Born in Flames (1983)
There is a version of science fiction that has almost nothing to do with spaceships or distant galaxies, and Born in Flames sits firmly in that tradition. Released in 1983, Lizzie Borden's debut feature imagines a near-future United States roughly a decade after a so-called social-democratic revolution, a revolution that promised equality and has, by any honest reckoning, failed to deliver it. Women across race and class lines, pirate-radio broadcasters, street activists, and a loosely organised Women's Army are all running out of patience. The film unfolds across a fragmented, almost mosaic-like structure, following this network of figures rather than a single protagonist, which puts it closer in spirit to radical agitprop and feminist theory than to conventional narrative cinema. Made on the fringes of the American independent scene, at a time when New York was still genuinely gritty and politically charged in ways that feel almost mythological now, it is a film that arrived from a very particular moment and carries that moment on every frame.
Borden, who also edited the film and co-wrote the script with cinematographer Ed Bowes, assembled the project over a period of several years with minimal funding from C.A.P.S., The Young Filmmakers Ltd., and the Jerome Foundation. That financial constraint is visible on screen, but not always as a liability. The co-written screenplay, Borden and Bowes working together on both the page and the camera, gives the production a coherent handmade quality that more lavishly funded films rarely achieve by accident. It is worth noting that Born in Flames predates the American independent boom of the late eighties and early nineties by the better part of a decade, and films like Hollywood Shuffle owe at least a spiritual debt to the kind of no-budget, politically motivated filmmaking Borden was doing here. For a point of comparison on what a more polished but equally unconventional science fiction premise can look like, it is interesting to set it against something like Total Recall, where the dystopian infrastructure is massive and expensive. Born in Flames works in the opposite direction entirely.
The cast is drawn from a mix of performers and real-world figures. Honey and Adele Bertei play the pirate-radio DJs at the centre of the film's agitational energy, and civil rights lawyer and activist Florynce Kennedy appears alongside Jean Satterfield and Pat Murphy, lending the film a quality that sits somewhere between documentary portrait and dramatic fiction. The cinematography, shared between Ed Bowes and Al Santana, gives the film its most immediately striking characteristic: the images are grainy, handheld, shot on the streets of lower Manhattan with the camera catching whatever the city offered on that particular day. There is a texture to the footage that feels closer to a music video or a news report than to conventional feature filmmaking, and that restless quality suits the material. The film has no credited composer, which means what you hear is stitched together from punk, no-wave, and post-punk sounds of the era, music that was already politically loaded in 1983 and that roots the film even more firmly in its particular cultural moment. It is a film that looks and sounds like the city it was made in, which is both its greatest asset and, depending on your patience, something of a double-edged thing. For a film similarly rooted in its urban environment and its particular historical moment, Macca's thoughts on Nightcrawler are worth a read, and fans of experimental image-making from the same period might also find Koyaanisqatsi a useful companion piece.
There is a lovely irony to Born in Flames: made in 1983 and set in a near-future America, it now works best as a time capsule of the very moment it was made.
Lizzie Borden's guerrilla-shot feminist drama imagines a United States a decade on from a socialist revolution that was meant to fix everything and conspicuously has not, following a loose network of women, pirate-radio DJs, activists, a fledgling Women's Army, as they run out of patience and begin to organise.
It is dystopian, but only lightly so, closer to a scrappy, streetwise tale of feminist uprising than to anything as stylised as A Clockwork Orange, and its vision of the future is really just a slightly tilted version of the New York outside its window.
And that window is the best thing about it. Shot on the fly on the streets of early-eighties New York, the film has a raw, punkish, documentary texture that looks wonderfully evocative now, all grain and texture and downtown energy; aesthetically, it is something to behold. The acting, too, is decent in patches, unpolished in the way these DIY productions tend to be, but sincere with it. Where it lost me was the pace. For all the urgency of its message, it is a slow, often meandering watch, and the fervour that clearly burns on the page, the calls to action, the political heat, does not always translate into momentum on the screen.
Which brings me to the thing I could not quite get past: it has not aged all that gracefully. Its politics were plainly provocative and alive in 1983, and there is real value in that as a record, but a good deal of it now feels dated, both in its filmmaking and in the way it frames its arguments.
I am glad I saw it, as a document of a time, a place and a movement it is fascinating, but as a piece of cinema to actually sit through, it tested my patience more than it held it. Three stars, and a fascinating snapshot of its era that is more rewarding to have seen than to actually watch.
Born in Flames is the kind of film that generates more conversation after the credits roll than it necessarily sustains during them, and that is not entirely a criticism. Its value as a cultural document, a record of feminist politics, downtown New York, and DIY filmmaking at a specific crossroads in American life, is not really in question. Whether that value translates into a satisfying hundred minutes in front of a screen is a rather different question, and one that depends considerably on what you bring to it. Films made in genuine anger and on genuine margins tend to age in complicated ways, and this one is no exception. A document that demands to be known about, even if knowing about it and actually watching it turn out to be rather different pleasures.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1983 | Watched: 2026-08-24
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Born in Flames (1983) on YouTube
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