Lydia Lunch

Acting

Lydia Lunch

Born 1959-06-02 · Rochester, New York, USA

Lydia Lunch is an American singer, poet, writer, actress and self-empowerment speaker, whose career was spawned by the New York no wave scene. Her work typically features provocative and confrontational noise music delivery, and has maintained an anti-commercial ethic, operating independently of major labels and distributors.

Acting credits

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things poster
5.8

Young Jeremiah lives in a stable environment with loving foster parents until the day his troubled mother, Sarah, returns to claim him. Jeremiah becomes swept up in his mother's dangerous world of drugs, seedy hotels, strip joints and revolving lovers. Salvation comes in the form of the boy's ultrareligious grandparents, but soon Jeremiah's mother returns. Maternal love binds the pair together on the road until Sarah's desperate and depraved lifestyle finally consumes her.

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things

2004

Godkiller: Walk Among Us poster
5.4

Even in a postapocalyptic future in which Earth has been colonized by aliens, humans need hearts to live, so when an orphan boy's sister needs a new one, he'll go to just about any length to get it in this "illustrated film" from Matt Pizzolo.

Godkiller: Walk Among Us

2010

Guerillère Talks poster
7.1

This experimental short consists of eight unedited rolls of super-8 film, each of which profiles an individual woman in real time. The women engage in everyday behaviour, such as playing pinball or reading a letter aloud.

Guerillère Talks

1978

Mutantes: Punk Porn Feminism poster
4.8

Mutantes sheds light on a feminism that was little talked about in France. This documentary comprises of a series of interviews conducted in the USA, Paris and Barcelona, and documents from the archives about the political action of sex workers, queer activists and post-pornographic performances.

Mutantes: Punk Porn Feminism

2009

Subway Riders poster
7.2

A psychotic saxophone player lures victims to deserted spots with his music and then guns them down.

Subway Riders

1981

Blank City poster
6.9

In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of their best works. Taking their cues from punk rock and new wave music, these young maverick filmmakers confronted viewers with a stark reality that stood in powerful contrast to the escapist product being churned out by Hollywood.

Blank City

2011

No artwork available
NR

Plot TBA. Represents Radu Jude's feelings of "creative obligation" to Romania and channels Roberto Rossellini's 1948 film 'L'amore' while exploring sociopolitical tensions in Europe.

Love Diptych

The Offenders poster
7.0

A punk savage satire about a kidnapping.

The Offenders

1980

Fake Orgasm poster
6.0

Lazlo Pearlman is a conceptual artist, an activist capable of dinamiting our prejudices about sex and identity. What it seems to be a reflexion about lies in our sexual lives suddenly turns out to be a sharp discourse about gender theory and the continuous evolution of our identitiy. Fake Orgasm, first part of an ambitious multidisciplinary project about sexuality and identity, hits our minds and forces a change of perspective to reconsider some concepts we've been educated with and grown up with.

Fake Orgasm

2010

Black Box poster
5.4

An innocent youth is abducted and dragged down into a dystopian nightmare where teenage Lydia Lunch throws him into the Black Box.

Black Box

1979

Bye Bye Blondie poster
5.5

A love story of two women who meet up in their late forties and attempt to retrieve the romance they had in their youth.

Bye Bye Blondie

2012

Baby Trouble Hole poster
NR

Malga Kubiak stars in her exploration of sex and self. One woman's love to her own body interlaced with maggots; mixes x-rated porn. Voyeuristically titillating this avant-garde study of horrors of sex.

Baby Trouble Hole

1996

Submit to Me poster
5.2

Cinema of Transgression pioneers and participants (Lydia Lunch, Lung Leg, Nick Zedd, etc.) perform a series of acts as they submit to director Richard Kern's camera. Originally created for DTNY acid parties; Submit to Me was eventually edited down to 10 minutes and given an accompanying score.

Submit to Me

1985

Penn & Teller's Invisible Thread poster
6.5

Penn Jillette and Teller are called upon to display their unique brand of humor to save civilization from strange extraterrestrial beings who have invaded Earth and who, disgruntled and bored with the mundane nature of human life, threaten to blow up the planet unless someone gives them a good reason not to.

Penn & Teller's Invisible Thread

1987

Spit and Ashes poster
3.0

Spit and Ashes is a reimagining of the historical violence waged against women by patriarchal forces in the name of religion, medicine and family. The High Priestess embodies the wild, sexual and grotesque - the un-tamable hunger of female desire and the ultimate threat to male power. The Midwife is the spirit of all women who sought knowledge and agency over their own bodies and paid for their agency with their lives. Through a series of erotic and brutal rituals these women come together to reclaim their bodies and prepare for the fight ahead.

Spit and Ashes

2019

No artwork available
NR

Her Noise was an exhibition which took place at South London Gallery in 2005 with satellite events at Tate Modern and Goethe-Institut, London. Her Noise gathered international artists who use sound to investigate social relations, inspire action or uncover hidden soundscapes. The exhibition included newly commissioned works by Kim Gordon & Jutta Koether, Hayley Newman, Kaffe Matthews, Christina Kubisch, Emma Hedditch and Marina Rosenfeld. A parallel ambition of the project was to investigate music and sound histories in relation to gender, and the curators set out to create a lasting resource in this area.

Her Noise - The Making Of

2006

The Hardcore Collection poster
NR

A fringe film collective of edge-dwelling New York nihilist punks and crazies whose main pathological protagonist triumvirate were voyeur smackhead Richard Kern, pouting artpunk Nick Zedd and damaged psychescream queen Lydia Lunch.

The Hardcore Collection

2000

Submit to Me Now poster
5.0

Oddballs dancing, leering at camera, guy shaving a nontraditional part of his body and man ripping his own throat out, woman stabbing herself to death.

Submit to Me Now

1987

No artwork available
NR

Beth B, in collaboration with legendary downtown performance artist/musician Lydia Lunch, creates a chilling yet poetic vision of despairing nihilism -- literally, a "meditation on death." In this noirishly rendered narrative, a woman negotiates the banalities of life.

Thanatopsis

1991

Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard poster
7.5

From myth to legend Rowland Howard appeared on the early Melbourne punk scene like a phantom out of Kafkaesque Prague or Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A beautifully gaunt and gothic aristocrat, the unique distinctive fury of his guitar style shot him directly into the imagination of a generation. He was impeccable, the austerity of his artistry embodied in his finely wrought form, his obscure tastes and his intelligently wry wit. He radiated a searing personal integrity that never seemed to tarnish. Despite the trials and tribulations of his career, in an age of makeover and reinvention, Rowland Howard never ‘sold out’. With recent and moving interviews, archival interviews and other fascinating and original footage, AUTOLUMINESCENT traces the life of Rowland S Howard. Capturing moments with the man himself and intimate missives from those who knew him behind closed doors; words and images etch light into what has always been the mysterious dark.

Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard

2011

Road Rant: A Week on the Road with Lydia Lunch poster
5.0

The X-rated cartoon animations of Emmy award winning director/animator Merrill Aldighieri add a comical edge to this intense documentary with Lydia Lunch, a second collaboration after their first success, ""The Gun is Loaded."" Highlights from 5 concerts are accompanied by a live music score performed by composer JOE BUDENHOLZER & horn player TERRY EDWARDS (from MADNESS) during their travels to MARSEILLE, LYON, EVREUX, & NANTES. Bonus clips include rare on-the road interview footage with Lydia and composer Joe B., and an exclusive reading done at the Père Lachaise Cemetary.

Road Rant: A Week on the Road with Lydia Lunch

2012

No artwork available
NR

Collection of live spoken word performances by Lydia Lunch.

Lydia Lunch: Malicious Intent

1994

Kill Your Idols poster
7.4

A 2004 documentary on thirty years of alternative rock 'n roll in NYC.Documenting the history from the genuine authenticity of No Wave to the current generation of would be icons and true innovators seeing to represent New York City in the 21st century

Kill Your Idols

2004

Mondo New York poster
4.9

A young woman wanders around New York City and stumbles across a number of strange characters and settings that represent the "underground" areas of the city. She sees stand up comedy in Central Park, a prostitution auction, a voodoo ceremony, an S&M club, and a number of very interesting performance artists. These are just a few of the sights and sounds of New York that she encounters.

Mondo New York

1988

Behind the camera

No artwork available
NR

Beth B, in collaboration with legendary downtown performance artist/musician Lydia Lunch, creates a chilling yet poetic vision of despairing nihilism -- literally, a "meditation on death." In this noirishly rendered narrative, a woman negotiates the banalities of life.

Thanatopsis

1991

Road Rant: A Week on the Road with Lydia Lunch poster
5.0

The X-rated cartoon animations of Emmy award winning director/animator Merrill Aldighieri add a comical edge to this intense documentary with Lydia Lunch, a second collaboration after their first success, ""The Gun is Loaded."" Highlights from 5 concerts are accompanied by a live music score performed by composer JOE BUDENHOLZER & horn player TERRY EDWARDS (from MADNESS) during their travels to MARSEILLE, LYON, EVREUX, & NANTES. Bonus clips include rare on-the road interview footage with Lydia and composer Joe B., and an exclusive reading done at the Père Lachaise Cemetary.

Road Rant: A Week on the Road with Lydia Lunch

2012

No artwork available
NR

Collection of live spoken word performances by Lydia Lunch.

Lydia Lunch: Malicious Intent

1994

The Right Side of My Brain poster
4.8

Lydia Lunch and Richard Kern's first collaborative effort, The Right Side of My Brain, is a glimpse into the world of unsatiable female lust, narrated by Lydia Lunch. The film was initially dismissed and dismayed by critics such as J. Hoberman, but the criticism of The Right Side of My Brain received only pushed the two to go one step further with Fingered (1986).

The Right Side of My Brain

1984

Kiss Napoleon Goodbye poster
4.8

Punk icons Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins star in this cult drama about a pregnant pianist named Hedda whose marriage to husband Neal (Don Bajema) hits the skids with the sudden appearance of a mysterious stranger.

Kiss Napoleon Goodbye

1990

The Gun Is Loaded poster
5.0

At the end of the Reagan years, rocker and confrontational performance artist Lydia Lunch launches a broadside. From a formal podium, she attacks the white male power structure of the US. Next she takes on her parents. Then, the volume lowered and the background the streets of New York, she lets us know what she thinks of life, of herself, and of us, anyone who's watching or listening. Life is depression, despair, and death. She's the girl next door gone bad. And us? Compliant sheep. Lunch lays out a challenge.

The Gun Is Loaded

1989

No artwork available
NR

Renowned artist Lydia Lunch joins architect Juan Azulay in an experimental performance broadcast live from the SCI-Arc Gallery.

Flood Stains

2010

No artwork available
NR

Poetic seductress Lydia Lunch describes the destructive nature of a broken human before partaking in physical abuse of grown men with her younger counterpart.

Kill Us All

2014

No artwork available
NR

Poetic seductress Lydia Lunch describes the destructive nature of a broken human before partaking in physical abuse of grown men with her younger counterpart.

Kill Us All

2014

The Agony Is The Ecstacy poster
NR

Lydia Lunch live session 1982

The Agony Is The Ecstacy

1982

Fingered poster
5.4

One of Richard Kern’s most ambitious works is Fingered (1986), whose sarcastic disclaimer says “although it is not our sole intention to shock, insult, or irritate, you have been warned that we are catering only to our own preferences.” The film came about following the criticism of Kern and Lydia Lunch's first collaborative venture: The Right Side of My Brain (1984).

Fingered

1986