Lizzie Borden (director)

Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden in December 2016
Born	Linda Borden Detroit, Michigan, United States
Occupation	Film director
Years active	1976–present

Lizzie Borden (born 1950 or 1958) is an American filmmaker, and is best known for the 1983 film Born in Flames.

The daughter of a Detroit stockbroker, originally named Linda Elizabeth Borden, at the age of eleven she decided to take the name of the accused 1890s Massachusetts double murderer Lizzie Borden, and was inspired by the following children's rhyme:

It even resulted in an announcement to her parents that she was legally changing her name. Borden says, "At the time, my name was the best rebellion I could make."

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.

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.

In 1976 she made a film titled Regrouping. Her next film, Born in Flames, was shot and 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, and concerned the racial, class, and political conflicts in a future United States socialist democracy. 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. Born in Flames premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and 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.