RADIOACTIVITY #3
Lizzie Borden and "Born in Flames"
Self-taught filmmaker Lizzie Borden is a pioneer of militant queer and lesbian cinema. Her second film, ‘Born in Flames’, described by Sophie Mayer as “feminist Afro-futurist science fiction”, oozes freshness and relevance even though it was released in 1983.
It was produced without a script – through what she calls inductive scripting – and shot over a period of four years with a budget of barely 40,000 dollars. The editing table then became one of her closest allies: guided by intuition and tenacious lucidity, she turned to pseudo-documentary to make up for the shortcomings resulting from precariousness and amateurism in the film world.
Against this backdrop, pirate radio became one of the protagonists and main motifs of the narrative thread of ‘Born in Flames’. In this short excerpt, Lizzie Borden explains the various reasons that led her to take an interest in the phenomenon of European free radio, and how it helped her to connect the various agendas of this cult film.
Reni Hofmüller
In the 1990s, twenty minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to detect and neutralise any illegal radio transmitter. Back then, Reni Hofmüller was part of a group of activists who took over the airwaves with pirate broadcasts every Sunday from the mountains surrounding the city. After short 18-minute sessions, the Radio Dauerwelle team would pack up its equipment and clear out, moments before the authorities arrived. In this podcast, Hofmüller shares her early commitment with radio, as well as her obsession with dismantling the invisible in order to understand and question it. A trip through time that takes us from the 1980s to the present, through her personal involvement in feminist discussions from the perspective of new media. Our conversation is riddled with references to her commitment to open source, to doing things together, to the uninhibited mixing of disciplines, and to her passion for the electromagnetic sphere and bicycles.
Elektronmusikstudion (EMS)
In 1953, after attending the first Swedish Radio and Fylkingen Society electronic music concert with Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström wrote a manifesto for concrete poetry. More than a decade later, the Swedish Radio broadcasted his pioneer radio piece “Fåglar I Sverige (Birds in Sweden)”. In the decades that followed, the complexity and broad spectrum of productions coming out of the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), founded by Karl Birger in 1964, made it a hub for artists. But while the text-sound scene was in and out of the Sound Workshop, Knut Wiggen, the first director of the EMS, channelled his energy into the futuristic dream of creating a world-class computer music studio for experts and scholars.
Lizzie Borden
American filmmaker and activist Lizzie Borden talks about her first three films -"Re-grouping” (1976), "Born in Flames" (1983) i "Working Girls" (1986)-, about inductive and deductive filmmaking, about filming without a script, about the importance of editing, about style, about the use of documentary strategies in fiction films, about alternative distribution as a form of activism, about the lack of women in the film world and about her notion of television as the future of audiovisual media.
The seminal Pirate Radio scene in London
Media studies expert Matthew Fuller talks about the origins and legacy of pirate radio culture in London, focusing on this fertile period of DIY resurgence, when radio resumed a prominent role in a scene hungry for alternative channels before the arrival of the internet.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Mats Lindström that we were unable to include the first time around.
Radio Tomate
RADIOACTIVITY looks into two seminal free radio stations – Radio Alice in Bologna and Radio Tomate in Paris – as singular case studies in which self-management, decentralised organisation and DIY coincide. The mini-series is an introduction to the free radio movement that sprung up in several countries in the seventies as a way of giving voice to actors who were outside the media establishment: an alternative to the dominant narrative that can also be seen as precursor of the horizontal rhizome structure of digital networks.
Radio Alice
RADIOACTIVITY looks into two seminal free radio stations – Radio Alice in Bologna and Radio Tomate in Paris – as singular case studies in which self-management, decentralised organisation and DIY coincide. The mini-series is an introduction to the free radio movement that sprung up in several countries in the seventies as a way of giving voice to actors who were outside the media establishment: an alternative to the dominant narrative that can also be seen as precursor of the horizontal rhizome structure of digital networks.