A door simply ajar on reality

Artaud, who “lost his mind in Ireland,” is one of the figures in Vivienne Dick’s The Irreducible Difference of the Other (the other, Anna Akhmatova), screening at the Darklight Festival on Saturday, 26th April.

In Dick’s latest film, Olwen Fouéré takes on the persona of Antonin Artaud, the French playwright. “I suppose you could describe it as some kind of a documentary, but it’s a little bit unusual in the way that it’s made,” says Dick. “There are sudden jumps to different situations, different places, different times. It’s about what it means to be human. We know from our history that things change. There’s always new empires, new ways of understanding the world. And I really like that idea. Because I suppose where I’m coming from is a feminist position, and an understanding that, in this world, there’s a huge imbalance between male and female, and that’s a very important question. That informs all of my work.”

Dick has been reading a lot about war lately. “It’s also about relationship and what relationship has meant over the centuries. Because it seems to me, reading philosophy, that relationship has been seen as dominating the other. It’s how countries treat other countries if they’re a bit weaker. They just want to dominate them.”