POTTENKIJKERS@Eye - Born in Flames

An evening curated specially for Eye by POTTENKIJKERS. With special guest Professor Emeritus in gender studies Maaike Meijer, who threw herself into the nascent feminist movement of the ’70s, becoming one of its leading spokeswomen. She was also a founder of lesbian feministaction group Paarse September (Purple September). Maaike Meijer will be talking to filmmaker and researcher Noor de Vries of POTTENKIJKERS Filmcollectief. The discussion will be in Dutch

Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983, 90')

This postpunk provocation rocked the underground during the 1980s. A highly flammable feminist futurist tale of female rebels in America.

Ten years on from a seemingly socialist revolution in America, equality of race, class and gender is still far from ideal. In response, many different female action groups start to combine forces. When Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield), the Black revolutionary who founded the Women’s Army, is murdered under mysterious circumstances, a large-scale movement made up of highly diverse groups of women – of all races, classes and sexual orientations – rises up with the aim of tearing the system down. The authorities hope to deliver a decisive blow to the movement by kidnapping a prominent leader, but this totally backfires. The struggle intensifies; within the feminist movement, however, fantasy and anarchy retain the upper hand.

Born in Flames was filmed guerrilla-style on the streets of New York before gentrification took over and is a Molotov cocktail of feminist futurism and anarchism that is both an important time capsule and a radically progressive statement. Digital restoration by Anthology Film Archives.

Unpaid

Lizzie Borden financed Born in Flames with money she earned as an editor on major American productions. Friends donated leftover film stock and camera operators and actresses worked on the film unpaid in their free time. The lab that – little by little – processed the stock, did so for free. Borden is also a painter and art critic as well as co-founder of feminist magazine Heresis. After Born in Flames she went on to make Working Girls in 1987.

This film’s original distributor, Feministisch Filmkollektief Cinemien, played a ground-breaking role in raising the visibility of female filmmakers.