The Urgency of the Moment: A Conversation with Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden burst into international film consciousness when her debut feature, Regrouping, screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) in 1976. Presented in a groundbreaking program called International Forum on the Avant-Garde Film (running alongside a “Psychoanalysis and the Cinema” week, which was infamously accompanied by a dense theoretical reading list), Regrouping was praised by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum for putting abstract theory into dynamic practice. While it was shelved for personal reasons, it offers both formal and political inspiration for the work most associated with Borden’s name, Born in Flames (1983), a feminist call to arms—quite literally. Her third feature, Working Girls (1986), completed a trilogy of films about New York feminisms and the forces of gentrification sweeping downtown culture aside. Subsequently, Borden has written and directed for film and television, and has also written for publication—she started out in the 1970s as a writer for Artforum—but it’s this radical trilogy that is closest to many viewers’ hearts.

These three films come to the Criterion Channel at an urgent moment that they meet—a moment whose engagement of forces of domination and resistance they predict. Lizzie and I first met the day after the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, when Regrouping was rescreened at the EIFF as part of a fortieth-anniversary tribute to the 1976 program curated by Kim Knowles. Our conversations are always charged by the moment, and by Lizzie’s deep, structural, and intersectional feminism. As a new generation watches these films in the context of global crisis, I’m sure many will follow the late filmmaker Barbara Hammer, who said, “We were all about ready to join the Women’s Army after seeing Born in Flames.”

Here we are in the future time of Born in Flames, but it’s not the future you imagined. How does that feel?: I never expected Born in Flames to be relevant today. I thought it would disappear over the years. The film is set in a time after the U.S. has undergone a “social-democratic cultural revolution” meant to address inequities of race, class, and gender. I had no idea we would be, decades after the film’s release, slowly creeping toward a dictatorship. I thought we would have the rights we had been fighting for and sometimes making progress toward over the years, as in freedom of choice and equal pay. But we’re facing the eradication of all that with an election that will very likely endorse a man who says he wants to be a dictator. That’s shocking to me. A lot of the calls to action that Florynce Kennedy, the civil-rights attorney and activist, makes in the film, in her role as advisor to the Women’s Army, feel even more necessary now: that one’s voice must be heard by any means possible, and that violence is sometimes necessary when fighting oppression.

Born in Flames has this incredible power in part because it developed from your first film, Regrouping, which is a deep dive into feminist politics, highlighted through intense montage. For a lot of viewers, though, this will be their first opportunity to see the extraordinary Regrouping. How come?: While I was making Born in Flames, I said it was my first film because I had literally put Regrouping in the closet after three screenings and hoped everyone would forget about it. I gave it to UCLA to store after I moved to Los Angeles because I thought it might completely deteriorate. I’ve come to realize only now I’m showing it again that some of the formal elements of Born in Flames came from Regrouping.

How did you come to make it? Did you always want to be a filmmaker?: Rather than film school, I went to art school, where I had male and female mentors: Joan Jonas, Richard Serra, Vito Acconci, Yvonne Rainer. I loved their films, which were mostly shown in galleries. Joan Jonas did videos like Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll (1972), shown on TV sets during big performances. I had already started to edit film for Richard and some downtown artists, and loved it.

I met the four women in Regrouping through Joan. They were from the School of Visual Arts and were giving feminist talks downtown. Ms. magazine had been in print for years. Most women I knew downtown had been politicized by the second wave of second-wave feminism—not the second wave itself—so I decided to make a documentary about these women because I had become so frustrated at the way the art world treated female artists: most weren’t respected, collected, shown, or paid as much.

Sol LeWitt gave me $3,000 to make the film, which began as a collaboration with them. But after I started, they never let me film any of their meetings. When I was filming, what they often argued about was their sexuality—being with men or women. And they spoke reverentially about one of the members of the group, Susan, who had died in a car accident before I met them. Together with pieces of film they themselves shot, I wove my footage into a first cut. But when I showed it to them, one told me I couldn’t use anything about Susan: they had been romantically involved. At that point, I decided I had to become “the enemy” and told them so. I had to finish.

So I expanded the argument of the film to be about group interaction, assembling a second group of women a decade older to talk about how women’s groups work for them, and I shot groups of women in other places. I thought of it more as an experimental film rather than a straight documentary, an essay about how groups come together, fall apart, and regroup. I also felt an obligation to finish because of Sol, although he never got to see it. He died before it came “out of the closet.”

When I first showed the film, at Anthology Film Archives, the original group picketed with flyers calling for a meeting to discuss whether I was a feminist. Then, at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1976, one of the women from the film spoke against it. I felt terrible. I didn’t want to hurt them anymore, so I put it away.

During the process of their discussions about being gay or straight, I had become radicalized about my own sexuality. Part of the reason I layered sound was as a formal strategy to interrogate myself: within a scene, I could have a chorale of tracks that conveyed the simultaneous holding of conflicting ideas. In Born in Flames, I did it differently, sometimes with a dialogue track and a music track. I wanted Born in Flames to be less experimental, more narrative.

As you moved from experimental documentary to narrative speculative fiction, did you have any reference points? How did that second film evolve?: I was very influenced by The Battle of Algiers [Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966]. I did “borrow” certain shots and ideas from it, like how the Women’s Army is structured. I’d read a lot of Marxist texts as well, and was reacting against the art world then being so white, straight, and middle class. I wanted to work with women in a different way and for Born in Flames to be “intersectional,” though Kimberlé Crenshaw had not yet coined the word.

It was going to be titled Les Guérillères, after the book by Monique Wittig. The premise was that women get pushed into second place ten years after a social-democratic cultural revolution, so I wanted to focus on those who would be most affected, women of color and mostly lesbians. Looking at it now, I realize some of the women were potentially trans, but transitioning wasn’t an option back then unless you had a lot of money.

The narrative of the film came together, very much in dialogue with the women I was working with. It was two years before I even knew what the story was going to be. It wasn’t until someone I knew came back from the Western Sahara with footage of women training with arms that I had the idea of the activist Adelaide Norris wanting to go abroad to import arms.

Flo brought in the history of her character with the Saharan women; Alexa—the woman who says, “the army is not mature enough to hang out with me”—said she would have no sympathy for any woman in the army unless she died in prison. So having the “suicide,” which some people have said foresaw Sandra Bland, wasn’t foresight: Black people have been murdered in prison before and since, and it gets called “suicide.” It’s part of the prison industrial complex, part of a culture that is so misshapen, so racist.

Born in Flames took five years, but it was made out of urgency about violence: out of abortion bans, racism, rape, prison, the lack of control that women have over our bodies. I see it as a series of questions about what it takes for women to take up arms. The women try leafleting, then radio, then breaking into the TV station to play their videos on-air to have their voices heard. In the end, their voices are not heard, so what’s left?

The final act of violence against property is specifically against the means of communication: the transmission tower on top of the World Trade Center. At the time, I imagine that scene was shocking enough—but how does it feel for you since 2001?: When we lived downtown, there was a beach on the tip of Manhattan where I shot the meetings between Adelaide and the rebels and matched it up with the Saharan footage. There was only one tall, phallic building then, which at the time seemed really ugly. So it seemed like a logical target. Now I feel so nostalgic when I see them in the film and the character Sheila McLaughlin plays goes into the building—that’s the real World Trade Center. I miss it.

Born in Flames is a film about New York: people ask whether it was a reaction against Reagan, but he came into office only during the last two years of making the film. The government’s attitude when I started was “New York City: drop dead.” There was garbage and rats everywhere, and we lived cheaply in raw lofts. By the time I made Working Girls, landlords were starting to value these lofts and wanted us out. But before that, everybody was making film, art, music, theater, dance in these spaces.

It was a time of huge creativity, because we all helped each other. We had time, and we could share resources and screening spaces. Even if some of us didn’t go to film school, films showed downtown all the time, and we could include them in our vocabulary. At the tail end of this period—now called “no wave,” although I never felt as if I fit into that aesthetic—downtown films started to burst into global attention with Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch.

Born in Flames comes out of that downtown scene, but its characters work in construction, and it’s the threat to their jobs that starts the Women’s Army action. How did labor become so central to the film’s rhythms?: The title, Born in Flames, came from the song I asked the musician Mayo Thompson to write, and it was pulsing, radical, anticapitalist. I loved it so much, it’s what I called the film, which is absolutely about labor. It’s about women trying to break into traditionally male jobs like construction, about earning less money than men, and it relates to my experience of being an artist and self-employed. I could shoot only when I had $200, and then spent the rest of the time editing. I got a few grants along the way: D. A. Pennebaker helped me get one, which I was so grateful for. Chris Hegedus, who became his wife, was one of the women who helped shoot some of the film until she started working with him. But for the most part, it was really a struggle to keep it going.

Then it turned out that a few women I knew were working in the same brothel in the East Twenties. So I did it, and I brought a tape recorder every time, hiding it from the madam. I think I could justify it to myself by knowing I was going to make a film afterward. I was there for six months when I got another grant and could leave, and then I wrote Working Girls. The film wasn’t based on theory, just on my personal experience. It was only afterward when I was traveling with it that I met and learned from women like Margo St. James of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics); Carol Leigh, who coined the term sex work; and Tracy Quan of PONY (Prostitutes of New York).

The Urgency of the Moment: A Conversation with Lizzie Borden

The Urgency of the Moment: A Conversation with Lizzie Borden

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