Why is she in prison?
She was convictedon the most circumstantial evidence one could possibly be prosecuted underof murdering her husband's ex-wife. I can't say she's innocent. There's no evidence to show that she didn't do it. She doesn't have an alibi. She was home alone when it happened. It's too complicated to get into here. At this point my idea is to film her telling her own story, and she's agreed to do that. I'll have to
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work through the prison officials to get permission. I'd like to film eight to ten hours of her talking and then work with that footage until it suggests images. I don't really want to tell if she's innocent or guilty. I want to see where her life has been, where it's going.
In the four years she's been in prison, she's been active politically. She corresponded with male prisoners at the Wisconsin State Prison to find out what their rights were, and discovered that women prisoners were allowed to do much less than the menin terms of the number of phone calls they could make, the amount of exercise equipment available, things like that. She filed suit against the state and won, upgrading the rights of women prisoners in Wisconsin.
How do you plan to get funding for the film?
Well, that's always a problem. I do want to film her; I'm going to get that done even if I have to borrow. I think once I have her on film, there'll be no problem raising money to finish the film. She's so interesting. At times she's naive, the twenty-one-year-old girl she was when the murder was committed. And since that time, she's become a well-read, self-taught Marxist/feminist with experience working with the system. And she's been in prison for four years, so she's also a hard-core lifer. Her three languages mix and separate from moment to moment. I meet with her four hours at a time and it seems to go by in minutes. I think I've developed a rapport with her, and I think she's pretty honest, but like I said, I can't tell what the truth is about her case. I finally asked her if she was innocent, and she said, 'Of course, I am.'
You said earlier you'd like to make enough money from your films to support yourself. What's the state of your film rentals?
They get rented more every year, but more doesn't mean it's enough to live on. I've pretty much exhausted the grant possibilities. At the moment, I have no income, except for rentals and visiting-artists fees, which I probably could get by on, except that I wouldn't have any money to make films. I'm at the peak of my career. I just had a retrospective at the Whitney. And I have the least money I've ever had. It seems like at some point you shouldn't have to talk like this. Other kinds of artists don't. I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining. I'm very happy. It's just frustrating to be at this point in my career and not know if I'm going to have rent money next month.
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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
. . . , 1974, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's
1977, Jackie Raynal's
1970, Sally Potter's
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:
(1983) and
(1986).
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,
is only intermittently convincing.
In
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-
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tutes in her film, Borden helps us recognize the sad romanticism of conventional macho, the sexual self- delusions under which it functions, and the institutions that have developed to maintain it.
allows us a sense not only of the realities of women's bodies, and the ways in which they must be disguised
