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Lizzie Borden
One of the commonplaces of film theory is that the traditional Hollywood narrative has been devoted to the maintenance of a male vision of the world, a world in which women function as the central focus of men's erotic gaze. Many of the most discussed feminist films (Yvonne Rainer's
Film About a Woman Who
. . . , 1974, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's
Riddles of the Sphinx,
1977, Jackie Raynal's
Deux Fois,
1970, Sally Potter's
Thriller,
1979) have attempted to interrupt this gaze and provide more progressive depictions of women. In recent years, Lizzie Borden (her original first name was Linda: "everybody always called me Lizzie because of my last name. My parents hated it!") has made important contributions to this process, in two films:
Born in Flames
(1983) and
Working Girls
(1986).
Born in Flames
is a feminist "sci-fi" feature that uses an approach reminiscent of Peter Watkins: nonactors portray scenes from a not-too-distant future in which women struggle within a postrevolutionary American society where they continue to be oppressed by men. Borden's decision to cast nonactors in roles that might allow them to psycho-dramatize new forms of collaborative action was ingenious and progressive. And to a degree, what Borden calls its "bargain basement" look functions for the film: the trashy production values enhance the lower Manhattan milieu in which most of the action occurs. Nevertheless, as a narrative experience,
Born in Flames
is only intermittently convincing.
In
Working Girls,
Borden finds a way of redirecting conventional film pleasure so that it can reveal the conditions within which the standard erotic gaze functions. By enabling us to share the vision of the prosti-