BETH B dives deep with LYDIA LUNCH
Beth B and Lydia Lunch - photo by Curt Hoppe - courtesy Kino Lorber
Beth B exploded onto the New York underground scene in the late 70s, after receiving her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1977, creating installation art works and directing Super-8 films. Controversial and political in approach and content, these breakthrough films, such as Black Box, Vortex, and The Offenders, were shown at Max’s Kansas City, CBGB’s, and the Film Forum.
These and more recent films have also been shown at, and acquired by, the Whitney Museum and The Museum of Modern Art. Her early films, along with those of Jim Jarmusch and Amos Poe, are the focus of the documentary film, Blank City. Beth B’s career has been characterized by work that challenges society’s conventions, with focuses on social issues and human rights. In 2021, B's catalogue of films were acquired and will be restored by Kino Lorber.
In 2017, confrontational multimedia artist Lydia Lunch and Beth B joined forces to create LYDIA LUNCH: The War Is Never Over — the first career-spanning documentary retrospective of Lunch’s confrontational, acerbic and always electric artistry. In this moment where the desire for powerfully independent and challenging female figures are in the spotlight, this is the ideal time to be acquainted with Lunch, the psycho-sexual transgressive who forged a vocabulary of rare emotional honesty, philosophy and humor.
In this phone interview, Beth B gets into the details and challenges of making such an all-encompassing feature of a complicated and uncompromising artist. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview by Tyler Nesler
You and Lydia go way back as creative contemporaries who both emerged within the 1970s NYC underground music and art worlds. What ultimately made you decide to do an in-depth feature length documentary on Lydia’s life, and what were some challenges in getting it off the ground?
Every film I make is a challenge to get off the ground because I am often attracted to difficult subject matters, and it's usually hard to find funding to do something that is controversial or is a little outside of the box.
I first met Lydia in the late 70s. I saw her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks onstage and I was completely mesmerized and frightened but at the same time I said, whoa, I’ve got to work with this woman. I cast her in my short film Black Box (1978), and then we’ve worked together off and on for years. And I kind of felt like with the Me Too movement and everything that was going on, I thought, okay, I’m going to do a film about Lydia because she has been ranting and raving, you know, writing poetry and music and performing about these very issues for forty years. And I felt like it was really important to have a backdrop of some history here.
And so that’s why I decided that now was an important time. And Lydia is still active. She has bands, she still does spoken word, and she is just as potent as she was forty years ago. And the messages are really cathartic and scary for an audience sometimes. But they also relate so much to the themes that I have delved into throughout my film and art career. So it seemed like the right time to go for this. It’s like a full circle for me.
Kino Lorber
So was the Me Too movement a primary catalyst for you in terms of ultimately putting together a project of this scale? Do you feel that at this point in time, given your working history with Lydia and the topics she has focused on, that it was inevitable you would do a project like this?
It’s not so much that Me Too was a catalyst because in some ways I feel like it was making the issue quite simplistic and black and white, and that disturbed me because I think that there are so many gray areas and mysteries and confusions about the battle between the genders, and that it was important to speak about these things and look at them with a reflection of our culture. Because these things start in the home, there’s a cycle of violence that is just perpetuated by people who are conscious or unconsciously in life acting out the same behaviors that were enacted upon them when they were children, whether they are good or bad or whatever.
So I wanted to have a much broader conversation, and it’s not so much inevitable that I came to make a documentary about Lydia. It’s more that twenty years ago, I wasn’t even making documentaries. I went into television for several years, producing and directing, and I think coming out of that, I was like, oh my God, I’ve got to get back to totally uncensored, radical filmmaking again. And documentary in a way is just so much more economical than feature narrative. And so, I had gotten such great training working in television, I thought, okay, I’m going to follow by going into documentary. And so I’ve made three films since that time. And each time they do seem to focus more and more on just things that are personally historical for me.
I was really struck by the film. I had been aware of Lydia Lunch and knew a little about her work, but I was blown away by her presence and her direct ability to communicate just how complicated these issues are and all the different nuances. These issues of abuse are not always cut and dry and the way she expresses that in the documentary was amazing. It took it to a whole other level for me personally. I bought the book [by Nick Soulsby], too, which is a fantastic companion piece.
Awesome! I’m glad you did that because it has a lot of interviews that I did which didn’t quite make it into the film, because I had to really figure out how to shape the film around the focus being on Lydia, and you know, with interviews, people go all over the place when you do them, as I’m sure you are witness to.
How did the collaboration with Nick Soulsby come about? Did you previously know or work with Nick and how closely did you work with him on developing the book along with the assembling of the film?
The book came into play once the film was for the most part finished, and I was still kind of tinkering with some of the editing. But I knew of Nick’s work, especially because of the book he did about the band Swans. Because I have a history with Michael Gira and Swans the band, and so I thought that was a really fantastic approach to use. I was like, okay, this might be a fantastic way to collaborate. I basically sent him all the transcripts. He used a lot of material from there, but I let him organize it however he wanted to, because frankly I did not have the time to do that. I was focusing on the movie. So it was a collaboration of sorts, but I didn’t have input and didn’t want the in input actually into how it was formed. I trusted Nick to do a really good job, which he did.
There's a great and funny part in your film where Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) recounts a specifically weird early moment with Lydia Lunch when he realized he was hanging out with someone who was undeniably unusual and unlike anyone else he would likely ever meet. Did you also have a similar moment early on with her when she said or did something that just made you go "whoa" in the realization of what a true outlier she is?
There are so many moments, and some of them, they’re unspeakable! But I would say in her role in my film Black Box, it was to in some ways turn the tables on genders and she then inhabited the role that is usually played by a male of a torturer. And her part was to torture this young teen blonde innocent youth. And we had a script and such, and there was a baton, like a police stick, a nightstick that we were using as a prop. And she started smacking him with it without too much direction and I was like oh my God, oh my God, and it was like…real. So in a way, her torture of this young actor became something more than just acting. And what I really saw was the violence within her manifest in a really unexpected, real way on camera.
And maybe one other instance was in [my] film Vortex working with her, and there’s a barroom scene, and there’s a guy who was coming on to her and we were kind of talking about the dialogue and what should be written and how the scene should go, and she’s like, I should just say, you want to fuck or what? And this was in 1982, when most women I knew wouldn’t just approach some guy and just blurt that out. So for me it was kind of eye-opening and like, oh, again, turning the tables.
Yes. It doesn’t sound like she would just switch on a different persona when the camera started rolling. She just kept being herself…
You know, I think there absolutely is a Lydia Lunch persona, I mean, Lydia is quite different. Like if she’s home cooking a meal for you, it’s like there’s a domestic side of her that I feel she does not necessarily want to have public. I asked her if I could film her cooking at home, because she loves to do that. She’s like, absolutely not. Persona is a really interesting thing. Again, nobody’s black and white, this way or that way, we all have depths to our personalities, to what we want to be public, what we want to be private, if we want to be vulnerable and to who and when.
I did get a sense of some warmth and humor from her that really came through in the film though, especially when she was kind of ribbing her bandmates – there was an affection there.
Yes. And that was critically important to me, to try to capture some of those moments where you see her humor, her affection, her tenderness…she goes and gives her friends haircuts and she’s playing around with them and hugging them, and the film was to try to bring more dimensionality into who she is, because there is so much there.
Photo by Jasmine Hirst - courtesy Kino Lorber
The whole gritty late 70s and early 80s NYC underground “No Wave” world has in many ways been mythologized and idealized by many. When you were producing and assembling the footage for The War is Never Over, were you consciously thinking of ways to depict that era in the truest sense, in a manner which avoided any sort of glamorization of the time?
Well, first of all, my approach to the editing totally echoed my kind of vision of what that time period was all about: fast, loud, out of control — it was in a way chaos, riotous, but when you put it all together it made sense. And so in a way I think it echoed that period of time. I think something I wanted was to cast against the usual cast of characters in the movie. You know, okay, there’s JG Thirwell and Thurston Moore, and maybe a couple of other people who are iconic from that period. But I also wanted younger people, like Donita Sparks, who is really after that time period, and Ron Athey – people who represented different aspects of the arts. Ron Athey is not a musician. He’s a performance artist of a most extreme nature. And so he could speak to certain aspects that other people perhaps could not have. Even including Nicolas Jaar, he’s of a very young generation.
Yeah. I thought Nicolas Jaar was a very surprising addition. I’ve known about him and his work, but I didn’t realize how interested he was in Lydia’s work, how it impacted him like that.
Exactly. And that was also to point out the concept that Lydia’s work is. It’s not necessarily a one particular type of time, her work is timeless, it inspires people of all ages. And that was very important to me.
Women such as Lydia who overtly confront social and gender inequities and who speak bluntly about uncomfortable truths have unfortunately been rarely heard by many or remembered in history. Who do you think are some other women throughout time who took a similar iconoclastic approach as Lydia, but who are now not very well known and who deserve greater notoriety for their work?
Well, there’s always Valerie Solanas, you know her. Karen Finley, Carolee Schneemann, Liliana Cavani, the director of The Night Porter. But also if you go back, there’s an extraordinary history of the silent movie makers, and many of them were women. People do not know this. There’s actually a whole series of these films that have been restored by Kino Lorber, who is our distributor, and it’s called Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers. These women were directing films at the very beginning of cinema. And they were actually forced out, because the men were like, oh my God, we can make money with this. And most of them were pushed out, or their credit was given to a man!
There’s an amazing film by Ida May Park. It’s called Bread, and that film is so important because it shows us exactly the Harvey Weinstein story, in 1918! It’s shocking. And there’s so many women through time who have made films about things that we do not want to talk about, but unfortunately their voices often get buried by the horrific model of entertainment that we have in Hollywood and otherwise.
There are many, many extraordinary women performers. I made a film about the underground burlesque scene in New York. It’s called Exposed. I mean, talk about women’s voices. People like Dirty Martini, Rose Wood, Julie Atlas Muz…they’re huge, huge stars with so much to say, and a small stage…
Lydia Lunch with her band Retrovirus - photo by K Fox - courtesy Kino Lorber
Some screenings this summer were booked at music clubs, which harkens back to the early days of showing your films at clubs, since they were the only venues capable and willing to take on the work (as opposed to more established theaters and art galleries).
First, how has it felt for you personally to be screening a film in music venues again? Lastly, what are the plans for a wider release of The War is Never Over on streaming platforms?
I love showing films in music venues. Great sound system, usually the projection’s okay, or you brought your own projector in the old days. They were the only places that allowed us to show our films in the early days. The galleries didn’t want them, the alternative spaces didn’t want them, the art spaces, they were like, forget it, get out of here. Because it was very much about structuralist filmmaking. It was really conservative and precious, and this was all against that. It was about content, and being loud, and screaming the message, and rock clubs were just perfect for that, it was an excellent built-in audience.
The War is Never Over will be widely available on DVD and streaming [on various platforms] from August 31, [and also] on Kino Marquee. And, if you’re in New York, look at the bus shelters and subway cars because we have advertising on them. It’s so incredible! [Also], Kino Lorber is restoring all of my films, twenty-five that I’ve made, and they will hopefully be available in 2022 to see in theaters or streaming. So people, look out for those.
It must be very gratifying to have Kino Lorber doing this restoration and broad retrospective of all your work.
I’m the luckiest person ever to have Kino Lorber. They’re true art cinema lovers, and they are the best distributor. And I am just incredibly grateful to have them on board for this fantastic journey that goes from the 1970s up until today, to restore all of my films and then get them out into the world. So it’s pretty cool!
The film is now also available on streaming services such as Google Play, YouTube, and Vudu.
The companion book by Nick Soulsby is also available.
Other links:
LYDIA LUNCH: The War is Never Over official site
Main page photo of Beth B by Grace Roselli
Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based freelance writer and the Founder and Managing Editor of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.
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