Short movies by Vivienne Dick (II)

The final programme dedicated to the work of Vivienne Dick brings together four short films that reflect the kaleidoscopic nature of the Irish filmmaker’s artistic practice. Across these works, Dick pays tribute to the artists who shaped her imagination and sensibility, turns her gaze to the landscape of the country where she grew up and to which she returned after her years in New York, and reflects on humanity’s voracious relationship with the only planet we call home.

Rothach (UK, 1986, 9’, Colour, HD video from Super-8 Film)

The film is a series of circular pans of the countryside of the south west of  Ireland. Scenes of a child playing  fiddle are interspersed with shots of turf cutting , a farmer sitting on a wall and pans of the limestone karst landscape of the Burren in Co Clare. The serenity of the landscape is undercut by the soundtrack and by the words of Cork poet Seán ó Ríordáin’s, an Roithleán.

Visibility Moderate (USA, 1981, 38’, HD Video from Super-8mm)

Vivienne Dick’s first film after the New York series takes her back to her native Ireland. Shot on a handheld Super 8 camera the filmmaker chronicles her own return to Ireland in the early 80s through the proxy of an American tourist who we see at the beginning of the film in an empty floor of the World Trade Center, then abruptly reappearing perched on top of a portal dolmen in the middle of a bog. 

Red Moon Rising (IE, 2015, 15’, Colour, HD video) 

A celebration of the carnivalesque, through dance, performance and the spoken word.The film reaches towards a renewal of our embodiment with the Earth as a response to a belief in invincibility, and the desire of Man to dominate the planets. A red moon is both a beacon, and a warning.

Felis Catus (IE, 2016, 5’30’’, Colour, HD video) 

A short film about a domestic cat which also comments on homo sapiens, the most predatory and destructive animal on earth.