Microreview [film]: Born in Flames, Lizzie Borden [dir.]

A Punk-Inspired Underground Gem from 1983

 

Described by The Village Voice as "a radical-lesbian-feminist sci-fi vérité," Born in Flames might be a little hard to pin in any one genre, but it's a tightly-packed, singular film, produced on a shoestring, with a vision of society that has profound, unfortunate resonance forty years later.

Born in Flames is set ten years after a fictitious socialist revolution swept American politics, but now a decade in, it has become clear that women have been left behind, an afterthought of social progress. The movie follows a number of women: organizers, reporters, editors, and others in their orbit who embrace, or reject, or remain ambivalent about the rising tide of increasingly militant women's activism. Stylistically, it's a brilliant hybrid of scripted scenes, improvisational dialogue, news footage, security camera footage, and just good-old guerilla filmmaking that allows writer/director/editor Lizzie Borden to get a ton of production value on the screen, in service of a story whose scope is one of the broadest I've seen in outsider cinema.

There are difficult parallels in this movie to our current moment, from a bombing at the World Trade Center to the shady in-custody death of a Black woman, which felt like an eerie echo of Sandra Bland, but from thirty-five years in the past. There are definitely moments in this film that are hard to watch, especially when considering that they could be describing events happening right now. But one of the most compelling takeaways from Born in Flames is the idea of intersectionality. This topic is something that we are grappling with daily (just check whatever the trending topics on Twitter are right now), and even ten years before the term was coined, Born in Flames tackled it head-on. There are viewpoints across class, racial, and sexuality divides depicted in the film, and many of the same talking points we hear today that exclude or marginalize different groups of women are pilloried in this movie. Are the attitudes and representations totally in sync with today's norms? No, of course not. But the dialogues taking place on screen remain relevant and thought-provoking.

Very simply, Born in Flames is the kind of movie that reminds me why I love cult movies. I found out about it because the Criterion Channel is doing a retrospective on Afrofuturism, so this is one of those times where I went into a movie with no background, introduced to it because it was included in some retrospective a film preservation group put on, and I walked away with not only an example of astonishing techincal achievement accomplished with negligible resources, but also with a window into an entire worldview and generational movement that I never knew existed. If you had told me before watching this movie that in 1983 there was a collective of intersectional feminists in New York City discussing militarism, exploitation, forced domestic and sexual labor, bridging racial divides, and international solidarity for common cause, I might have said, "I wish I could've seen that." Thanks to Born in Flames, I kinda did.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10. This is low-budget guerilla filmmaking, but inventive use of technology creates a broader canvas than usual.

Bonuses: +1 for the NYC punk vibe of the early 80s, +1 for early appearances from fellow members of the emerging scene such as Kathryn Bigelow and Eric Bogosian, +1 for staying topically relevant for almost 40 years

Penalties: None from me

Cult Film Coefficient: 9/10. I'll be thinking about this one for a while.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather since 2012.

Microreview [film]: The Foreigner

The then-brand-new World Trade Center.

The Meat

The Foreigner is a movie so obscure it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Not even a stub. Shot in New York in 1978 by a handful of people with seemingly a nickle and length of rope between them, there's really not much to recommend the film either narratively or technically. There's not really a story, so much as a vague idea being played out very slowly across its running time, the sound is so bad that long stretches of dialogue are totally incomprehensible, and no one in it, no matter how much responsibility they seem to have in the world of the story, looks any more than about 24 years old.

But The Foreigner is one of those odd gems that makes a fascination with cult cinema so rewarding. If you can soldier past the (very significant) problems with it, the movie offers its own set of rewards that are pretty much distinct from the experience you get watching a normal movie where you hope to get caught up in the human struggle of made-up characters. Shot over the course of one week by Amos Poe, who a couple of years earlier made what is considered the first documentary about punk music (The Blank Generation), you could argue that The Foreigner is the first punk feature film. It's rough, intentionally ugly in parts, transgressive, and was clearly done for the sake of doing it. Like punk music.

There's a fine line here, of course, between "rugged DIY experiment" and "who cares?" but the film's immediate impact on the small circle of artists involved in the scene that produced it (called No Wave Cinema at the time) was significant and lasting. I could describe the movie as some kids attempting to do their impersonation of Godard's Alphaville, which is accurate but also makes it sound like something your pretentious high school neighbor did last weekend. So instead, I'll describe this movie about a secret agent who is so secret neither he nor anybody else knows what his mission is as the filmic contemporary and equivalent of Blondie's self-titled 1976 debut album -- more memorable for what it started than for its own content. And Debbie Harry has a small part in The Foreigner, which is neat to see. The movie, its filmmakers, and others all revolved around CBGB's, and so the result is sort of an insider-outsider film, a film about outsiders made by a trusted member within that group.

The Math

Objective Quality: 2/10

Bounses: +1 for providing a DIY model and sense of what was possible to people like Jim Jarmusch, who was also in the scene at the time but not yet making films; +1 for achieving an evocative atmosphere unhindered by the movie's own technical shortcomings; +1 for the present-at-the-creation view of the late-70s NYC punk scene

Penalties: None, it would just feel like piling on.

Cult Film Coefficient: 5/10

This is how we make DIY title-cards.

[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]