Lizzie Borden (director) facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden in 2019
Born	Linda Elizabeth Borden February 3, 1958 Detroit, Michigan, United States
Occupation	Film director
Years active	1976–present

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).

Early life

The daughter of a Detroit stockbroker, originally named Linda Elizabeth Borden, at the age of eleven she decided to take the name Lizzie Borden.

Early career

Borden's career as a feminist filmmaker began when she majored in art at Wellesley College in Massachusetts before moving to New York. She moved away from the more mainstream writing and art criticism (in part for Art Forum) and decided to become a painter. However, after attending a retrospective of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, she was inspired to experiment with cinema and favored a "naive" approach to film production.

Independent film career

Her body of work investigates race, class, power, capitalism, and the power that money bestows — all from a feminist viewpoint.

Borden's first feature, Born in Flames, was shot and edited over five years with a budget of $30,000, and completed in 1983. Set in a near-future New York City, the film explores the role media plays in culture. What began as a project about white feminist responses to an oppressive government evolved into a story about women of color, lesbians, and white women of various classes mobilizing into collective action. The film concerned the racial, class, and political conflicts in a future United States socialist democracy. 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." Born in Flames premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and has won several awards. It was named one of "The Most Important 50 Independent Films" by Filmmaker magazine and has been the subject of extensive feminist analysis, including that of Teresa de Lauretis.

Borden's next film, Working Girls, maintains some of the stylistic and thematic features of her debut, but is more mainstream in its approach. Borden prefers the film to be discussed as a narrative fiction film rather than as a documentary.

Borden wrote, directed and produced the film, which premiered in May 1986 at the 39th Cannes Film Festival after being selected for the Directors' Fortnight. The following January, the film debuted at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival where it won a Special Jury Prize and was picked up for distribution by Miramax Films.

Hollywood film career

Miramax gave Borden a budget of $6 million and a script for Love Crimes, her first Hollywood feature (and her first film based on another writer's script). The original script by Allan Moyle was rewritten by Laurie Frank, a female screenwriter specifically requested by Borden. The film starred Sean Young and Patrick Bergin.

Love Crimes was subjected to much studio interference. Numerous scenes were removed and some never shot. 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."

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. She subsequently directed episodes of 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.

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.

Since the mid-2000s, Borden has been working as a script doctor in Los Angeles, writing scripts for other directors including one about reggae singer Bob Marley's relationship with mobster Danny Sims (based on Rita Marley's autobiography No Woman No Cry). That project was called Rebels and was announced in 2015 as part of slate of projects by Golden Island Filmworks to begin shooting in 2016. 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.

Legacy

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 restored and remastered 35mm print of Born In Flames that debuted at the Anthology Film Archives in February 2016 enjoyed something of a second life, traveling to the Walker Art Center, the Toronto Film Festival, the 2017 London Film Festival, the Edinburgh Film Festival and the Seoul International Women's Film Festival,; as well as screening in Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, and San Sebastian; and in many US cities including Detroit, Rochester, San Francisco and New Orleans. Her first film, Regrouping, was also shown at the screenings in Spain and in Brussels, and at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where it first played.

Born In Flames was featured at the fourth annual Final Girls Berlin film festival in 2019; the festival features horror by women directors and presented Borden's dystopian film as part of a sci-fi showcase. 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.

Borden's early films continue to be shown singly and in retrospectives at film festivals, repertory cinemas and art venues worldwide. Regrouping was restored by The Anthology Film Archives for a 2021 release and is part of Borden's early catalog acquired by Criterion. The Criterion Channel has shown Born In Flames and an interview with Borden; and The Criterion Collection restored and released Working Girls on DVD and Blu-Ray in 2021.

In 2021, Borden was invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Personal life

Borden has stated she is bisexual.

Filmography

Film

Television

Awards and nominations

See also

In Spanish: Lizzie Borden (directora) para niños

• List of female film and television directors
• List of LGBT-related films directed by women