#borninflames

Backyard Movie Night!

Join us for Freedom Machines, an evening with back-to-back backyard screenings of director Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983) and Herschel Gordon Lewis’ She Devils on Wheels (1968). The bicycle was a political tool for the women’s liberation movement of the 1890s, aiding in the emancipation of women from the restrictions of clothing and the confines of their homes, to an increasingly mobile and independent way of life. Dubbed the “freedom machine,” the cycle and its political vitality would be carried into future generations with its technological advancement. These two films reflect progressions of the women’s movement from second to third wave feminisms, wherein the freedom machine is a constant.

An ensemble of armed female cyclists blow whistles at would-be rapists in the dystopic streets of a future New York City. This is the Women’s Army, a faction of multiple feminist groups responding to the injustices afflicting society after a failed revolution. This image is one of the many in Borden’s large-scale socialist-feminist collage, with faux newscasts and talk shows, fictionalized documentary footage, police-surveillance tapes, protests and confrontations, and intimate glances at private life in a time of conflict. Born in Flames (1983) presents a future wherein the women’s movement commits a final iconoclastic gesture in an attempt to abolish the dominant narratives of the main stream.

In their piece, “It’s here, it’s that time:” Race, queer futurity, and the temporality of violence in Born in Flames, Stephen Dillon articulates clearly and powerfully three connecting concepts. First, Dillon explains a liberal construction of time, one that distinguishes time into three different periods – past, present, and future. Then, a contrast with ideas of Brauman, Fanon, and Jackson articulates the notion that time does not pass it only accumulates, pushing the violence of the past into the future, making the future unable to arrive, and the present unlivable (Dillon 49). Thirdly, Dillon names a “temporality of violence” that steps into utility here; where the employment of a liberal construction of time becomes advantageous, because it equates distance (perceived or not) from violence as an erasure or clearing of violence; the further from the past we can get, the brighter and cleaner the future can be (Dillon 39). This construction of time creates a trap where one is stuck in a present that denies the past and only hopes of the future.

A relationship between past violence and understandings of the future is found in Bailey’s piece and Jenny Holzer’s redaction art through Holzer’s ability to demand an active reimagining of the past. Holzer’s work presents paintings of archived documents of declassified United States government documents broadly relating to the War on Terror. Her paintings uncover (lack of) memory of the nation’s recent past and present it in forms that require work and imagination from viewers existing in the present.  Bailey references a concept of the unknown known in relation to this past, recalling photos of prisoner abuse that uncover not only a violent past but highlight “a direct insight into ‘American values,’”(Bailey 146). These kinds of memories are referred to as aspects of the war susceptible to repression. Memories susceptible to repression appear as past violence easily severed from future realities (Bailey 154).

Holzer appears to unpack an accumulation of time in her redaction pieces. Holzer does so by denying the possibility of severing the past from the future through perceived proximity from violence via the passing of time. Holzer takes documents and knowledge out of the archive, a construction of memory that enables the perpetuation of unknowing the known of the violent history of the U.S. state in Iraq and Afghanistan. By highlighting the present’s close proximity to violence, Holzer marks the state with its own history, interfering with its tried composition of the future. Drawing on Dillon’s argument that, “The future will be what was before,” Holzer warns against this pattern in their work, displaying a violent past that technically “exists” in public memory, via the largely unreachable archive, but may fail to remain in the public’s understanding of the past in relation to the imagining of the future (Dillon 43). Following Dillon’s argument that the past is a prediction of the future, and drawing on the utility of redaction as an edited account of history; it appears that the redaction of U.S. documents on the War on Terror attempts an erasure of the violence of the past, serving to empty the future and aid an imagined State as one of “seamless progress”. Where Holzer uncovers a blind spot in U.S. memory/history of the War on Terror, the film, Born in Flames, uncovers the blind spot that is a temporal understanding of the future as a completely severed horizon from our here and past.

Works Cited

Bailey, Robert. “Unknown Knowns: Jenny Holzer’s Redaction Paintings and the History of the War on Terror.” October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (2012): 144–161. Print.

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