Screenings & Conversation with Filmmaker Lizzie Borden
Haverford College
Organized by Avi Serebrenik ’23
Free and Open to the Public
1. Born in Flames (1983)
Tuesday, April 11
7:00pm
VCAM Screening Room
The movie that rocked the foundations of the early Indie film world, this provocative, thrilling classic is a fantasy of female rebellion set in America ten years after a social democratic cultural revolution. When Adelaide Norris, the black radical founder of the Woman’s Army, is mysteriously killed, a diverse coalition of women – across all lines of race, class, and sexual preference – emerges to blow the System apart.
2. Working Girls (1986)
Tuesday, April 18
4:30pm
VCAM Screening Room
**Followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Lizzie Borden via Zoom
Sex work is portrayed with radical nonjudgment in Lizzie Borden’s immersive, richly detailed look at the rhythms and rituals of society’s most stigmatized profession. Inspired by the experiences of the sex workers Borden met while making her underground feminist landmark Born in Flames, Working Girls reveals the textures of a day in the life of Molly (Louise Smith), a photographer working part-time in a Manhattan brothel, as she juggles a steady stream of clients, balances relationships with her coworkers with the demands of an ambitious madam, and above all fights to maintain her sense of self in a business in which the line between the personal and the professional is all too easily blurred. In viewing prostitution through the lens of labor, Borden boldly desensationalizes the subject, offering an empathetic, humanizing, often humorous depiction of women for whom this work is just another day at the office.
Lizzie Borden is an American filmmaker whose feminist perspective informed her eclectic style and subjects, which largely defy mainstream cinema. Borden earned her bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Wellesley College and received a master’s in fine arts from Queens College of the City University of New York. Regroupings (1976), an experimental feature-length film she directed, was shown in New York City, but she made her mark in filmmaking in 1983 when her feminist classic Born in Flames—directed and produced on a budget of about $30,000—received considerable critical attention. Borden wrote, directed, edited, and produced the 1986 film Working Girls, a feminist docudrama that attempts to de-eroticize the subject of prostitution. Its main character is a Yale University graduate who lives with a female lover and aspires to become a professional photographer. Borden’s next feature, the thriller Love Crimes (1991), was made in Hollywood with a budget of more than $6 million. Studio reediting of Borden’s original conclusion, however, made the ending both abrupt and confusing. In 1994 she cowrote and directed “Let’s Talk About Sex,” the American segment (segment 1) of Erotique (1994).
Contact: aserebreni [at] haverford.edu
Sponsored by the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities’ Student Arts Fund
