Lizzie Borden (director) - Career

Career

Borden majored in art at Wellesley College in Massachusetts before moving to New York. She moved away from writing and art criticism (in part for Art Forum) and into painting. 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.

Initially, her films were united by an "iconoclastic depiction of sex." "We are living in a very anti-sexual time; lack of sexual desire is epidemic," said Borden. "It's more than the fear of AIDS, it's more than the influence of the Republican culture of Reagan-Bush and Newt Gingrich. What I want to know is, why have we become so afraid of sex?" Her body of work also investigates race, class, power, capitalism, and the power money bestows—all from a female vantage point.

Her most famous film, Born in Flames, was edited over the course of five years and had a budget of $40,000. Set in New York, it 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. Borden's "naive" approach to film production can be seen in its gritty, pseudo-documentary style which pieces together a "disjunctive collage of women's individual and collective work." Additionally, she used nonprofessional actors.

Borden's second feature, Working Girls, depicting the lives of sex workers, maintains many of these stylistic and thematic similarities. The film was inspired by some of the women who participated in Born in Flames, who coincidentally supported themselves through prostitution. Although Working Girls addresses the subject of prostitution in great detail, Borden prefers the film to be discussed as a narrative fiction film rather than a documentary.

Love Crimes, Borden's first commercial feature, is a women's psychothriller. Unlike most in its category, Love Crimes was directed by a woman. It was originally scripted by Allan Moyle and rewritten by Laurie Frank, a female screenwriter who was requested by Borden. Although Borden found herself in the position to direct a mainstream production, with a $6 million budget, her power over the film's content was interfered by, as Borden puts it, "everyone else's psyches . . . with their fetishes, and what they don't like." Additionally, it had fallen victim to Hollywood's de-sexing of the nineties, lacking taboo topics she was once unafraid to project on screen. Numerous scenes were removed and some never shot in the studio's attempts to present an 'acceptable' vision of female sexuality to a mass audience. For this reason, Borden negotiated the restoration to the video version of several scenes originally cut in the theatrical release. As a result, two video versions of Love Crimes were released in July: the original it-rated theatrical version and a second, unrated version. "The problems really came down to sex," Borden said, "My vision of what I wanted, of how I wanted to explore the character and her sexual needs and desires just wasn't acceptable or accepted. The sadomasochistic element of the film as I envisioned it was too scary for the people writing the checks. And then I didn't get the final cut." After "Love Crimes" it became very difficult for Borden to set up projects. She was in pre-production on a film version of Strindbeg's play, "Miss Julie, when Mike Figgis announced his own version in the trades and Borden's bank financing fell apart. Then another piece of bad luck occurred: Borden was on flying to New York for final script discussions with Susan Sarandon on Borden's film, "Rialto". She and her partners arrived on the morning of 9/11, just in time to witness the buildings collapse. Sarandon immediately joined the relief effort at Ground Zero and the project was put on hold.