Лиззи Борден: Американский режиссер и феминистский взгляд в кино

American filmmaker

Lizzie Borden (born 1950; some sources say 1958) is an American filmmaker, best known for her early independent films Born in Flames (1983) and Working Girls (1986).

Borden majored in fine arts at Wellesley College in Massachusetts before moving to New York City, and began her career as a writer, art critic (with several articles and reviews for Artforum from 1972 1974) and painter. Borden made an experimental documentary film in 1976, Regrouping, which chronicled the fracturing of a women's collective. The film portrait of four women artists incorporated avant garde techniques borrowed from performance art, including a meta analysis of the role of film itself in the fracturing of the collective that the film portrayed. The documentary was shown along with her next film, Born in Flames (1983), at an Anthology Film Archives screening in 2016.

Borden's films have been said to be united by an "iconoclastic depiction of sex" – notably, she controversially portrayed prostitution as an "economic choice" in her 1986 film Working Girls. Her body of work also investigates race, class, power, capitalism, and the power that money bestows — all from a feminist viewpoint. The film is named for a song written by Mayo Thompson of the Red Krayola, a member of the artists' group Art & Language. Borden used nonprofessional actors and the film was produced in a gritty, pseudo documentary style. One reviewer noted that it pieces together a "disjunctive collage of women's individual and collective work." The studio took away much of Borden's control over the final product and even went so far as to cut out the original ending that Borden had shot, substituting its own. "I went to movie jail after I did this awful movie, Love Crimes. I should have taken my name off it, but I was bullied into not taking my name off it. There are things in it that I didn't shoot. It's just not my movie, really." Love Crimes was released in theaters on January 24, 1992 and quickly tanked – it was pulled from release after three weeks due to poor box office. It recouped less than half of its budget. For its VHS release, Borden negotiated the restoration of several scenes originally cut from the theatrical release. As a result, two versions of the film were released on video in July 1992: the original 84 minute theatrical version and a second, "unrated" version at 91 minutes. In 2018, Borden disowned the "director's cut" label as a misnomer, and a marketing ploy by the studio and Harvey Weinstein, who she later said "threatened to destroy my career." After the critical and box office failure of Love Crimes, Borden suspected that Weinstein branded her as "difficult." As a result, she ran into difficulty setting up further film projects. She ventured into television with mixed results, and worked with such cult stars as Mary Woronov, Alexis Arquette and Joe Dallesandro in a series Propaganda Films had created for Playboy TV (other directors in the series included Bernard Rose and Alexander Payne.) She subsequently directed episodes of Red Shoe Diaries, The Secret World of Alex Mack and other television productions, as well as directing local theater in Hollywood with the Grace Players, a theater troupe led by Natalija Nogulich. Borden was one of four directors involved in the 1995 sex vignette anthology film Erotique; and she cast a not yet famous Bryan Cranston for her segment. "Besides Louise Smith, he was the most game, daring actor I've ever worked with," she said. In 1999, Borden was able to pitch to investors a filmed version of August Strindberg's 1888 play Miss Julie and was in pre production when director Mike Figgis announced his own version in the trades, and her bank financing collapsed. In 2001, Borden flew to New York City for final script discussions with actress Susan Sarandon for her next film project, Rialto. She and her partners arrived on the morning of 9/11, just in time to witness the World Trade Center collapse. Sarandon immediately joined the relief effort at Ground Zero and the project was put on hold. She has worked on some pilots for Fox Television, wrote a play about singer Nina Simone, and continues to solicit financing for her independent projects.

Her other works in progress have included editing a book of stories by strippers, Honey On A Razor, and collaborating on a series about strippers with Antonia Crane, author of the memoir Spent. On December 6, 2022, Seven Stories Press published an anthology of stories by strippers Borden edited over a period of twenty years, Whorephobia, reviewed in Publishers Weekly as "a humane, multidimensional portrait of an industry typically shrouded in artifice and shame."

In February 2016, Anthology Film Archives hosted a week long revival run of Born in Flames to premiere Anthology's new 35mm restoration of the work, funded by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The restoration was part of a larger multi year project, "Re Visions: American Experimental Film 1975–1990," supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. To commemorate the re release, The New Yorker remarked, "the free, ardent, spontaneous creativity of 'Born in Flames' emerges as an indispensable mode of radical change — one that many contemporary filmmakers with political intentions have yet to assimilate." The film was also broadcast on Turner Classic Movies on the night of November 3, 2020, along with Borden's commentary on her film and on several other films featured in Mark Cousins' documentary, Women Make Film. The Bronx Museum of the Arts featured Born in Flames as the title piece of an exhibition about feminism and futurity from April to September 2021. On the fate of her Hollywood films, Borden has said, "Born in Flames and Working Girls are the only two films I consider my own. The others – especially Love Crimes and Erotique – were so radically re cut and interfered with by producers, they're not 'mine', in any sense of the word."

Borden has stated she is bisexual.