Lizzie Borden

 Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden’s film Born in Flames (1983)
1)is a feminist film that exhibits a documentary-like style.
2)The film touches on many issues including: sexism, racism, and classism.
3)The film involves two feminist groups in New York that come together and join a Women’s Army.
4)The army interrupts a presidential broadcast and bombs an antenna on top of the World Trade Center. 5)Director Katherine Bigalow plays an intern in the film.

Richard Brody reflects on the politics of the film in a 2016 essay:

1) "Before 'indie' was a brand, it was sometimes called
     guerrilla filmmaking, and in Born in Flames the feeling of a movie arising
      from its filmmaker’s fierce passion—
2) it took Borden five years of stolen moments to get it done—converges with its very subject.
3) The film is a sort of political science fiction, set in an unspecified future that’s seemingly
    identical to the time of its making, in which—
4) ten years after the 'Social Democratic War of Liberation,' a peaceful socialist revolution—
5) the fractures beneath the surface of the new policies come to the fore and
6) New York women plot a revolution within the revolution.
7) Those fractures are unaddressed inequities of gender, race, and class, and the women’s efforts to
     confront them are both cultural and martial.
8)Even a bare description of the story reflects the passionate excitement and the imaginative energy
    that binds the movie’s politics and its artistry.
9)As women endure catcalls from men in the street and leering sarcasm from male news broadcasters
10) Borden evokes a truly cultural revolution embodied by competing feminist underground-radio
     stations: Phoenix Radio, hosted by Honey (played by the actress of that name),
     and Radio Ragazza, hosted by Isabel (Adele Bertei).
11)Meanwhile, physical threats to women continue unabated, and
12)Borden dramatizes the development of a Women’s Army that rides through the city
      on bicycles to protect women against rapists and rides the subway to protect women against
      harassers.
13) The leader of the Army is a black activist, Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield),
14) who works with an elder theorist, Zella Wylie (played by the writer and activist Flo Kennedy).
15) Zella’s vision of the movement is global, tactical, and (where necessary) violent, and
16)under her  guidance Adelaide gets involved with revolutionary women in the Spanish Sahara.
17) Upon returning to New York, Adelaide dies in police custody; her death is officially labelled
      a suicide, but others in the movement believe that she was murdered and seek to expose the coverup.
18) Meanwhile, television news, dominated by male broadcasters and producers,
19) report skeptically on the Women’s Army and the effort for women’s rights.
20) A 'workfare' program sparks conflict between men and women, between whites and blacks.
21) But, in the press, three women journalists (one of them played by Kathryn Bigelow)
     at the Socialist Youth Review initially downplay the “separatist” assertions of women activists
     to the ostensibly universalist cause of socialism, until their own suspicion of a coverup of Adelaide’s
     murder leads them into conflict with their male editor and with their party.

The Women's Army rally in the following clip from Born in Flames.

Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983):

Trailer Click Here (It has German subtitles)
Description of film trailer and film
Set ten years after the most peaceful revolution in United States history, a revolution in which a socialist government gains power, this films presents a dystopia in which the issues of many progressive groups - minorities, liberals, gay rights organizations, feminists - are ostensibly dealt with by the government, and yet there are still problems with jobs, with gender issues, with governmental preference and violence. In New York City, in this future time, a group of women decide to organize and mobilize, to take the revolution farther than any man - and many women - ever imagined in their lifetimes.