This page contains links to articles, interviews, and videos that can be incorporated into your syllabus in preparation for an event or afterward for post-event discussion and research. Go to saic.edu/cate for detailed event information.
Lizzie Borden: Regrouping
Thursday, March 28, 6:00 p.m. CT
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
Lizzie Borden: Born in Flames
Thursday, March 28, 8:30 p.m. CT
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
Lizzie Borden: Working Girls
Friday, March 29, 6:00 p.m. CT
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.
Please note that All CATE events will have real-time captioning (CART). Hearing loops, wheelchair seating, and companion seating are also available at the Gene Siskel Film Center. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu
Regrouping, Lizzie Borden’s daring first feature, is a shapeshifting portrait of a women’s collective and the slippery relationship between a filmmaker and her subjects. When the collective breaks down, the film similarly fragments, with the introduction of fictional characters, disjunctive sounds and images, and multi-textual observations by artists outside the group, including Joan Jonas, Barbara Kruger, Nancy Holt, and Kathryn Bigelow, resulting in a rich and complicated depiction of 1970s feminism. The collective protested Borden’s final cut after Regrouping’s 1976 premiere and Borden shelved the film for many years. Now, with the participants’ permission, it is circulating once more.
Born in Flames, Borden’s legendary second feature, is a thrillingly provocative tale of female rebellion set in America 10 years after a social democratic cultural revolution. When Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield), the Black radical founder of the Woman’s Army, is mysteriously killed, a diverse group of women—Black, white, queer, hetero, working class, and elite—build a coalition to topple the patriarchy once and for all. Radical in both style and politics, Borden’s film brings together documentary footage, incendiary news reports, and violent action sequences to underscore the urgency of intersectional feminism in the face of oppression.
In Working Girls, Borden’s groundbreaking third feature, the director looks at gender, race, and labor relations in a Manhattan brothel. Inspired by the experiences of sex workers Borden met while making Born in Flames, Working Girls follows the rhythms of a day-in-the life of Molly (Louise Smith), an artist who turns to sex work to fund her photography practice (images provided by the artist Nan Goldin). Molly and her colleagues greet clients in the brothel’s pastel-hued reception, change sheets, answer the phone, and log their earnings in a ledger overseen by their overpaid boss, paralleling women’s labor of all kinds—from domestic to the office.
Lizzie Borden’s appearances are presented in partnership with the Gene Siskel Film Center; the University of Illinois Chicago’s (UIC) College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts; and UIC’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies
Lizzie Borden is a writer, director, editor, and script consultant. Her 1983 film Born in Flames, named one of “The 50 Most Important Independent Films” by Filmmaker Magazine, has been shown at countless festivals and theaters around the world. It has been taught and written about extensively since its 1983 premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2016, when the film was restored by Anthology Film Archives, New Yorker critic Richard Brody called it “a feminist masterpiece.” Borden also wrote, directed, and produced the controversial independent fiction film Working Girls, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors’ Fortnight, won a US Dramatic Special Jury Recognition at the Sundance Film Festival, and was restored by the Criterion Collection in 2021. Borden’s long-unseen 1976 film Regrouping was restored by Anthology Film Archives in 2023.
Lizzie Borden [Interview]
Sussler, Betsy | Bomb Magazine | October 1, 1983
Interview with Lizzie Borden [Interview]
MacDonald, Scott; Borden, Lizzie | Feminist Studies, vol.15 (2) | p.327-345 | 1989
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login
Lizzie Borden [Interview]
MacDonald, Scott | A Critical Cinema: Interviews With Independent Filmmakers, vol. 1 | 1988
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In Queer Time: Lizzie Borden in Conversation [Interview]
McGrath, Callum | Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art | August 8, 2022
Regrouping [Article]
Anderson, Melissa | 4 Columns | May 20, 2022
Fracture and Assembly: On Lizzie Borden’s “Regrouping” [Article]
Nelson, Laura | LA Review of Books | January 26, 2023
“What I Had Wanted All Along”: Dora Budor on Lizzie Borden’s “Regrouping” [Article]
Budor, Dora | Text Zer Kunst, (127) | September 2022
Working Girls: Have You Ever Heard of Surplus Value? [Article]
Mayer, So | Criterion Essays | July 13, 2021
The Political Science Fiction of “Born in Flames” [Article]
Brody, Richard | New Yorker | February 19, 2016
Domestic Unrest: Social Reproduction and the Temporalities of Struggle in Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames [Article]
Capper, Beth | Third Text, vol. 31 (1) | p.97-116 | 2017
Negotiating the Feminist Group: Lizzie Borden’s Regrouping [Article]
Evans-Hill, Lily | Moving Image Review & Art Journal, vol.11 (2) | p.213-229 | 2022
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login
Let's Talk About Sex [Chapter]
Borden, Lizzie | Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors | 1997
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Whorephobia: Strippers on Art, Work, and Life [Book]
Borden, Lizzie | Seven Stories Press | 2022
The (Moving) Pictures Generation by Conversations at the Edge Lecture Recordings
Conversation at the Edge video recordings (2016–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.