Film Screenings / Programs / Series
LIZZIE BORDEN SELECTS
February 24 – March 2
February 24 - March 2, 2023
“I was politicized by feminism back in the day and wanted to stir things up; so too, for their own reasons, did Kathryn Bigelow, Sheila McLaughlin, Pat Murphy, and other women filmmakers in downtown New York in the late 1970s and 80s (such as Vivienne Dick and Bette Gordon). ‘No Wave’ cinema, as it is called now, was seen as the downtown aesthetic – a punk, nihilistic take on the French New Wave. But we weren’t part of that aesthetic. We weren’t nihilistic. We weren’t self-indulgent. On the contrary, Bigelow was concerned with exploring the semiotics of the image; McLaughlin, madness, role-playing, desire, and lesbian identity; Murphy, the objectification of women in relation to nationalism. They produced several important, non-nihilistic films that have been woefully under-screened in the U.S: Bigelow’s short THE SET-UP (1978), McLaughlin’s SHE MUST BE SEEING THINGS (1987), and Murphy’s MAEVE (1981). I am proud to present them here.
Downtown was a community where everyone collaborated on one another’s work. I knew all three before we became filmmakers – Sheila from the downtown theater scene, Kathryn and Pat from the art world. We all worked on each other’s films. In Kathryn’s THE SET-UP, two actors pound each other against my beat-up Lincoln, which I loaned the production. Kathryn provided a voice-over for my film REGROUPING (1976) and created her own, satirical ‘character’ – a Socialist news editor – for BORN IN FLAMES (1983). During my film’s long production, Pat flew to Belfast – an actual war zone – and made her landmark MAEVE, then returned to my pretend war zone and continued her essential, improvised role as another editor. Sheila appears everywhere in BORN IN FLAMES and helped vitally behind the scenes, while several performers from that film appear in her feature SHE MUST BE SEEING THINGS. I owe them all a great debt. MAEVE, THE SET UP, and SHE MUST BE SEEING THINGS are fascinating and crucial films in the redefined history of ‘No Wave’, expanding the idea of what was happening downtown.” –Lizzie Borden
Lizzie Borden will be here in person to present the Fri & Sat, Feb 24 & 25 screenings of SHE MUST BE SEEING THINGS and MAEVE, as well as the special screening of her own BORN IN FLAMES on Sat, Feb 25!
Special thanks to Lizzie Borden, Kathryn Bigelow, Sheila McLaughlin, Pat Murphy, Marc Mauceri (First Run Features), Sunniva O’Flynn (Irish Film Institute), and Katie Trainor (MoMA).
Sheila McLaughlin
SHE MUST BE SEEING THINGS
1987, 95 min, 16mm. Score by John Zorn.
This fascinating feature by pioneering lesbian filmmaker Sheila McLaughlin is the second of two remarkable films she made in the 1980s, and was highly controversial in lesbian and feminist circles for its depictions of its protagonists’ fantasies of voyeurism, bondage, cross-dressing, heterosexual sex, and fetishism. Incorporating a film-within-the-film – an adaptation of a Thomas De Quincey story of a seventeenth-century nun who rebels against her patriarchal convent – it is a complex, multi-layered, and still-provocative work.
“Where Sheila McLaughlin’s 1987 lesbian-feminist film SHE MUST BE SEEING THINGS goes, heated discussions follow. A film forged within political, social, and theoretical debates around feminism, women’s filmmaking, lesbian identity, and desire, SEEING THINGS tackles head-on issues that were animating lesbian-feminist thinking in its contemporary setting. The film doesn’t provide simple answers to the questions of power, gender, desire, and paranoia that it raises. Instead, SEEING THINGS stays with the tensions and contradictions around these issues, giving form to them in ways that have proven, over time, both alluring and troubling.” –Jacob Engelberg, CULTURE CLUB
Fri, Feb 24 screening preceded by:
Kathryn Bigelow
THE SET-UP
1978, 15 min, 35mm. Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.
Made as a student film during her time at Columbia University, Kathryn Bigelow’s THE SET-UP is an exploration, in her words, of why “violence in cinematic form is so seductive.” It depicts two men beating each other to a pulp in a dark alley while two philosophy professors analyze the visual image in voice-over.
Fri, Feb 24 at 6:30 and Thurs, Mar 2 at 6:30.
Pat Murphy & John Davies
MAEVE
1981, 115 min, 16mm
“MAEVE captures not just a particularly bleak time in Northern Ireland’s recent past, but also a passing moment of radical possibility in cinema. A film about the individual’s relationship to the flow of history, MAEVE is itself a historical milestone: generally accepted as Ireland’s first feminist feature, it was also the first film to be cast and shot in Belfast (no mean feat while the Troubles were raging).” –Trevor Johnston, SIGHT & SOUND
“A steady flame of rapture and pain burns through Pat Murphy’s captivating MAEVE: it is vehemently acted, superbly composed and remarkably shot on the streets of Belfast. This is a fierce, gaunt prose poem of a movie, born of the British Film Institute’s art-cinema aesthetic of that era, starkly realist and yet at the same time mysterious and wan. It is theatrically stylized, always stumbling across dreamlike tableaux of its own devising. There is something of Terence Davies here, and also Ibsen and Beckett.” –Peter Bradshaw, THE GUARDIAN
Sat, Feb 25 screening preceded by:
Kathryn Bigelow
THE SET-UP
1978, 15 min, 35mm. Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.[See above for description.]
Fri, Feb 24 at 9:15 and Sat, Feb 25 at 3:45.
SPECIAL SCREENING!
Lizzie Borden
BORN IN FLAMES
1983, 85 min, 16mm-to-35mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with restoration funding by The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation.
A landmark of early-1980s American independent cinema, and made for only $40,000, Lizzie Borden’s BORN IN FLAMES is figuratively and literally an all-out attack on our patriarchal society, a call to arms for women everywhere. This Molotov cocktail of a film became an instant classic of feminist cinema upon its premiere at the 1983 Berlin Film Festival. An unlikely underground breakout that received widespread attention and commercial distribution, BORN IN FLAMES is a film whose impact has never waned.
Set slightly in the future in a world largely resembling our own (or rather downtown NYC in the late 70s/early 80s), BORN IN FLAMES uses documentary techniques alongside invented narratives to tell the story of a feminist insurgency against the incumbent “Socialist Democratic” government. Promised social progress and equality by the current administration, women and minorities feel even more oppressed and abandoned than before. Competing pirate radio stations provide news to the confused public from different ideological positions within the radical movement, while the government attempts to quell it all. Featuring performances from Kathryn Bigelow, Adele Bertei, and Ron Vawter, and a fantastic theme song by The Red Krayola, BORN IN FLAMES examines the extremist agendas of two different feminist groups as they strategize, debate, take up arms, and form a true Women’s Army. The film swings between various protagonists and political viewpoints, creating an inclusive atmosphere that allows for a larger, very real political discussion to develop.
Sat, Feb 25 at 6:45.
