‘A tough time – but so exciting’: cult film-maker Vivienne Dick on post-punk New York

She fled rural Ireland and hit the Big Apple just in time to capture Lydia Lunch, James Chance and the post-punk scene take off. Now back in her home country, she relives those turbulent years

In 2014, the Irish Times ran a profile of the film-maker Vivienne Dick with the headline: “Stifled in Ireland, celebrated in New York.” As an encapsulation of her formative years as an artist who found her calling in exile, it was blunt but pretty accurate. “There was nothing for me in Ireland back then,” says Dick of her youth in the 1960s and early 70s. “It was not an attractive place because, as a woman, you were essentially treated as a second-class citizen. You could train as a teacher, but that was about it. I remember I bought a camera, but there was no way to even get on a course.”

Having relocated to New York by the mid-70s, after various overland adventures that took her to Pakistan, Nepal and even Kabul, she found herself instinctively drawn to Manhattan’s edgy, bohemian downtown scene, where would-be artists, musicians and writers had colonised the low-rent apartments and makeshift studios of what was then a deprived, drug-ridden neighbourhood. There she hung out with many of the characters who would go on to define Manhattan’s legendary post-punk No Wave movement: the likes of Lydia Lunch (of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), Pat Place (Bush Tetras), James Chance and Adele Bertei (the Contortions). Her films capture these maverick outsiders at the very moment the scene congealed into a fleeting but incredibly fertile cultural moment – all attitude and dissonance – that still resounds today.

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