Son[i]a #240
Lizzie Borden
The films by American filmmaker and activist Lizzie Borden are like a wake-up call urging us to think about the past, the present, and the future of feminism through a particular understanding of the creative process and cinematic language. Following her dream of being a painter, Borden studied art and came into contact with the American conceptual art scene in the early seventies.
As a result of clashes with the prevailing discourse on abstract expressionism led by Clement Greenberg, she drifted away from painting, although she maintained close links to the art world through her work as a writer for ‘Artforum’ and her friendships with some artists. Her discovery of Jean-Luc Godard’s films and his way of mixing essay and narrative within a single artistic expression was a turning point in Lizzie Borden’s career.
In 1976, armed with a 16 mm camera and surrounded by friends and acquaintances – including Joan Jonas, Barbara Kruger and Kathryn Bigelow – Borden shot her first film, entitled ‘Regrouping’. Made in the context of the second wave of feminism in the US, it reflects on the reason for being and the living conditions of a group of women in a man’s world. The film, which used an experimental and very beautiful cinematic language, with audacious fades to white, abrupt editing, and an expressive, unconventional use of sound, was literally kept in a closet for forty years, before finally coming to light again recently.
Borden’s second film, ‘Born in Flames’ (1983) was framed within a more radical discourse. It reflects on the situation of black non-heterosexual women and on the nature of activism and violence as revolution. In an exercise in speculative fiction that draws on documentary strategies, Borden explores dystopias in an Afrofuturist setting. The film, which Borden shot in stages over four years as she managed to raise the financing, has become a cult work of feminist activism.
In her third film, ‘Working Girls’, made in 1986, Borden turned to the problems of race, class and stereotypes in relation to sex workers, from a demystified female point of view totally removed from the voyeurism and prejudices with which prostitution is usually portrayed.
SON[I]A talks to Lizzie Borden 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.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Isaac Julien that we were unable to include the first time around.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with video artist, activist and researcher Marina Gržinić, which we were unable to include the first time around. Marina reflects on her trajectory, together with Aina Šmid, in the field of video art and new media, from the eighties to the present day, from a feminist and socialist perspective.
Isaac Julien
The work of Isaac Julien moves through liminal spaces. Overlapping zones between photography, film, and installation; choreography and dance; poetry and music… and the infinite possible versions, iterations, and variations that can emerge from systematic work with the archive. Intersections in which fiction, documentary, narrative, and radicality converge to produce aesthetically meticulous and politically powerful imaginaries and stories that challenge white heterosexual film conventions through their temporalities, narrative construction, and aesthetic forms. In this podcast, Isaac Julien talks about the need to give a voice and body to dissident black identity and desire in the cinematic imaginary, about expanded cinema and choreographic montage; and about his constant shifts between the worlds of art, video art, and film.
Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey contextualises, updates, and elucidates on the far-reaching impact of her key text "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", where she coined the notion of the “male gaze” in classic Hollywood cinema and addressed the power asymmetry in representation and assigned gender roles, thus emphasising the patriarchal ideological agenda of the American film industry. At the same time, she opens up the debate with the notions of the “queer gaze” and the “universal whiteness” of Hollywood. Mulvey also defends orality as a form of "history from below", citing the example of “compilation films” (films that use archival footage re-written with new narrative) as a space for a new feminist film practice.
Lizzie Borden and "Born in Flames"
Pirate radio became one of the protagonists and main motifs of the narrative thread of Lizzie Borden's 'Born in Flames'. In this short excerpt, the cult and self-taught filmmaker Lizzie Borden shares 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.