The Prescient Fire of Cinema

Picture: John Coplans (at right), my and Lizzie’s ex-boss at Artforum, portrays a police chief in Born in Flames.

As I post these chunks of memoir, I saw Born in Flames, the 1983 film by Lizzie Borden which was recently remastered and streaming on Filmin.es. It’s a classic – and rather unique, as the Village Voice wrote, "perhaps the sole entry in the hybrid genre of radical-lesbian-feminist sci-fi vérité".
My own “Strife” was in production when Born came out. That work, despite its anarchist topic and its weirdness was a more conventional cartoon with a stereotypical plot line. Born in Flames struck me with both its shocking newness for its times, and its immediate relevance to contemporary politics.
It’s a work of political imagination, a fulfilled wish for both a socialist government and revolution-within-a-revolution. The politics of the city Borden sketches with her minimal No Wave cinematic means are liberal. Socialists, not Democrats are in charge, but women are still oppressed. They revolt. (In one scene they “steal” a couple of U-Haul trucks, a classic no-budget cinema move.) They hijack TV stations. Guns are brandished, but never fired. As it has been for a century, real corporeal violence in the USA is suffered, not inflicted, by the oppressed.
It’s a fake docu-drama, but what makes it so striking to me for its moment is its bi-racial cast. The lead protagonist are mostly black; the retardataires are mostly white. It is so perfectly balanced in its construction of an imaginary aspiring left of nearly 40 years ago that it seems ripe for a full-budget remake.
Born in Flames coincidentally fulfills the criteria for an exibition project Gregory Sholette initiated recently. His charge to artists for his Imaginary Archive was: "Provide me with a document about a past whose future never arrived." In his YouTube video explaining the several iterations of the project ("IA Imaginary Archive overview 2020"), he calls it a library of "what if" histories, “an ersatz para-archive” of “an alternative future, or some parallel universe… What would the content of such an archive reveal abouit other ways the world might be constructed?”
Put these questions to Born in Flames and you have the makings of a seminar. And a plan of action.