“Ten years after the social-democratic war of liberation” is how director Lizzie Borden’s 1983 feminist experimental film “Born in Flames” begins. What does that mean, exactly?
“I worded it so that it would be confusing,” Borden said, “because in a capitalist society, you can't really have a revolution completely. It’s just too big.”
Under capitalism, she continued, even a social revolution wouldn’t guarantee women equal protections under the law. “Women would be treated badly,” Borden said. “It would be a domineering government.” As such, “Born in Flames” follows groups of women organizing to overcome the obstacles inherent to a patriarchal society.
Forty years later, Borden looks back on the film’s themes with incredulity.
“When I made ‘Born in Flames,’ I fully expected it not to be relevant today,” she said. “I thought women would have equal pay and the issue of women's safety would be dealt with. In some ways, there has been progress. But [feminism] hasn't killed the idea of patriarchy, which is part of the reason why we as a country have not had a female president.”
Some of the women Borden worked with on “Born in Flames” supported themselves as sex workers. As a follow-up project, she made “Working Girls,” a glimpse into daily life at a Manhattan bordello that explicitly centers the relationship of sex and labor. The narrative drama, which she co-wrote with Sandra Kay, screens at the University of Rochester’s Wilson Commons (in the Gowen Room) on Nov. 21, followed by a panel with Borden, photographer Barbara Nitke and multimedia artist/activist Antonia Crane.
“Born in Flames” and Borden’s first-ever documentary, 1976’s “Regrouping,” will be shown at The Little Theatre the preceding night (Nov. 20).
As its title declares, “Working Girls” focuses on the capitalistic aspects of the world’s oldest profession as well as the labor itself required to sustain such a job. “By the end of this movie, you wonder where they find not only the patience, but also the strength,” critic Roger Ebert wrote in his 1987 review.
Though it’s not a documentary, “Working Girls” arrived after Borden spent years making them while using experimental filmmaking as an artistic and social tool. Bridget Fleming, a PhD candidate at the university’s Visual & Cultural Studies program who helped organize the screenings, said the history of feminist documentary filmmaking spells out this divide.
“Should women behind the camera be creating cinéma vérité, documentarian, day-in-the-life portraits of people, or should they make experimental films?” she said. The case for the former is its immediacy. “It would be like us getting on Instagram.”
On the other hand, experimental filmmaking accounts for the belief that there is no way to accurately represent reality.
Fleming calls Borden’s debut, “Regrouping,” an experimental documentary. Showing it with “Born in Flames,” a piece of docu-fiction, allows both approaches to be in conversation with each other.
The university owns an older analog film copy of “Working Girls,” though the screening will be digital to present the most polished work. The panel that follows includes Nitke, whose photography captured many candid moments of porn performers during downtime between scenes on set.
“The prevailing thought was that porn movies were made by people having orgies, but I was struck by the 12-16 hour days,” Nitke said. “It wasn’t sexy. They're wondering, ‘is somebody bringing in pizza? Why didn't they get the chocolate-covered donuts that I like?’”
In other words, it was a job.
Nitke’s then-husband, Herb Nitke, owned and operated several adult theaters in Rochester in the 1970s, including the Schine Riviera on Lake Avenue and the Monroe Theatre. He was arrested on obscenity charges in 1972 for helping produce the porn film “The Devil in Miss Jones.”
“He would call me every night and kept saying, ‘this jury, they're retired Kodak workers. They're really conservative people. I'm going to jail,’” Nitke recalled. The trial resulted in a hung jury.
Nitke’s work — along with that of artists like Crane, Lena Chen, Chichi Castillo, Sasha Waters Freyer and more — will hang in the exhibition “Sex/Labor,” set to open at the Hartnett Gallery directly after the panel discussion.
Fleming said the pieces examine all sides of sex work.
“We really wanted [art] that looked at and thought about sex work as a form of labor broadly speaking — emotional and physical,” she said.
It’s precisely what Borden aimed to capture back in 1986.
“What I wanted to show in ‘Working Girls’ was just the labor of it,” she said. “This is how the towels are folded. This is how a session gets done. The enemy is actually the madam who pushes them for more and more and more and more. It's like other jobs.”
"Born in Flames" and "Regrouping" screen at The Little Theatre on Nov. 20 beginning at 5:30 p.m., followed by a filmmaker Q&A with Lizzie Borden. Ticket information here.
"Working Girls" screens the following night, Nov. 21, at 5:30 p.m. in the Gowen Room at the University of Rochester's Wilson Commons, followed by a panel discussion with Borden, Barbara Nitke and Antonia Crane and the opening of the exhibition "Sex/Labor." More details here.
Patrick Hosken is an arts reporter for CITY. He can be reached at patrick@rochester-citynews.com.