1277 Born in Flames

[domino harvey]

A blistering rallying cry issued loud, clear, and unapologetically queer, Lizzie Borden’s explosive postpunk provocation is a DIY fantasia of female rebellion set in America ten years after a revolution that supposedly transformed the country into a democratic socialist utopia. In reality, racism, sexism, and economic inequality are as virulent as ever, and a band of radicals—led by Black, lesbian, and working-class women—join forces to fight back. Told through a furiously fractured, kinetically edited flurry of television news broadcasts, pirate radio transmissions, agitprop, and protests shot guerrilla-style on the streets of New York City, Born in Flames is a shock wave of feminist futurism that’s both an essential document of its time and radically ahead of it.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

2K digital restoration—preserved by Anthology Film Archives, with restoration funding from the Golden Globe Foundation and The Film Foundation, and supervised and approved by director Lizzie Borden—with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
Introduction by Borden
New audio commentary featuring Borden; cast members Adele Bertei, Hillary Hurst, Sheila McLaughlin, Pat Murphy, Marty Pottenger, and Jeanne Satterfield; and camerapeople DeeDee Halleck and Chris Hegedus
Regrouping (1976), Borden’s directorial debut, an experimental documentary about a New York City women’s group
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: Essays by film scholar Yasmina Price and author So Mayer

New cover by Jillian Adel

[The Narrator Returns]

Was lucky enough to see this on 35mm at the Music Box a few weeks ago, incredibly propulsive and ragged, an alarm that never went off and is only getting louder. I had no idea how it was going to end and I hope everyone blind-buying it gets to do the same, though they won't have the experience of a crowd full of lesbians reacting with shocked joy at it.

[guyetgenevieve]

^ I was also at that screening! Such an invigorating film - I was so glad to see it part of the announcement today!

[senseabove]

And thank god, it includes Regrouping! Some thoughts on that one from the 1970s list:

Regrouping (Borden, 1976) Borden's first film is a semi-collaborative documentary that proposed to follow a group of four women in the 70s whose friendship is loosely, but explicitly organized around their feminism. Its iterative, compounding style is reminiscent of Yvonne Rainer's first three films, exploring first the parameters of the women's consent to be documented, the nature and development of their friendship, and then their growing suspicion of the project and of Borden's intent. As the project itself disintegrates before us, Borden turns it into a meditation on the porous boundary between political identity and identity politics. It is hardly a treatise, though; like Rainer's early films, you might say its subject is how the ideological and the emotional are inseparable, and it deftly explores both sides of the stakes; its style takes on something of the Velvet Underground's story songs with a visual dimension: voices lapping each other as they fade in and out, forcing you to choose a focus for your attention, the association of sound and image drifting apart to imbricate suggestions without ever settling them into fact, new voices fading in or cuts to different imagery pulling attention from whatever continuing element you had fixated on for a moment. While it isn't quite the tour-de-force that Born in Flames and Working Girls are, it feels in some ways like the most prescient and contemporary of Borden's three films, an absolutely fascinating look at what it means to be both human and political, to disagree and still strive to accomplish something.

I'm going to be very upset with Criterion if they don't include this on the presumably forthcoming Born in Flames disc, excepting that I expect it would be at Borden's request; she apparently put it in her closet for decades by choice because of the fallout—it only had three screenings on its release, one of which, at Anthology Film Archives, was picketed by the original subjects of the film, who passed out flyers inviting attendees to a discussion of whether Borden was actually a feminist!