Autodidact and feminist: Lizzie Borden, a politically charged cinema

Saturday March 7, TCM Cinema devotes an evening to the director Lizzie Borden. The occasion to rediscover three of the films that the American feminist shot, as an autodidact, between 1976 and 1986.

Selecting for an artist’s name that of a teacher who fascinated the United States in the 19th century after being accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an ax is already a form of rebellion. Lizzie Borden wanted to be a painter. She left her home in Detroit and a dominant father to settle in New York, in a climate of artistic ferment and financial bankruptcy that prevailed in the Big Apple in the mid-1970s. She quickly became disenchanted by the sexism of the downtown Manhattan art galleries, very white and upper-middle class, but she also distanced herself from the local underground cinema, this “No Wave” that she loved for its energy but favored aesthetics over politics.

It is in this context that she self-produced Regrouping (1976), a documentary about four art students, united in a feminist and protest collective. They question their sexuality, gender, mixity, intimacy, leadership in a group, the function of art or the film itself. Each films and decides what will be preserved. They quickly want to control their image, so as not to appear vulnerable. The different viewpoints become so many betrayals. Lizzie Borden’s approach is to seize the film and make it her own, transforming it into an experimental collage. Her disjointed images and sounds strike and unsettle, but its density and plastic strength create a welcome complexity in a form of activism that questions how to stay together in solidarity, while continuing to be disruptive. Faced with the protagonists’ outcry, the film sleeps for forty years in a closet and becomes a legend.

Agit-prop does not forbid humor

The director returns to the street with Born in Flames (1983). In this pamphlet at the heart of a dystopian America in the midst of a so-called democratic revolution, but in reality still racist, classist, and misogynistic, black workers and/or lesbians speak out, even taking up arms to achieve equality. It is once again an incendiary and Marxist patchwork, debating patriarchal oppression, rape culture, unemployment, and the convergence of struggles. Agit-prop does not forbid humor. Like the revolution, the film constantly shifts, contradictions arise, but what stands out above all is the need to succeed in fighting together.

Lizzie Borden emerges from the underground with Working Girls (1986), a day in the life of several prostitutes in a chic Manhattan brothel. The still polyphonic and discordant approach this time turns to almost anthropological study. The oldest profession in the world is seen… as a profession (money, management, and long hours). The film is distributed by Harvey Weinstein, who produces, re-edits, and completely denatures Lizzie Borden's next film, Love Crimes (1992), an erotic thriller about power and consent, from a female point of view. He refuses to let the director remove her name from the credits and puts her on a blacklist. Since then, she has been teaching and writing scenarios anonymously. Her films, which are slowly emerging from museums and campuses where they were confined, have lost none of their sharpness.

Evening devoted to Lizzie Borden on TCM Cinema, Saturday March 7th starting at 8:50 pm with: Working Girls, Born in Flames, Regrouping.