INTRODUCTION

COMING from two very different traditions of cinema, the films of Vivienne Dick and Julie Jenkins illustrate the range and richness that is available to anyone interested in representations of groups of women or girl gangs. With their very individual styles and approaches to filmmaking, they offer images that are original and witty. Their respective influences could not be more different. Vivienne cites the N. American Underground of the '60s as an important influence, whereas Julie talks about the impact - from childhood - of British film comedy.

ONE: VIVIENNE DICK REASSESSES HER EARLY FILMS

I talked with Irish-born filmmaker Vivienne Dick in her 18th floor council flat in North West London where she lives with her son and her cat. The focus of the discussion was the films from the late '70s made in New York which gained critical recognition in the context of the 'New Wave' or 'punk' film, a movement with which Vivienne Dick is crucially identified.
Made on Super-8 using friends and neighbours as subjects, the experimental narratives of this period revived the flagging underground filmmaking culture and were shown in the bars arid rock clubs of downtown Manhattan. An unsteady camera, abrupt transitions, jump cuts and changes of mood were the hallmark of Vivienne's inimitable style. In terms of content her films are preoccupied with female sexuality, relationships and 'transgressive behaviour'. Women in ones, twos or in groups are the subject matter of a number of films including Guérillère Talks (1978), She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978), Beauty Becomes The Beast (1979) and Liberty's Booty (1980).

Bev Zalcock: Could you talk about your influences?
Vivienne Dick: New York was a big influence. Seeing women there who were creative and experimenting. There was a lot of encouragement to experiment. The first films I saw at Anthology Archives were basically American Underground cinema. I saw Maya Deren, Ron Rice, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith and Warhol there. This was my first time to see work that wasn't Hollywood film and seemed to be made by one or a few people, home movies really. I'm interested by films that are made by women because it's unusual, still. I remember some time in the '70s seeing Margarethe von Trotta's work The Two Sisters, and later Pat Murphy's films.'
BZ: What is your view on representations of women taking up arms?
VD: I'm interested in how women can have power in the world as they have so little power. I'm interested in incorporating political ideas into a narrative in an oblique way or with humour. I'm not cut out to do straight narrative though. I bring these issues to do with women and power in terms of psychoanalysis and in terms of their place in the world. Or issues to do with a mother for example, which is something I've been thinking about a great deal this past year and work out how to represent that somehow in a film.
BZ: How do you work 'issues' into your films?
VD: Liberty's Booty and Beauty Becomes The Beast particularly come out of this incredible anger that I was feeling. A sort of rage. I see it as more complex now. I saw women being oppressed in the world and a difference between how men and women are brought up. Seeing the church as an oppressive institution, in having been brought up with a heavy dose of Catholicism - reacting against that, you know. There are little scenes that come up in Liberty's Booty like the one in McDonald's, connecting capitalism and low wages. It's not about capitalism but the issues are there. Like the graffiti on the wall by Samo (Jean Michel Basquiat): "TELEVISION=CHURCH=STATE= MCDONALD'S=OPPRESSION" (or was it "McDonald's=Church=State=Television= Oppression"?). The voiceover is somebody recounting the story of McDonald's in Dublin where there was a strike against low wages which lasted over a year.
BZ: There's a sense of random connections in Liberty's Booty. Could you comment on this?
VD: Instead of focusing on a narrative structure in the conventional way, the film links things in a more open-ended way. I'm showing another kind of link that's there anyway. It's a looser kind of link. Things that crop up all the time whether they're on the radio or something on the wall, that you see in the street or whatever, which connect in unexpected ways. I'm aware of all that when I place them in the film - they're not altogether by chance. But at the same time they're captured in a chance way. You're walking round the street and you see something and you say - I want to film that and I know it will fit into the film somewhere.
BZ: Could you talk a bit about your approach to editing?
VD: I learnt to edit as I went along. I had plenty of time to mess about because I was working at home and still usually do. There's a kind of abruptness in the Super-8 work which is there partly because it's inherent in Super-8 single system and live sound. There is a hole in the soundtrack when the camera stops and starts. I like abrupt switches - like channel hopping.
BZ: What about the music?
VD: Sometimes the music comes later. It's something I find that seems to be appropriate and sometimes it's music that's happening at the time I'm filming; it's literally on the radio or someone's playing it or I say "put that record on again, I want that in the shot, playing while I'm shooting". That's how I shot then, very crudely. Now I want to work with people who play with sound - composers.
BZ: Can you talk about the influence of popular culture on your work, as there seems to be a lot of references to it?
VD: It wasn't a conscious thing. We're influenced so much by everything around us and everything we hear. It infiltrates our brains, our consciousness. You know, old programmes coming up on TV. People dressing (we're talking about the late '70s) in the clothes of the '60s. You know, this sense of other times which, of course, we are so aware of now. At that time it was fairly unusual to have someone dressing up in their apartment in completely '60s paraphernalia. Someone who was only a tiny girl in the '60s, playing that music and just fantasising. It is a result of growing up on TV culture and looking at old movies on TV and being influenced by different looks of women, different images of women that allows us to see these representations as constructs. As images of femininity, as possibilities only. In those dance scenes in Beauty Becomes The Beast I'm playing with an image of '60s femininity, obviously with irony. The 'male' dancing partner is a woman in drag. At the beginning of Liberty's Booty there is a scene with the woman with a large doll or mannequin. It is a woman ostensibly but it was really a man who had a sex change. And it's a male-female doll. [2] I wasn't thinking about gender in a theoretical way. I just found it fascinating so I had to film it.
BZ: Another aspect of your films, particularly with Liberty's Booty, is the extraordinary decor, a sense of accumulation of objects. Did you set it up?
VD: The clutter in the rooms was there. It's like seeing a place and saying "I want to film this". It's full of things which spill out of the frame - it's going on, it's continuing. It's to do with the way some of the people I was hanging out with in New York were living - a lot of kitsch and trash. Stuff they collected in their apartments. A bohemian type of lifestyle, full of people who didn't quite fit into society or have jobs or anything. A lot of fantasy in the world, in their world. Eccentric. Probably a lot to do with being in your twenties or early thirties! Like in Liberty's Booty when Trixi opens the fridge in her apartment and she has a broken doll with bloodstains inside the freezer. She didn't put that there for the film. That was there! What the hell does that mean? You know! [Laughs]
BZ: How do you get your characters to perform? Are they acting or are they for real?
VD: Usually it's something I've seen them do many times and think I'd like to film, like the dance scene in Beauty Becomes The Beast. There is a collaboration there because people would often produce their own costumes and props. There was a great playfulness there. I did not have to explain myself. A fantastic atmosphere, full of possibilities; because I think I grew up in a very critical and judgmental culture. Guérillère Talks was the first film I made. It consists of six cartridges of Super-8 strung together, each running for three and a half minutes. The women in each could say and do as they wished. It must have been influenced by Warhol's work I'd seen. I certainly didn't direct them. I remember feeling so thrilled just filming looking at them.
BZ: And what about your work with Lydia Lunch? She's in a number of your films.
VD: In Beauty Becomes The Beast, Lydia Lunch plays a young girl who has been abused or who could have been abused. She said it freaked her out because it wasn't something she could talk about at the time. She told me that she had been abused years later when she asked to see the film again. I had picked it up somehow - but it was never discussed, never talked about. So on the one hand the 'characters' are one-dimensional - we don't 'know' them in the usual narrative sense, but on the other hand there is a documentary element there. So we are seeing real' people, with 'real' apartments, gestures, clothes and views. That boundary is deliberately made unclear. In Liberty's Booty it is difficult to tell who is a prostitute or who isn't. Maybe it is a kind of evasion?
BZ: How far do you think your films are about relationships between women?
VD: In She Had Her Gun All Ready I've always sort of thought that could as easily have been a man and a woman, as two women, in terms of their relationship. Pat [Place] - the blonde-haired one - the more passive one, people who saw that film thought she was a boy. The film is about a relationship. It's about someone feeling overwhelmed by the other person. That mirror in there seems to be such a big feature of the film. Pat's looking at herself and suddenly the image turns into the image of Lydia [Lunch]. There is this identification which turns into a huge hostility, you know, a need to kill - get rid of the other person. This maybe is more of a feature between mothers and daughters, or amongst women, as it's easier for men to break away on account of being another gender; they can move away from that very close bond with the mother. Perhaps. In the film, Lydia tells a story and Pat is sitting there pulling at her hair, full of anxiety. The voiceover is about Ed Gein, the serial killer, who loved his mother to death. He identified with her to the extent that he put on her body suit - disembowelled her and had her skin hanging up in the cupboard. The most extreme end of loving someone to death. Psychoanalysis is a valid way of looking at the film it seems. At the time I seemed to be very preoccupied with relationships being something overpowering; being something where one party can be really overwhelmed by the other. It's still an area we haven't worked through, especially in heterosexual relationships. There is often not enough reciprocity. It seems to me now that this notion of reciprocity is related to respect for the other or another point of view, where we get away from the polarised 'right' and 'wrong' or 'good' and 'bad' which is entirely caught up with Cartesian patriarchal culture. Take relationships within the family set up. It's breaking down now. Women are beginning to demand a more equal place when it comes to children and the value of what they do. Women have really been taken advantage of where children are concerned. Now that families are breaking up, people are forced to realise the value of what it costs to raise a child, for example, when it comes to maintenance. We still live in a society where raising children and doing housework is not considered part of the GNP. It's not considered to have value which is an extraordinary thing. That is the new Pandora's Box! Open that one and the whole of society as we know it will collapse.
BZ: What was your attitude to feminism in the late '70s?
VD: I was interested up to a point because I was quite intimidated by the academic thing. But at the same time I had my ears open; I was listening. I'd feel intimidated by material I didn't understand because there was this kind of slightly academic snobbery about this new stuff that was coming from France. I hadn't read that much. It was very dense and undigested.
BZ: At the time did The Women's Movement take up your films?
VD: Betty Gordon had this screening over in her loft and invited Yvonne Rainer and other women. And I was invited as well and I felt very shy. Nobody spoke to me. They saw She Had Her Gun All Ready but they didn't talk to me about it so I felt estranged. Betty was the person I knew the most in that group and her friend Karen Kay wrote about the film in one of the magazines connected to 'The Collective' which was a downtown alternative cinema at the time. Amy Taubin also wrote about the work. I think the film really upset Yvonne Rainer. And the same thing happened when I went to Edinburgh and showed the films there - I don't think Ulrike Ottinger liked the work, though her editor did. It was difficult for me to talk about the work. I felt incredibly vulnerable - unsure - although I wasn't that unsure as I made the damn thing! Right. And I was always there when they were being shown. But I felt like I was really exposing myself in some way. But it was very gratifying in another way. There was always a very strong response. It was not your usual film audience at all, as the early screenings took place in music venues. It was interesting that people didn't find the films too confusing. It all happened outside of the academic thing, outside of all the feminist thing.
BZ: Did you feel you were making films for women in particular?
VD: All my life I've been looking at films which foreground men. I wanted to make films where men are peripheral. In the background - the way women usually are. I also feel that I could relate to women easier. I spent five years in a boarding school. [Laughs]. I used to show the films then and there would be discussions afterwards. You know. People were interested in these strange 'punk' films that were coming out of New York. Women certainly responded to them.
BZ: Does it bother you that recently your films are being shown in a more rarefied atmosphere, in art galleries for example?
VD: In the past year the work has been shown in The Museum of Modern Art [New York City], and the Tate Gallery [London]. I think it is good that galleries and museums are taking an interest in lo-tech work. They might start buying tapes! But it is usually more satisfying to screen in smaller places. The Whitney showed a programme of mainly Super-8 work from the late '7Os/early '80s in conjunction with Nan Goldin's photography retrospective. She took some stills for the early films and one was shot in her loft.
BZ: I know that in your New York films you worked autonomously, at least where the technical side of the filmmaking is concerned. How do you find working with a crew?
VD: It was hard for me working with a crew in London Suite [1989] which was shot on 16mm. I found it very hard letting go of the camera - having someone else shoot it. It is hard to explain intuitive movement verbally; to explain what it is I want to frame or how I want to frame it is quite a challenge. If you can do that then I would adore to make a film with somebody else shooting part of it. And I would shoot part of it. I can use the little camera, someone else can use the bigger camera. I would love to work with a crew. You know, I've always worked with musicians - worked with music and of course the people in the films have always been collaborators. It's not all directed by any means. They give so much of themselves and of their own ideas, and so on.
BZ: But if you work more formally with a crew isn't there a danger that your films will lose some of the spontaneity, the meandering style that people associate with your work?
VD: Oh yeah, I'm aware of the dangers of that because I experienced it working on London Suite. I have a tendency sometimes to become stiff or petrified. It's something in my personality and it's something that could occur consciously with a crew - feeling overwhelmed. It is something I am more aware of now; not that it doesn't ever happen. It would be interesting to incorporate this in some way in a film. Basically I am looking forward to collaborating more and working on a larger scale.
BZ: But isn't the small scale nature of your films part of their particular aesthetic appeal? And wouldn't getting a large amount of funding change what it is about your films that makes them special and original?
VD: Well, for a start, it costs money to make any kind of film; you can spend all your life going for small amounts of money but it would be nice to do something more ambitious too and it would be interesting to work something out on paper. A structure is worked out and it can change. Funders need the assurance that you know what you're doing. That you've got a plan. What you're saying is the results of what comes out of very low-budget filming is something you'd never be able to get in a more formal funded situation. I know, yeah, it's true. But maybe a film can be made that has elements of both, where there's a space somehow in the script for bits of filming that would operate off chance or off something more instinctual. It's difficult to get funding bodies to allow you to do that, but I am about to try!
BZ: How did you finance your earlier films?
VD: I was working as a waitress and bartending as well. The ratio was about 2:1 or something crazy and we shot over time. That's what you have to do; when people are available, when people are free .... So it was shot little bits here and little bits there. And people giving me their time and help and everything, you know, and not getting paid.
BZ: Looking at your work overall, two things especially interest me: your approach to narrative and your representations of women. Could you comment on these?
VD: I see narrative as basically the male story. If you look at the history of narrative films, for the most part it's from the male point of view. There are other stories. Women make narrative films too but from another perspective. I'm extremely interested in making films which play with narrative - stretch it - let it flow in other directions. Films which are fragmented, playful, which have another kind of coherence. It happens with music, dance, theatre. Why is it so hard for films like this to get made I wonder? Is it to do with its power as a medium? On the subject of representing women and images of the female body, take the mother, right. The mother is never sexualized. She's not allowed to be a sexual being. There is a scene in Beauty Becomes The Beast where the woman who plays the mother is ironing. And then she's putting on makeup and looking very strong; and she's wearing '50s corsetry and there's that really aggressive music on the soundtrack. She's represented as powerful and sexual in that image. It's the same with the sewing. The things that women do have been demeaned by our culture. I think I am trying to show that. Then take women as a commodity in our culture. Liberty's Booty is about prostitution. It's about the split between sexuality and emotions. But it’s also about the complexity of sexuality in that we see ourselves as feminist and can still get off on fantasies of being dominated. It's there in popular culture - in the music. In that song "96 Tears" for example, where it's about one person controlling another person. Experiencing 'in love' as something where you're overwhelmed by someone and losing your own power, you know. And the situation being reversed. Men still distance or control women by placing them in this body place. By sexualizing them because they're afraid of reciprocity. I believe there is a connection between this kind of relationship between men and women and capitalism. Where relationship is like one culture dominating another culture. Freud uses the term 'the dark continent' when speaking of femininity (female sexuality). We're still somewhat stuck there in that place and it hasn't moved beyond that too much. I think playing with gender is an empowering thing. It's about changing identities, as well. Playing at different roles. I was aware of women in our culture being placed in a particular place and there being an attempt to keep that fixed. The images of what women can be are changing. For example, Sigourney Weaver has a powerful role in the Alien series.
BZ: Finally, could you say a bit about how your Irish identity informs your work and also the effects of being a mother on your filmmaking?
VD: it's always been a struggle for me to combine the mothering job and anything else that I do. A battle almost, you know. Now, finally, this year, I've deliberately and willingly put my child first and I'm finding that, to my amazement, it's turning right round and feeding my work. And maybe finally, after all these years, become at peace with this conflict. In terms of being Irish, in a way, the film London Suite deals with Irish people living in the margins. I have made two films in Irish; one was Pobal, The Artist, produced by Bob Quinn for RTE; the other was an Arts Council funded film, a landscape film called Rothach. I've always felt a kind of an outsider in Ireland anyway. I feel that everywhere I am. And I've decided that's just how it is. Now I've accepted it, you know. It may be to do with me being part of a large family. [Laughs] I identify with being Irish because I grew up there and have an understanding. But I think no matter where I go - it seems that I'll always feel somewhat of an outsider, 'cos it's just sort of the way it is. And maybe it's not a bad thing either because it detaches you a little from stuff. Maybe that's why I'm making films even. Always trying to figure things out. And making films is like trying to make sense of something - trying to understand something. If everything was all easy and I slotted in to somewhere, I'd just be doing that wouldn't I!