Agenda

Five friends, united first by poverty and then by an unexpected lottery win, abandon Paris to renovate a ruin on the banks of the Marne, transforming it into a ‘guinguette’ (open-air café). They pursue a utopian community, which gradually falls apart.

Jean: « C'était une belle idée... une belle idée. »

« Quand on s'promène au bord de l'eau,
comme tout est beau,
quel renouveau.
Paris au loin nous semble une prison,
on a le cœur plein de chansons… »

Jean Gabin performing the film's signature song Quand on s'promène au bord de l'eau

“La Belle équipe is an iconic film of Poetic Realism and the mood of the Front Populaire (which won the elections during the filming), as far as the working-class protagonists are indifferent to ideology, as was Julien Duvivier, who recognized an immediate empathy with Charles Spaak’s storyline in terms of its pessimism and spirit of disillusionment (tinged with misogyny). (...) Duvivier and Spaak managed to persuade the producer Arys Nissotti to present such a bitter film only thanks to the backing of Gabin (at his fourth film with Duvivier). After the film’s commercial failure during the first few days of screening, however, Nissotti convinced Duvivier to shoot some new sequences and to re-edit the last part to give it a happy ending. This became definitive after the public chose it in a poll [305 out of a test audience of 366]. Up until 1960, La Belle équipe was then distributed in France with the optimistic ending (Duvivier and Spaak: ‘the stupidity of this version where the final scenes contradict the rest of the film’). In 1966, the writers reacquired the rights, but could no longer find the original. Just before his death in 1967, Duvivier, found a Swiss copy subtitled in German thanks to the Cinémathèque française, whose last reel was replaced with that of the producer. In the meantime, the sweetened version had also circulated in Great Britain and the United States, while in Italy and Germany the original version was released. With historian Lenny Borger’s discovery of a nitrate dupe preserved by Cineteca Nazionale in Rome, the writers’ original version has been restored.”

Roberto Chiesi1

« On retrouve dans ce film toute la mythologie de '36 : la solidarité ouvrière : éveillée par les paroles de Jean, elle est symbolisée par la construction de la guinguette, la mise en commun de l’argent, la nuit passée sur le toit à retenir les tuiles menacées par l’orage. L’affiche du film représente cinq silhouettes se tenant par la main. Un nom doit être trouvé pour la propriété commune, ce petit phalanstère comme un siècle plus tôt en rêvait Fourier. « Chaque citoyen (étant) président », elle s’appellera « Chez nous ». L’enseigne qui l’illustre est encadrée de deux mains qui se serrent, le symbole de la C.G.T. (est-ce volontaire ?). La solidarité s’exerce aussi envers le cinquième, Mario, réfugié politique espagnol, amoureux d’Huguette. »

Geneviève Guillaume-Grimaut2

• 1Roberto Chiesi, “La belle équipe,” Festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, June 2015.
• 2Geneviève Guillaume-Grimaut, “Le peuple au cinéma,” L’Avant-scène cinéma, 450 (1996).

Various tales in the lives of Tokyo slum dwellers, including a mentally deficient young man obsessed with driving his own commuter trolley. The film title Dodesukaden are the playacting words uttered by the boy character to mimick the sound of his imaginary tram (trolley car) in motion.

”I think that I will suffer agony making this film”

...

“Never before have I worked with so much relaxation.”

Akira Kurosawa before and after shooting Dodesukaden

“‘This film was Kurosawa’s first in color, and he doesn’t let you forget it,’ Dave Kehr sneered in his Reader capsule review. ‘The tonalities are so bold, so broadly symbolic, and so spectacularly deployed that they easily overwhelm the tiny sentimentalities of the story.’ I agree that the colors of Dodes’ka-den are spectacularly deployed, but I don’t think they’re broadly symbolic. Yes, Kurosawa identifies certain characters with individual hues (the swapping wives are identified with yellow and red, for instance), and the film is rife with primary colors. At the same time, Dodes’ka-den contains many muted colors as well: in fact, they often compete for one’s attention in the same shot as bold colors. Kurosawa doesn’t always seem in control of the color scheme of the movie; he just wants to use as many colors as he can. In this regard, one might appreciate Dodes’ka-den as an experimental film as well as a narrative one.”

Ben Sachs1

“The film discloses the psychological and social binds of its characters, and it discloses the contradictions between their delusions and stark reality. But at the same time that Kurosawsa exposes the personal contradictions of his characters, he has created yet more in his own work. He does not show us how his characters become oppressed, or who is oppressing them, or how people struggle to be free. There is very little context or perspective. Some of the characters might have been artists – actors or architects – had they been born into more affluent classes. These characters have visions that Kurosawa makes concrete and visible to us. We become sympathetic to these visions and appreciate their beauty. Yet we also see that the visions are illusory; they are very inadequate substitutes for material reality. Psychologically, the characters’ illusions run from neurotic to psychotic, but whatever we term them, the problem remains the same. There is a confusion between concrete reality and imagination or fantasy. And from a political point of view, the illusions are naive, sentimental idealizations.”

Marty Gliserman2  

• 1Ben Sachs, “Akira Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den is the most beautiful movie in town this week,” Chicago Reader, 2 February 2018.
• 2Marty Gliserman, “Dodes’Ka-Den. Illusions,” Jump Cut, no. 6, 1975, via E-jumpcut.org.

Set in a seaside town, the film consists of three parts that tell the story of three different women, all named Anne and all played by French actress Isabelle Huppert. The framing story has young film student, Won-joo and her mother Park Sook hiding from their debtors in Mohang, a seaside town in Buan, North Jeolla. The bored younger woman sets out to write a screenplay whose plot will use the place they’re staying in for the location, but eventually comes up with three variants, using the same basic idea in all of them.

“The construction of In Another Country, with its triple role for Isabelle Huppert and its recurring characters, is as much based on the pure experience of the chemistry of feelings (consecutively bringing three women into an a priori identical environment and observing the different reactions) as on pictorial observation (changing the foreground figure to see how the background evolves). Far from any rigidity, this dispositif proves incredibly malicious, in the image of the character of the lifeguard, who is identical in the three stories but behaves much more unpredictably than the spectator’s expectations. We expected ‘again’, but we get ‘either, or’. That is precisely Hong Sang-soo’s sleight of hand: making us believe that he is constantly directing the same film in order to quietly ameliorate the construction of his scaffolding of fictional deployment, a drunken cousin of Smoking/No Smoking, which would rather be called Drinking/No Drinking in his case. Cheers, dear Hong Sang-soo! Cheers to you and to your cinema!”

Joachim Lepastier1

“Unlike the twice-told tales of Hong’s early career, in which his films’ second halves reiterate their first, revisiting sites and incidents to revise their meaning, Hong’s recent works, including his latest, In Another Country, often repeat episodes more than twice – literally, déjà vu all over again – varying the version of events to cast doubt on their veracity or to offer cubist scrutiny of his complicated characters. In The Day He Arrives, a soju-fueled cross between Last Year at Marienbad and Groundhog Day, Yoo Seongjun, a lapsed director self-exiled to the provinces, roams the streets and bars of Seoul much as X wanders the hallways and gardens of Marienbad, through an endless repetition of settings, characters, and incidents, each reiteration calling previous accounts into question. “I don’t remember a thing,” the bar owner Ye-jeon insists after Seongjun apologizes for what something he has just done, her protestation recalling A’s many disavowals of the past in Marienbad. Whose version does one trust: his, hers, neither?”

James Quandt2

“The actor is indeed, as much as the set and the filmmaker himself, an important purveyor of fragments, leading Hong Sang-soo to declare the following about In Another Country: ‘I saw the light, its beams on the floor. I did not yet know what I was going to do with them, but I knew these elements would be at the heart of the film. The same goes for the place where Isabelle Huppert sees the goats. Precision or rather a sense of detail is essential for me. It had to be that place and no other. When I choose the actors, the first time I see them, I identify a number of facts about them. Concerning the actors, it is this mixture of feeling and intuition, and the details gathered at the locations, which make it so that I have to shoot here and nowhere else. It’s a rather strange and indefinable alchemy that inspires me. What’s beautiful is that everything starts from chance. The chance to meet these places, these actors. I never know what drives me to love a place. This road with this arrow, it’s banal, you might not even notice it. Yet I remember that it immediately caught my eye. As if it was something waiting to be revealed by someone.’”

Romain Lefebvre3

• 1Joachim Lepastier, “Drinking / No Drinking,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 682 (2012). Republished on Sabzian on 6 May 2020.
• 2James Quandt, “Déjà Vu,” from the booklet that accompanied Cinema Guild’s DVD of The Day He Arrives. Republished on Sabzian on 7 February 2018.
• 3Romain Lefebvre, “The Hong Sang-soo Method,” translated by Gerard-Jan Claes and Anton Jäger, Sabzian, 6 May 2020. Originally published as “La méthode Hong Sang-soo. Ou comment tourner un film en quelques jours,” débordements, 6 March 2018.

A film that excavates layers of myth and memory to find the elusive truth at the core of a family of storytellers.

“When you're in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all but rather a confusion, a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard are powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you’re telling it to yourself or someone else.”

Michael Polley, storyteller in Stories We Tell

“Near the beginning of Sarah Polley’s newest film, Stories We Tell (2012), an autobiographical documentary about her family and her life history, Polley asks one of her sisters what she thinks about this very film being made. ‘Who fucking cares about our family? Can I swear?’ her sister replies. This quick line, almost a jokey throwaway, is, in fact, key to Sarah Polley’s conception of autobiography and documentary filmmaking. Polley’s sister, Joanna, like each of the director’s four siblings, will play a vital role providing her thoughts and her memories about the family and their complex relationships, but here near the start of their interview, she questions the very legitimacy of the project and whether their story carries any special weight. Even as she voices skepticism, though, Polley’s sister immediately cedes to the authority of her sister/interviewer/director. ‘Can I swear?’ she asks the documentarian, off screen. Joanna voices her own assertive perspective and pulls back to acknowledge her sister. This short line establishes the push-pull, give-and-take pattern that will continue throughout the film and in many distinct forms. From this pattern, Polley’s film seems to forward an argument about autobiography and documentary filmmaking: that these are plural, collaborative genres most effectively and truthfully made through a chorus of many and diverse voices, a ‘medley’ as her other sister, Susy, describes it, each given freedom as well as equal weight.”

Leah Anderst1

“What’s important in considering Stories We Tell is not to tally up the turns of the story, which are numerous and compelling enough both on paper and onscreen (and are duly inventoried in just about in any other review), but rather the way that Polley chooses to present them: as a thick, interlaced tapestry. There are intimately shot interviews, eloquently scripted and delivered voiceovers (one of which is written and delivered by Polley père in his plummy stage actor’s voice), authentically degraded old home movies, and also elaborately degraded fake old home movies featuring well-cast actors as the younger versions of the major players.”

Adam Nayman2

“In Polley’s work [...] the narrative self is a cinematic storyteller who transforms actual email messages into dramatic scenes, and employs actors to create faux home video footage. Fictional devices, a commonly used strategy in the literary memoir, highlight the constructed nature of identity and memory-driven storytelling, a central theme of the film. An established director of narrative film, Polley employs the camera as mediator for her self-exploration. Consistent with the notion of performatism, the ‘primary’ of ‘ostensive’ frame, moreover, is storytelling, as seen through its objective correlative – the camera, or the various “cameras” that function throughout the film. The camera focuses alternately on the interviewees and on Polley herself, calling attention to the crucial role of the other in her self-representation. Such a strategy cushions the impact of the family revelation at the film’s center, disrupting Polley’s personal identity while pointing to a more fully conscious, if refracted, subjectivity abetted by and within the frame of filmic narrative.”

Kate Waites3

• 1Leah Anderst, “Memory’s Chorus: Stories We Tell and Sarah Polley’s Theory of Autobiography,” Senses of Cinema, December 2013.
• 2Adam Nayman, “Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, Canada),” Cinema Scope, 53, 2013;
• 3Kate Waites, “Sarah Polley’s Documemoir Stories We Tell: The Refracted Subject,” Biography, vol. 38, no. 4, 2015, 543–555, www.jstor.org/stable/24803074. Accessed 14 Jan. 2020.

When Mildred Pierce’s wealthy husband leaves her for another woman, Mildred decides to raise her two daughters on her own. Despite Mildred’s financial successes in the restaurant business, her oldest daughter, Veda, resents her mother for degrading their social status. In the midst of a police investigation after the death of her second husband, Mildred must evaluate her own freedom and her complicated relationship with her daughter.

“To the men we have loved! The stinkers.”

Ida Corwin1

“Beneath the sheen of glamour and the throb of melodrama, Mildred Pierce (1945) is an acute, unsparing study of relationships poisoned by class and money. The plot reveals a cruel sting in the tail of the most essential American promise – that hard work, sacrifice, and self-improvement will find their ultimate reward in the next generation’s success. But these caustic insights are embedded in a movie as satisfying as the comfort food Mildred serves in her neon-lit upscale diners: the dialogue crisp and salted with wit, the decadently rich emotion cut by just enough acerbic tartness.”

Imogen Sara Smith2

“In 1945, Joan Crawford appeared as Mildred Pierce in the feverish film noir of the same name, where she played the compelling and electrifying central heroine. This film would go on to influence Sonic Youth’s heavy, angst-ridden ‘Mildred Pierce’ which appeared on Goo and was one of the first tracks they ever wrote as a band. In it, Thurston Moore repeats the name ‘Mildred Pierce’ in his deep East Coast drawl before the song explodes into a chaotic, cymbal-smashing climax, while Moore yowls ‘Why, Mildred Pierce, Why?’ with his voice muffled amongst his own distorted screams.

In the video, Sofia Coppola appears as insane twist on Joan Crawford’s character, whilst she shakily paints her lip black, tries to rearrange her hair and gazes manically into the camera as she stumbles around the streets of Hollywood.”

Daisy Jones3

“Mildred Pierce

Mildred!

Mildred Pierce!

Mildred Pierce!

No!

Mildred Pierce!

Mildred Pierce!

Why

Mildred Pierce!

What!”

Sonic Youth4

• 1Ida Corwin in Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), interpreted by Eve Arden.
• 2Imogen Sara Smith, “Mildred Pierce: A Woman’s Work,” Criterion, 2017.
• 3Daisy Jones, “Why Sonic Youth’s ‘Goo’ rules 25 years on,” Dazed Digital, 2015.
• 4Sonic Youth, “Mildred Pierce,” Goo. DGC Records. 1990.

Sullivan: I want this picture to be a... document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity... a true canvas of the suffering of humanity.

LeBrand: But with a little sex in it.

Sullivan: [reluctantly] But with a little sex in it.

“Of course, other readings of this scene present themselves; after all, both light entertainment and religion have been accused of being means to the same end – keeping those who never get a piece of the pie in a state of quasi-satisfaction, taking their attention away from more radical solutions. This, however, does not seem to be Sturges’ point. Sullivan’s Travels is quite unequivocal in its stance: a full recognition of the fact that the American experience is a real nightmare to a large segment of its citizens, and the almost equally plain conclusion that there is nothing one can do about it, making the film a curious mix of daring social criticism and tremendous resignation.”

Jonas Varsted Kirkegaard1

Kent Jones: But the Marx Brothers moment in Hannah and Her Sisters is in keeping with the scene in Manhattan where you’re naming the things that make life worth living. It also seems directly related to the end of Sullivan’s Travels.

Woody Allen: Well, I’ll tell you an interesting thing. I only saw Sullivan’s Travels after I made Stardust Memories. I had never been an enormous fan of Preston Sturges.

Were you thinking of Unfaithfully Yours when you shot the scene in the detective’s office in Midnight in Paris?

No, but I did love that movie, because it was Sturges, who was an urbane wit, doing an urbane movie. When he worked with William Demarest and Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton, it was more bumpkin humor, and I couldn’t warm up to that. I, personally, was a Lubitsch fan, because Lubitsch was cosmopolitan and sophisticated, and unsentimental to the end. And in that one movie, Sturges was cosmopolitan, and I thought it was wonderful. People thought I’d been influenced by Sullivan’s Travels when I did Stardust Memories. Jessica Harper, who was in that movie with me, said, “You have to see Sullivan’s Travels! It’s just like this movie and you’ll love it.” I did see it afterwards and I didn’t love it. But I do think he was a great film director. I thought his pacing was great and he knew how to write. It’s just that I personally was a Lubitsch man. I am a paleface rather than a redskin. I like the European material very much. I respond to it. When you get out toward the middle of the country and the West, I can appreciate things but I don’t enjoy them as much. I’ve often said, not so facetiously, that when I was a kid and a film began with a pan of the New York skyline, I was right with ’em. But when they were rural, I could appreciate the movies, but I had trouble personally enjoying them. I still do.

So I’m assuming that you think the end of Sullivan’s Travels is unearned as well.

Yes, it’s a commercial cop out, because life does not have an ending or a resolution. It’s an unearned optimism.

Kent Jones2

• 1Jonas Varsted Kirkegaard, “Way Ahead: How Hollywood’s Funny Man Got Away With Murder”, Senses of Cinema, 2004.
• 2Kent Jones, “Interview: Woody Allen. The full-length version”, Film Comment, 2011.

“Some filmmakers say “this is my work and I want it to stay that way”. That is their right, and we respect that right. Those are the films we don’t buy, and those are the films we don’t transmit.”

TV executive in The Universal Clock: The Resistance of Peter Watkins (Geoff Bowie, 2001)

“Watkins does not reconstruct la Commune except to speak of our submission to the ‘permanent mercantilism’ of the televisual media; of our defused anger. And after three and a half hours, in a meeting in the local quarter, the actresses throw away their masks, suddenly evoking the combat of the ‘sans-papiers’ [immigrants without resident papers who risk being ejected from France], the condition of women put to sleep by comfort ... The film becomes a furious ode to direct democracy: Watkins makes sure that the actors take power in the film, as did their personages in Paris. They denounce the media as organs of Versailles. Screen title: ‘What the media is afraid of is to see the little man in the small screen replaced by a multitude of people - the public’. Alas, Watkins, too late! The public, the ‘people’, we see only this, today. Everywhere and at all times ... assimilated by our all-digesting gaze. All the same, a Communard actress finishes before she dies, by crying out directly [to the TV Communale filming her], ‘Whether this is film or reality, all you do is watch us, but you don’t give a damn! It’s this that I want to kill!’ It’s 3:30 AM, and we, the last of the television viewers, are roused by this cry; at this instant, the Versaillais, they are us.”

Philippe Lançon1

“The Monoform is like a time-and-space grid clamped down over all the various elements of any film or TV programme. This tightly constructed grid promotes a rapid flow of changing images or scenes, constant camera movement, and dense layers of sound. A principal characteristic of the Monoform is its rapid, agitated editing, which can be identified by timing the interval between edited shots (or cuts), and dividing the number of seconds into the overall lengthof the film. In the 1970s, the Average Shot Length for a cinema film (or documentary, or TV news broadcast) was approximately 6-7 seconds, today the commercial ALS is probably circa 3-4 seconds, and decreasing.

It is my belief that the excessive demands of these flashing images on our emotional and intellectual responses can lead to blurred distinctions between themes, and to a confusion in selecting and prioritizing our reactions (e.g., to the news scene of a bleeding body in a bombed area in Syria, which is followed by a commercial message, and sooner of later, by the image of a similarly bleeding body in a film or TV drama, etc.).

Despite academic claims that audiences have become ‘media literate', the standardized rate at which audiovisual information is delivered is probably far too swift to be properly managed by the brain, which has to digest and process the rapid and continual change of visual (and audio) information from one scene to the next, and to the next, and to the next, and so on. I can anticipate a negative response from the media education sector to this analysis on the grounds that it is ‘arrogant' to presume that audiences cannot understand or decipher the workings of the Monoform (even if they believe such a thing exists). But the fact that viewers ingest the Monoform every day is not a precursor to understanding how (or why) it functions in the way that it does. The form itself may neutralize any understanding of how it works, including by habituating us to its presentation, not to mention its more subterranean and less perceivable properties. As this subject is never raised by the MAVM [Mass Audio-Visual Media], and is too rarely discussed by media educators, there is hardly a wealth of analysis or information for people to rely on.”

Peter WatkinsPeter Watkins, “Dark Side of the Moon,” http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/dsom.htm[/fn]

“Why this film, at this time?

We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history - where the conjunction of Post Modernist cynicism (eliminating humanistic and critical thinking in the education system), sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalization, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualization of the planet have synergistically created a world where ethics, morality, human collectivity, and commitment (except to opportunism) are considered “old fashioned.” Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm - to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia - which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born.

Centralizing? Collective? - or both?

I realize that a large cast, and the necessity for many people (who in more traditional films would be relegated to the background as silent ‘extras’) to speak, did frequently limit the length of time in which they could express themselves as individuals. But I believe that this was balanced by scenes where space was given to individual expression, and by the sheer length of the final film. Since an overall objective of ‘La Commune’ was to present a collective voice, I believe that the filming achieved this in a way which is highly unusual in the MAVM today.

Centralizing? Collective? - or both? Another reason for such emphasis on long sequences, including during the editing, was because the fragmentation caused by the camera arriving and departing was not the only ensuing process - a study of these sequences shows that Gérard and Aurèlia often approach a group, ask a question, and then retreat while a discussion develops between the members of the group, who speak over and across the TV interviewers; the technology is thus used only to facilitate people communicating with each other. I find these moments very exciting - they were often very spontaneous, and exemplify how ‘La Commune’, while ostensibly implementing a Monoform technique, departs radically from it.

‘The Universal Clock’, and the length of La Commune

La Commune was originally planned as a two hour production. But the method of filming long sequences expanded the internal construction of the film to the point where it became impossible to reduce it beyond a certain stage during the editing, without destroying the very process which had developed in the filming. In the end, La Commune emerged as a film of five hours 45 minutes. For me, this was a very difficult decision on certain levels; reaction to my other later films (The Journey and The Freethinker) has shown that herein lies the road to complete marginalization - partly by film critics, and totally by today’s MAVM. I was very conscious of this as I began to make decisions regarding the length of ‘La Commune’. I have written about the problems of FORM and PROCESS, and the ways in which La Commune has tried to address these issues. Now we come to the question of LENGTH in the MAVM - the way that time is used (or abused). The existing tendency - ruthlessly enforced by TV executives, especially Commissioning Editors - is to increasingly reduce and fragment the format and space available to filmmakers and the audience. At the present time, filmmakers producing TV dramas or documentaries are usually permitted a maximum of 52 minutes - in order to allow commercials to fill up the remainder of the hour. There are indications that this may be dropping to 47 minutes, and in some countries, e.g. Canada, a maximum of 22 minutes is increasingly being applied to documentaries. I have heard executives within the MAVM state that these time-spans are the result of what they refer to as ‘the universal clock’. This being the case, we can now see how the MAVM use the Monoform as a metronome governing the rhythm and internal structure of their global audiovisual ‘clock’.”

Peter WatkinsPeter Watkins, “La Commune (de Paris, 1871)”, http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/commune.htm[/fn]

• 1Philippe Lançon, « Après coup. Le cri du peuple », Libération, May 2000

Set ten years after the most peaceful revolution in United States history, Born in Flames presents a dystopia in which the issues of many groups - minorities, liberals, gay rights organizations, feminists - are dealt with by the government.

“I made the film because it seemed that people now were either completely cynical about the effectiveness of any kind of political process, or burned out and caught without any kind of language. It seemed important to re-ask certain questions, and to re-ask them as mediated through Europe, where the left is still a very vital force. If it relates to the sixties, it’s only because that energy of the sixties was so good – not just here but in Europe too. Where has that all gone?”

Lizzie Borden

Bearing in mind the recent attempts of filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Baz Luhrmann to revitalize the spirit of 1970-80’s New York, the heydays of no wave, post-punk and “the get down” seem to making a swift comeback. Sure, the imagery of The Big Apple as modern slough of despond and vibrant beacon of creativity might have some appeal as backdrop for glistening nostalgia trips and epic rock operas, but its highly doubtful that the large-scale and hyped-up entertainment drama’s invading our screens these days can measure up to the untethered vitality and relentless waywardness of Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983). The recent restoration of this in Downtown NY and guerilla-style produced science-fiction fable manifests a radical vision that detonates like a molotov cocktail amidst an actuality that is marked by political unrest and reactionary tendencies. Perhaps as never before, the speculative vision of a post-revolutionary world order which, despite rhetorical promises of change and equality, indulges in systematic discrimination and oppression evokes multiple echo’s of recognition. No wonder that the film serves as a blueprint for many activist movements in the US: its zealous and kaleidoscopic portrayal of dissident struggle against heteropatriarchy and racism appears to have only gained in urgency and pertinence. Swinging between various perspectives and characters, with the likes of Kathryn Bigelow, Adele Bertei and Florynce Kennedy playing a version of themselves, and driven by the grooves and hooks of The Red Krayola en The Bloods, this challenging reflection on gender, sex, race and class confronts us like no other with the limitations and possibilities of resistance today. Born in Flames is the focal point of an extensive film program that was composed in consultation with Lizzie Borden. Among the works in the program are two other rarely screened films of Borden: her debut film Regrouping (1976), a portrait of a woman’s group whose homogeneity of race and class Borden would later counter, and Working Girls (1986), a demystification of sex work that was initiated during the production of Born in Flames. Furthermore this program offers work by friends and compagnons-de-route like Vivienne Dick and Sheila McLaughlin, as well as a series of films that have served as source of inspiration or that evoke contemporary resonances. 

Stoffel Debuysere1

• 1Stoffel Debuysere, “DISSENT! Lizzie Borden,” Diagonal Thoughts, 28 November 2016.