Born in Flames: From the Ashes

With its rapid-fire editing, exhilarating spirit of agitprop, and staccato story line, the film is in some ways energetically disjointed—reflecting a production process in which Borden worked with whatever discontinuous resources she had at her disposal, over five years. Hardly to the film’s detriment, however, this fragmentation embodies the nonlinear liveness of much oppositional cinema. It was made on a continuum with Borden’s 1976 debut, Regrouping, an experimental documentary about a women’s collective whose genesis was quite simply gathering together and talking. This approach carried over into Born in Flames’ embrace of improvisation and of filmmaking as a communal endeavor—unforeseen frictions and all. Borden relinquished singular authority over the direction of the project and avoided using the script as a tyrannical document, leaving room for the cast of nonprofessional actors to also steer the film.

Born in Flames seductively combines this electricity and dynamism with a deceptively neat three-act narrative structure, divided among three groups of women. The cultural vanguard is held by the two feminist broadcasters: Phoenix Radio, hosted by Honey, a Black woman who encourages joint mobilization against the new regime’s continued oppressions; and Radio Ragazza, led by Isabel (Adele Bertei), a white punk performer with no end of subversive sermons. The stations are connected to one of the film’s most emphatic statements—namely, that liberatory movements cannot survive without effective tools of media and communication. The Women’s Army is the militant front, shaped especially by the leadership of Adelaide Norris (Jeanne Satterfield), a queer Black woman determined to infuse the moribund state with the revolutionary spirit it has stifled. And finally, the three editors of the Socialist Youth Review (filmmakers Pat Murphy, Kathryn Bigelow, and Becky Johnston), abiding by the party line, stand in for the myopia and vague universalism of the white middle-class establishment. By the end of the film, these groups have merged their efforts, in large part through Honey’s facilitation—not blending into an undifferentiated or forced homogeneity but rather marshaling the full capacity of their differences. An escalation of FBI and media backlash against these organized women coincides with Norris traveling to the Western Sahara to meet and learn from Algerian women as an act of transnational solidarity. Through dialogues and direct actions across all these groups, the film traces a lucid arc of consciousness and acts out its own pedagogy, modeling revolution as a process of education and transformation.

The film relies on the incantatory repetition of the titular song by the experimental rock band the Red Krayola as a structuring element to string together its expansive consideration of “women’s labor.” The song backgrounds numerous montages, sequencing everything from taking care of a baby to cutting hair, secretarial work, protests, speaking on the phone, packaging chicken in a factory, putting on a condom, and reading. Borden treats all women’s labor and leisure with deft humor and dignity. In addition to the recurring anthem, largely punk diegetic performances are mixed with an altogether rousing soundtrack that sustains the film’s tempo. Across speeches, songs, slogans, radio broadcasts, conversations, and chants, Born in Flames stages a layered, polyvocal soundscape, as music takes over conversations, background sounds are maladjusted, and language explodes across newspapers, documents, and graffiti.

These make up the film’s dizzying surplus of media, in addition to the TV screens filling the frame with broadcasts, talk shows, and documentary clips. The news criminalizes the Women’s Army, framing their communal actions—childcare, political education, organizing strikes—as the “selfish, self-interested” antics of “extremists” and “vigilantes.” An FBI surveillance subplot contributes a deluge of photos, background files, diagrams, and videos. Presenting similar tools to different ends, Honey insists that music has a role in liberation, and Isabel proclaims it time to “redesign the mindscape of an alienated culture”; both characters assert the necessary participation of artmaking cultural production in the ongoing task of organizing toward freedom. Born in Flames makes clear what is now as urgently at stake as ever: how the communication of information constitutes, facilitates, and, most grimly, limits our understanding of a global architecture in which unevenly distributed survival is by design.

An explosion atop one of the towers of the former World Trade Center is the film’s final act. While this scene cannot escape the valence brought to it by subsequent events, it can still be read as a strategic undermining of the government’s media monopoly—the target is a transmitter. Destroying it is an attack on the capacity of entrenched structures to control knowledge. The film’s speculative leaps might not account for the precise evolution of communication technologies in recent years, but Born in Flames is still stunningly prescient in articulating a long historical consciousness of how they structure power. Placing this awareness within the film’s feminist framework, the closing missive of the Socialist Youth Review pointedly explains how “the media, the tool of the government, reinforces their position by promoting images of women as wives and mothers. We are surrounded by the very images our mothers fought to destroy.” This work of hybridized fiction considers how women might redefine themselves and create themselves anew by reorganizing relations of power and access.

Another scene involving the Socialist Youth Review shows its editors holding a photograph of Norris’s body—a political assassination masked as a prison suicide—to stage a brief but critical conversation about the sensationalist and exploitative use of images, with one of them concluding that “we don’t need to fetishize a dead body.” Given our only increased access to abundant visual evidence of state brutality today, the film’s attunement to representational violence is devastatingly up to date. As a narrative of revolution, Born in Flames must inevitably deal with violence and self-defense. A particularly memorable scene shows a melee around a woman being sexually harassed in the street, with help coming in the form of a whistleblowing and bicycle-riding brigade of women. The film challenges the recourse to punitive and carceral mechanisms of the state, looking to safety through the lens of communal self-defense.

Both the most ardent advocate for the significance of media and the most incisive commentator on the role of violence is the film’s movement elder, Zella Wylie, played by the real-life lawyer and activist Flo Kennedy. In a scene that continues to circulate widely across digital platforms, she sits in a red kaffiyeh and unambiguously states, “We have a right to violence. All oppressed people have a right to violence.” Without making it a central debate, the film considers many venues and tactics of survival and freedom-seeking as part of a program of reimagining the world. Kennedy was famously equipped with a law degree, a rude mouth, sartorial flair (including her signature cowboy hat), and an indomitable spirit and commitment to coalitional efforts with queer and sex-worker communities, organizing around reproductive rights with a fierce dedication to Black Power. She defended the Black Panthers against a bombing conspiracy charge, Assata Shakur during her retrial for an alleged bank robbery, and the estates of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker from predatory record companies, setting up the Media Workshop in 1966 to organize against racism and sexism in journalism; Kennedy was also a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus. Embodying the importance of intergenerational exchange in maintaining and moving struggles forward, Kennedy and her manifold political activities are the very spirit of the film.

Born in Flames critically responded to the white, masculinist left’s tendency to homogenize, at different periods relegating what were ultimately co-constructed, classed oppressions to “the Negro question” and “the woman question.” The film grows out of the explosion of women-led, Black, and anticolonial organizing that refused this marginalization—as well as the 1970s’ conjunction of the women’s movement, multipronged feminist politics, and theoretical debates around film aesthetics and how to disrupt dominant means of representation. Documentaries and nonfiction were key, becoming a standard for translating the political understanding of women’s experiences. In the formal assemblage of Borden’s film, documentary elements are written into the handheld camera, grainy imagery, jittery jump cuts, and nonprofessional actors half playing themselves, in addition to footage of real and orchestrated protests and real locations, such as the lobby and stairs of the World Trade Center.