorized in terms of a definitively American tradition, not least because of the fact that Vivienne Dick and her contemporaries Beth and Scott B, James Nares and Eric Mitchell were all based in New York during the late 1970s and early 1980s. J. Hoberman was also instrumental in shaping the processes of reception and historicization, through his articles in the Village Voice and an influential programme of screenings at Anthology Archives in I981.(7) He consistently situated the movement in relation to a specifically American tradition of narrow-gauge filmmaking, an approach that did not allow for an extended analysis of either Dick's feminism or issues of cultural specificity.

It was only when Vivienne Dick began to focus on overtly 'Irish' themes, in Visibility: Moderate - A Tourist Film (1981), that critics such as Hoberman began to emphasize the fact that she was Irish.(8) Her association with No Wave cinema has also presented problems of categorization for Irish curators and critics, particularly in relation to the dominant practices in Irish cinema or visual art.(9) Until relatively recently, her work was outside the canon in its most literal sense: the national film archive. (10) This is despite the fact that she has made a large number of films in Ireland since the early 1980s and has represented Ireland in a small number of international exhibitions and festivals. (11)

A critical analysis of Vivienne Dick's work, from the late 1970s to the present, is clearly long overdue. But my own research centres on avant-garde currents in Irish filmmaking during the 1970s and I980s and, as such, this paper deals only with a small selection of Dick's films. My aim is to highlight thematic parallels between her work and that of contemporary Irish filmmakers and I focus on the representation of the family and on the relationship between public and private space. In the process, I identify continuities between Dick's 'American' and 'Irish' films, centring on the notion of a cultural landscape that is mediated by Hollywood and by the experience of migration. Visibility: Moderate - A Tourist Film provides a focal point for my analysis because it is explicitly concerned with Dick's own position as a migrant filmmaker, positioned between Ireland and the US.

My analysis of Vivienne Dick's work, and Irish filmmaking in the late 1970s and early 1980s, is informed by reference to contemporary theories of the avant-garde. In particular, it relies heavily upon Paul Willemen's 'An Avant Garde for the Eighties' and Claire Johnston's analysis of Pat Murphy's film Maeve. (12) Although Willemen does not reference No Wave cinema directly, he traces a turn towards narrative across a range of feminist and anti-colonial practices. He theorizes an avant-garde that is structured by a critical engagement with specificities of cultural production and reception and he focuses, in particular, on the representation of landscape. Noting a shift away from modernist aesthetics and towards a critical engagement with the conventions of realism, he emphasizes that the new avant-garde may mobilize landscape ‘as a layered set of discourses, is a text in its own right'.(13) This contrasts with conventional representations of landscape:

In conventional narrative [...] a tourist's point of view is adopted as opposed to the point of view of those whose history is traced in [the landscape], or for whom the land is a crucial element in the relations of production that govern their lives. The tourist sees in the landscape only mirrors or projections of his/her own phantasms. (14)

Many of the filmmakers foregrounded by Willemen (Chantal Akerman, Cinema Action, Pat Murphy, Thaddeus O'Sullivan) are positioned between, rather than firmly within, national formations. Vivienne Dick's work, which transects a number of quite distinct contexts for avant-garde practice, also seems to have been formed by this productive position of ‘outside-otherness'.

FROM THE MARGINS TO THE METROPOLIS

Before turning to the analysis of specific films, it may be useful to provide a brief biography of Vivienne Dick, tracing her various journeys between Ireland and the US. Born in Donegal in 1950 Vivienne Dick studied arts (Archaeology and French) at University College Dublin and then toured Europe, India and Mexico before finally moving to New York in I975. There, she joined the Millennium Film Co-op and began exploring Super-8 film. It was not until she became involved with the Colab film collective, which included Beth B, Scott B, James Nares and Eric Mitchell, that she began to make and exhibit her own work. At this time she was also heavily involved in the Punk music scene and she collaborated with performers such as Lydia Lunch and Pat Place on film, performance and music projects.(15)

In the late 1970s New York was at the centre of the American avant-garde. It was home to a number of established institutions, from the Filmmakers' Co-op and Anthology Archives (associated with New American Cinema and the 'structuralism' of Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton) to the Whitney Museum (associated with the feminist and conceptual film of Yvonne Rainer and Vito Acconci, among others). The Lower East Side also hosted an increasing number of artists' studios, galleries and performance spaces. The No Wave filmmakers, however, rejected both the established and 'alternative' art spaces, in favour of bars such as Max's Kansas City, temporary storefront cinemas, such as the New Cinema on St Mark's Place, as well as newer film clubs such as the Collective for Living Cinema and the Millennium. Instead of Anthology's reverence towards the medium of film and the Whitney's critical rigour, No Wave filmmakers sought to recapture something of the populist appeal of 1960s underground cinema by screening their films in rock clubs between the bands.,/p>

Super-8 appealed to the No Wave filmmakers because of its accessibility and its long association with home movies. In the mid-1970s it also became possible to record sync sound and the 'anti-aesthetic' of Super-8 became associated with Punk. The No Wave featured a number of prominent women performers and this is was highlighted in Vivienne Dick's first completed film, Guérillière Talks(1978), which consists of a series of 'interviews', each running for the length of a three minute reel. Despite this 'structuralist' approach, however, Guérillière Talks is clearly less concerned with the specificity of film than with issues of gender.(16) Her subsequent films, Staten Island (1978), She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978), Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979) and Libery's Booty (I980) retain something of this quasi-documentary quality. Yet, with the exception of Liberty's Booty, they are also notable for the way in which they cast No Wave 'stars', such as Lydia Lunch and Pat Place, as characters in trash melodrama.

Although all of these works were produced on a very low budget, funded entirely by Vivienne Dick's earnings, their circulation was supported by an established network of clubs and societies and by the early 1980s, Dick was touring with her work to film clubs and colleges throughout the US.(17) Her films were shown on Manhattan Cable, a public access television station, at international festivals such as Berlin, Genoa and Edinburgh (18) and, in 1981, a programme of her films was screened at San Francisco's Pacific Cinemathéque. Finally, in 1983, Visibility: Moderate (1981) was included in the film programme of the Whitney Biennial, a prestigious survey of contemporary art.(19) But by this time, however, Vivienne Dick had relocated to Ireland.

Her decision to return to Ireland was prompted, in part, by positive encounters with Irish filmmakers in New York and in Ireland. She met Bob Quinn and later Thaddeus O'Sullivan and Pat Murphy in New York, while attending screenings of Irish film, including O'Sullivan's A Pint of Plain (1975) and Murphy’s Rituals of Memory (1977).(20) On a brief visit to Dublin, in 1979, she followed Quinn's recommendation to contact Project Arts Centre and arranged screenings of her own work for filmmakers such as Cathal Black At this time, Project was at the centre of a vibrant indigenous film culture, which was supported by new initiatives in arts policy.(21) When Dick returned in 1982, however, Project Cinema Club was less active and, although the Irish Film Board had been established, the facilities for Iow budget avant-garde production were underdeveloped at best. Dick continued to exhibit her work at film clubs such as the Ha'penny, at festivals outside Dublin and in colleges. She also became involved in running one of Ireland's first film production courses, at the College of Commerce, Rathmines (now part of DIT).

While in Ireland, Vivienne Dick completed a number of short Super-8 films, including Trailer (1983) and Like Dawn to Dust (1983). The latter film, set within the Irish rural landscape, features a performance by Lydia Lunch and was subsequently broadcast by Channel Four. But in the absence of recognition from funding agencies for her previous Super-8 work, she found it difficult to continue her film practice.(22) In 1984 she left Dublin for London, where she became a member (and later a director) of the London Film-makers' Co-op. Almost immediately after arriving in London, she received funding from the British Arts Council to complete Rothach (1985), a 16mm film photographed in Donegal. She subsequently secured a number of commissions and awards from both Irish and British agencies and continued to explore Irish subjects in films such as Images/ Ireland (1988) Pobal-Portrait of an Artist (1988) and A Skinny Little Man Attacted Daddy (1994).(23)

BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE: VIVIENNE DICK'S NEW YORK

As I have already noted, New York occupied a key place within the American avant-gardes of the late 1970s. It boasted both the established cultural institutions, such as MoMA and the Whitney, and the alternative spaces of the Lower East Side, some of which had witnessed the emergence of underground cinema. But the city also served as the privileged symbol, if not the actual centre, of globalized capitalism and it remained a focal point for migrants from all parts of the world. New York's doubled identity, as both 'subcultural' haven and global trade centre was, of course, most evident in the Lower East Side, located in close proximity to the twin towers. Towards the end of the 1970s these contradictory aspects of New York city life became particularly pronounced when rents in the Lower East Side began to rise, driven by a process of gentrification to which artists had perhaps (unwittingly) contributed.(24)

Vivienne Dick's early Super-8 narratives figure New York as a site of conspicuous consumption and waste. One of her first films, Staten Island (1978), is actually set in what appears to be a dump. In this short work, an androgynous female figure (the No Wave musician and performer Pat Place) investigates various abandoned objects, adopting the manner and wearing the costume of a visitor from outer space. The distinctive No Wave or Punk 'anti-aesthetic' becomes more pronounced in later films, through the accumulation of mass-produced goods and the referencing of retro fashion and pop music (as well as Punk). This aesthetic seems to suggest a convergence of formerly distinct eras, a form of time-space compression that David Harvey has identified as characteristic of postmodernity.(25)

Pat Place also features in She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978) which remains one of Vivienne Dick's most acclaimed films. This is a narrative of obsessive desire focusing on the relationship between Place and the 'femme fatale' Lydia Lunch. It is set within iconic New York settings such as East Village diners and Coney Island and it explores the dark side of American culture, with fleeting references to serial killers and stalkers. Dick's next film, Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979), also explores the flip side of the American dream and it shares some of the same themes as Taxi Driver. The central character in this mock-documentary (played by Lydia Lunch) is a teenage runaway, turned prostitute. Much of the action takes place in the contemporary Lower East Side, complete with vacant industrial lots, but this 'realism' is disrupted by the casting of Lunch, and by the use of melodramatic flashbacks which hint at a history of abuse.

Liberty’s Booty (1980), Vivienne Dick's subsequent film, also explores the theme of sexual exploitation, focusing on a group of prostitutes working in a New York brothel. This film developed out of a series of interviews and many of the participants are not actors. But, like much of Dick's work, it resists easy categorization as the 'documentary’ sections are framed by a short animation and interspersed with some obviously staged elements. Despite the apparent sensationalism of its subject matter, the narrative is resolutely focused on the everyday, calling attention to the domestic details of these women's lives. The women are, in fact, represented primarily as exploited workers and in the latter part of the film the critique of gender relations is displaced by a broader interrogation of US capitalism, when Dick suggests an analogy between the brothel and employment practices of McDonald's restaurants. (26)

Despite an evident fascination with American culture, Vivienne Dick's early films offer a number of thematic and formal parallels with the work of Irish contemporaries. For example, Beauty Becomes the Beast and Liberty’s Booty both explore memories of abuse, exploitation and violence, as do Cathal Black's Our Boys (1981) and Joe Comerford's Traveller (1981). Yet, while the films of Black and Comerford have been theorized as explorations of national identity and national history(27) Dick's work seems to lack any overt reference to foundational narratives or myths of the Irish nation. But in Liberty's Booty, the exploration of gender stereotypes is informed by critique of the mythic tropes through which the American nation has been imagined. The figure of 'Liberty'(28) becomes a symbol of exploitation as well as freedom and is aligned with another signifier of globalized capitalism, the golden arches of MacDonald's.

The representation of public and private space in Dick's New York films might also be read in terms of an exploration of Irish identity. She Had Her Gun All Ready, Beauty Becomes the Beast and Liberty 's Booty are initially set within domestic environments. Yet, despite the deeply personal character of the themes explored in the two earlier films, the central characters end up playing out their fears and fantasies on the street. Liberty's Booty also disrupts fixed concepts of personal space because it is set within an apartment that doubles as a brothel. In Transformations in Irish Culture, Luke Gibbons highlights a 'blurring of boundaries between the personal and the political', associated with the experience of colonization.(29) He notes both that the colonized nation may be conceptualized as a literal 'body politic' and that an 'alternative "feminised" public sphere (imagined as the nation)' can serve to turn the colonial stereotype against itself, providing a critique of the official patriarchal order of the state. The confusion of public and private in Dick's work could be read in these terms, as an attempt to negotiate the relationship between the nation, the state and the female body. Arguably, however, this project is also informed by the No Wave's particular investment in New York as both a site of cultural opposition and a global symbol.

LOOKING TOWARDS IRELAND: MYTH AND MEMORY

Tourist Land is always make-believe land in a certain way. You work most of the year and in America you get two weeks off, only two weeks. [...] You escape into this fantasy land, where everything has to be beautiful and fabulous. If it's Ireland you see lush green countryside and horses and carts and the Blarney Stone. [...] It's totally unreal; it's all memory and myth. (30)

The final section of Liberty’s Booty features a number of references to Ireland, and specifically to a strike by Irish McDonald's workers, which was apparently broken by 'heavies from America'. Ireland is represented initially by images of rolling fields viewed from above, and by a tourist postcard of Irish dancing. In the closing shots, however, news coverage of Pope John Paul II, identified by the newscaster as 'the superstar Pope', seem to suggest a convergence between Irish and American popular culture, mediated by communication technology. Vivienne Dick's next film, Visibility: Moderate, examines this mediated relationship between Ireland and the US in further detail, focusing on advertising and tourism. But it also considers the way in which the lived experience of place is structured by traditions of representation associated with the colonial state and with projects of resistance.

Visibility: Moderate is perhaps Vivienne Dick's most self-reflexive work. Although the title is taken from a weather report overheard at one point in the narrative, it could also be said to describe the prospects for avant-garde filmmaking in Ireland and the economic interdependencies between Ireland and the US. The first part of the film follows American woman, dressed in fashionably retro clothes, on a tour of Irish landmarks and seems to take the form of a home movie. This 'tourist' poses in the ruins of Irish monasteries, visits the Puck Fair, kisses the Blarney stone and travels on a horse drawn cart, recalling images from iconic John Hinde postcards and, most obviously, the romantic landscape of John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952). The 'tour' is, however, punctuated by a montage of TV ads (ranging from the amateurish animation of 'Jack Ryan truck rental' to the slick suburban fantasy offered by Blueband margarine) and by several comic interludes in which the tourist imagines herself as a 'Celt' running through a mystical rural landscape.(31)

As the tour progresses it becomes apparent that the visitor is in fact Irish-American, and her fantasies acquire an even greater resonance. But Visilibilty: Moderate is not exclusively concerned with cultural tourism, or even ethnicity, and the journey to Ireland is book-ended by images of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The pre-credit sequence introduces the connection between power and vision; the camera pans from the spectacular view over New York city back to the central character, who is slicing a pineapple, a graphic symbol of global trade. This alignment between spectacle and power becomes overt in the second part of the film, which deals primarily with surveillance. The tourist embarks on an alternative sightseeing journey through the urban spaces of Dublin and Belfast. She encounters a series of unlikely characters, from kitsch religious singers to labour activists and Hare Krishnas. These sequences, and specifically the street protests against the H Block prisons, are reminiscent of certain sections in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's A Pint of Plain,/em> (1975), just as the earlier images of the Puck Fair echo scenes from O'Sullivan's On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978). (32)