In the late 1970s, New York was a mess. Garbage was piling up, rats were everywhere — in other words, it was the perfect time to make art in cheap lofts and create disruptive social movements like no-wave cinema and punk rock. This was the backdrop against which Lizzie Borden set her micro-budget dystopian feminist movie “Born in Flames,” which was released in 1983 after five years of scrappy guerrilla production on the streets of Manhattan.
For those who might not have caught “Born in Flames” at a retrospective screening — or for those who saw it back in the ’80s and don’t remember how far ahead of its time it was — the Criterion Collection is releasing the restored film on Blu-Ray Tuesday with a commentary track from the director and cast members, an interview with Borden and as her earlier experimental film “Regrouping.”
In the 40-plus years since, “Born in Flames” has gone from a little-seen indie to a seminal title for cinephiles, whether the topic is pioneering women filmmakers or movies that seem eerily prescient from the view of our fractured present landscape.
“Born in Flames” takes place 10 years after a peaceful Social Democratic revolution, during a time in the near future when society has theoretically evolved, yet problems like unfair treatment of women workers and rape persist. It’s the story of a resistance movement spurred by two radical radio stations, one run by Black women and one by punkish white women, that spread the word of what’s really happening despite the so-called revolution. With an infectious proto-Riot Grrrl theme song by Red Krayola and a street-level view of the city at the time, it’s a vital piece of feminist filmmaking that proved to be uncannily prescient.
After directing the 1986 “Working Girls,” about the lives of sex workers in New York, Borden had a few misadventures in mainstream filmmaking, mostly no thanks to Harvey Weinstein. She’s still working on scripts and possible film projects, but Borden ultimately found the world of commercial cinema didn’t mesh well with the subversive brand of filmmaking that she came to by way of the art world and Jean-Luc Godard.
“Born in Flames” is set against the backdrop of a feminist uprising in New York City.
Ahead of the Criterion release, Borden talked to Variety about being in director jail, why it was crucial to her to include Black women’s voices in “Born in Flames” and how it relates to the attacks on freedoms happening right now.
“Born in Flames” is so interesting because it’s not solely an arty indie film like others from the no-wave movement, but also has a strong political message and an energy all its own. How did you come up with that combination?
I come out of the art world. I didn’t go to film school, and there were groups in the art world, like Art and Language that studied Marxist texts. I had become fascinated by the idea of the woman question. But what was the woman question? Did it mean that women would be second class citizens? So I wanted to start with that premise. But also coming from the art world, it was very supportive but it was very white and middle class. I really felt that I wanted to involve women of color in this film, and I didn’t know any, so I had to search for them. I searched for them in bars and at the gym. I wanted the women who I pulled in, especially the Black women, to create their own characters within the framework of this premise.
I had been influenced by two things — one was seeing a retrospective of Godard films. A lot of the no-wave filmmakers were influenced by some of his films, the Anna Karina films. I was interested in the ones where he combined essay and story, where he broke the fourth wall, because I thought that’s really interesting to do, that you can tell a story and you can do kind of a political statement in the same movie. The other was “The Battle of Algiers.”
The premise was not really science fiction, it was more like political fiction, and it looks dystopian now, but then that’s how it looked, burned out buildings and graffiti everywhere.
How have viewers discovered the film over time?
One of the key moments was when it was restored in 2016 by the Anthology Film Archives. And at that point, Occupy Wall Street was a big movement, and I think young men came to be an audience. So it was snowballing throughout the years. A lot of people wrote about it, a lot of people taught it in gender studies classes. I see people on social media saying, “Where can we see this film?” So finally, there’ll be a way for people to see it.
Who returned for the commentary track?
Adele Bertei, for one. She played Isabel of Radio Regatta, one of the pirate radio stations. Honey, who plays the leader of the other one, had died in 2010, which was very sad for me, but I was able to find the woman who plays Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield). She was not well, and I was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to do it, but she came through with flying colors. I was able to get Chris Hegedus, of Hegedus Penebaker. She originally was working as a cinematographer on the film, but then she met D.A. Pennebaker, and he fell in love with her, so I lost her. I spoke to Pat Murphy, who was one of the three editors — the three editors were Kathryn Bigelow, Becky Johnston, who wrote “Prince of Tides” and “Seven Years in Tibet” and Pat Murphy, an Irish director who directed “Maeve” and a few other films. Now she is a Buddhist priest and she’s just extraordinarily articulate and remembers the origins of the film in a way I forgot.
It was pretty unusual at that time to have so much representation of Black women in a film.
It bothered me so much that the art world was so white, and there were artist groups who spoke about equal representation, but I think they were also very sexist. It’s only recently been changing.
“Born in Flames” uses a number of formats for a visually exciting look, from videotape for the TV station segments to stock shots of women working in a chicken plant, to footage from real demonstrations. How did you incorporate all of that?
I used everything, I wanted texture. I had stock footage of demonstrations, of the Detroit riots, of Take Back the Night. There’s Italian footage of Radio Alice being destroyed. Some of the demonstrations are real, and I had the actresses walk into them. For the women working, I actually shot those over a period of time, and one of my favorite cuts in the movie is going from packing the chicken to the condom being put on a penis. It’s like, that is also women’s work. It was intentional that Adelaide Norris had a job in construction, because that kind of job is the first to go when men are being reintroduced into the workforce. If they complain they’re not getting enough jobs, the women are fired, and it’s back to the home, which I kind of see happening now.
What are some of the parallels between the political activism seen in “Born in Flames” and what’s happening today? You said once you thought those issues would have been solved by now.
The signs in some of those demonstrations could be the signs we see today, and it’s like, wait a second. Where are we in time? Now there’s even more of a kind of hatred of women and fear of women, as evidenced in the last election. I thought women would be earning equal pay. Abortion. It’s just so infuriating. So the list goes on in terms of all the rights that we hope to get that have just eroded or never been achieved — the Equal Rights Amendment, everyone thought that would happen.
After “Born in Flames,” you made “Working Girls,” which got more attention and played in the Cannes Director’s Fortnight. What happened with it after the festival?
After it was in the Director’s Fortnight, I met Miramax, and they wanted to pick it up. They made an offer I couldn’t refuse. They were still in a little office on the West Side. Harvey had an assistant, Eve, and he was being flirty with her, but he eventually married her. And he used to throw chairs against the wall, but my father did that too, so it just didn’t seem abnormal to me. Since we had a decent relationship, he didn’t make me cut it, in fact, he asked for more scenes to be put in. I figured if men come in thinking they’re gonna be turned on, they will be sadly mistaken, but that’s fine.
But then you made “Love Crimes” also for Miramax, and it didn’t go well. How did working with Harvey Weinstein on that film affect your career?
Everything changed. It had an Allan Moyle script to begin with, and it didn’t end up being that script. Every day I would get notes that changed it. I was just very confused and I was very innocent, because I had come from having total control on two films which I edited myself.
I did not have choice in casting. That was Harvey’s choice. I did not know that Sean Young was a Me Too survivor. I detested what happened with the movie, the way it was cut. I didn’t add flashbacks. They were not mine. They were the work of another filmmaker. But Harvey kept threatening me that if I took my name off, he would destroy my career.
And so I just went along with it. Even though there’s a supposed director’s cut, it’s not mine. That’s just Harvey’s way of adding more sex and trying to act as if it were mine. What he did, which then was borne out by what he did to other women, was he told people I was difficult to work with, and that made it really impossible to get anything else. And of course the film was terrible.
So director jail was indeed much worse for women in the ’90s?
What happens when there’s a failure is that a woman, especially then, isn’t given a second chance to make another one and men in the same position get second and third chances. I think that happened to so many of the women from the ’70s and ’80s. They make one or two movies and if the bigger one doesn’t work, that’s it. So the movie jail just lasted and lasted.
When women came out and talked about how their careers were destroyed by Harvey, by his telling people that we were impossible to work with, it was a revelation.
Recently, a clip from “Born in Flames” of Zella, played by Florynce Kennedy, saying “All oppressed people have a right to violence” caused controversy when it was briefly posted by Black Lives Matter after the killing of Iryna Zarutska. What did you think of that?
Flo Kennedy was playing a character. She would be so distressed by this. A few clips that are taken from the film are used sometimes very out of context. She says “Oppressed people have the right to violence, it’s like the right to pee. You need the right place, the right time.” She often said things just to rile people up. That was her way of forcing the world into dialogue. She would be horrified by that juxtaposition, which was sick and twisted.
This interview was edited and condensed.