Filmmaker Lizzie Borden is best known for her groundbreaking anarcha-feminist classic, BORN IN FLAMES (1983), which B. Ruby Rich calls, “A precursor to New Queer Cinema in its genre hybridization (radical-lesbian-feminist-sci-fi vérité) and political fury.”
In New York in the late 70’s, Borden aspired to be a painter and was invited to write for Artforum Magazine by critic Robert Pincus-Witten. While covering performance artists such as Joan Jonas, Yvonne Rainer and Vito Acconci – who experimented with various forms of film, Super-8 and video – Borden saw a retrospective of Godard films and realized film could combine essay and story. She made her first feature, REGROUPING (1976), a semi-experimental film about a women’s consciousness-raising group, which she put away for many years, and, troubled by the homogeneity of race and class in the group, embarked on what became the iconic BORN IN FLAMES.
BORN IN FLAMES is a “political science fiction” set in a near-future New York ten years, a conceit, after a peaceful socialist democratic revolution. In the film, women come together across racial, cultural, and socioeconomic divides to form the women’s army, combatting the sexism and racism that still run rampant post-revolution. As Borden says, “the science fiction in the film is to posit this thought: what if the very ordinary oppression that women have been experiencing for generations finally became something that would force a group of women to become armed and take over the media in order to redirect meaning, reclaim the language.” Shot over a five-year period with many non-actors and without a script, the film incorporates a dynamic use of strategies ranging from documentary, verité cinema, fictional news coverage and media takeovers, and improvisation, with a feverish soundtrack made in collaboration with Red Krayola and several of the performers in the film. Thirty years later, BORN IN FLAMES feels as relevant, potent, radical, and energetic as ever in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and increased divisiveness across the political spectrum.
Borden’s 1986 fiction film WORKING GIRLS follows a day in the life of women working in a middle-class brothel in Manhattan. Today WORKING GIRLS is still one of the most radical, honest, unromanticized portrayals of women’s work in the sex industry. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival that year.
In recent years, Borden has written pilots for Fox and Skype; a play about Nina Simone, “The Queen of Shebang;” “Rialto”, a film about abortion; and is developing various film and TV projects, including a limited series about the art world in the 80’s.
