Whatever Happened to Lizzie Borden?
—from a pirate radio broadcast in Born in Flames
The revolution has been victorious, and the Social Democrats have been governing the US for a decade under the banner of equality for all. But sexism and racism still run rampant, leading to the foundation of a Women’s Army comprised of divergent groups that have to unite their different perspectives under a common cause…and they do. The revolution will be transmitted by pirate radio. The fantasy premise of Lizzie Borden’s feminist guerrilla classic Born in Flames (1983) may not exactly evoke the current situation in the US, but it still speaks to our moment, as proven by the successful tour of Anthology Film Archives’ recent 35mm restoration. Born out of anger and shot over five years in the streets of New York with cheaply rented 16mm cameras on a budget of $30,000, Borden’s witty and energetic punk-spirit agitprop wake-up call has stood the test of time. Ominously ending with the blowing up of the World Trade Center (actually, only the transmitting antenna at its top), its protest agenda is still valid—maybe even more so—in the age of Trump. But whatever happened to its maker?
Following her breakthrough with Born in Flames—the film even made the front page of The New York Times upon release, where it was attacked as an example of the wastage of government arts grants—Borden scored again with Working Girls (1986), another study of female group dynamics and notions of solidarity and resistance, but one pitched in a completely different register. In Working Girls, Borden’s feminist sensibil-ity plays out in a restrained, slyly subversive study of a day in a middle-class New York brothel, turning cliched notions about prostitution on their head and focusing the all-round-rebellious spirit of its predecessor on issues of economy and exploitation: sex labour is treated as a valid, even positive option, crushed by the inequalities of the capitalist system.
When Borden then embarked on her first studio project, (1992), she was taken aback as the shoot quickly descended into disaster. Although even the compromised end result bears enough traces of Borden’s demystifying feminist agenda—basically tackling the then-popular, male-centred erotic thriller genre from the opposite perspective—it left her artistically disappointed, as did her contribution to the 1994 omnibus film (a telephone sex-worker short that makes for a fascinating sidebar to , but which was also mangled in production) and her for-hire television work, including some interesting items for the Playboy Channel and Zalman King’s . While she has no official credits after 1998, Borden has kept writing (and doing script-doctor services) and trying to develop television pilots and film projects; one of these, , about a female
