Like Dawn to Dust

Lydia Lunch in Connemara on the difficulties of relationship. Voice and soundtrack by Ms Lunch. V.D.

Like Dawn to Dust, made two years later, takes up the exploration of the rural landscape initiated in Visibility Moderate but it is characterized by a very different mode of address. Instead of appropriating from radio, television or film, Dick develops a more overtly ‘poetic’ aesthetic, through performance, cinematography and sound. The opening shots of a decaying ‘Big House’ bearing the scorch marks of a fire, are accompanied by an off-key piano, recalling stage melodrama or early cinema. The house, most likely a remnant of Anglo-Irish society, is abandoned but for the figure of Lydia Lunch, wearing her signature New York ‘Goth’ make-up and clothes. Lunch delivers a poetic monologue, both on screen and in voice-over, over a traditional soundtrack and her final words emphasize the circularity of Irish narratives: ‘the past never dies, it just continually repeats itself.’