Vivienne Dick's super-8 films emerge from the New Cinema renaissance taking place over the last few years in New York City, but her punk roots, more so than any of her contemporaries, are in the spirit of the mid-Sixties avant-garde of Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures), Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising) and Andy Warhol. J. Hoberman describes four characteristics of Dick's work: “...an ironic ashcan lyricism (among other punk reworkings of the old underground)...a Reform School Girl obsession with female macho...an interest in personality and a love of rock'n'roll....” And Amy Taubin (Soho Weekly News) writes, “Dick has a powerful sense of form.... (Her) feminism has revitalized a filmmaking practice that 15 years ago led to a dead-end....and that in the hands of her male contemporaries seems often like a trivial restatement.”
Beauty Becomes the Beast
“The upbringing of a female child and her intitiation into a sexual role defined by authority figures, television and newspapers. Lucille Ball is as important as the Son of Sam episode and the media blow-up it received. The main character, Lydia Lunch, plays a 7-year-old child growing up by the sea and alternately an adult in a decaying western city.” --Vivienne Dick