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WHAT I HAD WANTED ALL ALONG Dora Budor on Lizzie Borden’s “Regrouping”

Lizzie Borden, “Regrouping,” 1976, film still

Lizzie Borden, “Regrouping,” 1976, film still

One year after Laura Mulvey famously demanded that feminist filmmakers find a “a new language of desire” and deny cinematic techniques that create an identificatory illusion, Lizzie Borden’s film Regrouping (1976) created a distancing awareness by, for example, overlapping voices that move in and out of sync with the visuals. However, the film has never been seen by many of Borden’s contemporaries, because it was completely withdrawn from circulation, yielding to the complaints made by many of its participants. Now “Regrouping” was shown for the first time in almost 50 years, screened at Anthology Film Archives, where the artist Dora Budor had the chance to be in attendance. Here, she links the film’s technique, which evokes fissure and conflict, to feminist organizing at the time.

Lizzie Borden’s earliest film, Regrouping, is an important part of the director’s filmography as the first installment of what critic So Mayer has called Borden’s “New York Feminisms Trilogy.” [1] The film grapples with the shortfalls of second-wave feminism on the fault lines of race, class, and sexuality, which would lead to the sharpened criticisms of her epitomic Born in Flames (1983) and Working Girls (1986). Despite this fact, after its tumultuous release in 1976, which was picketed by its very protagonists, [2] and aside from a few sporadic screenings, Regrouping was confined to the director’s closet. Only this year, following Anthology Film Archives’ restoration, did it reach audiences again. Why the aporetic film has been tucked away for more than 40 years, partially by the wishes of its author, remains a curious matter.

Regrouping is prefaced by a director’s disclaimer explaining the shift in its production from a collaborative project into a kaleidoscopic and subjective probing. It began with the idea to make a film about an all-female artist group spontaneously mustered by former students of Joan Jonas: Ariel Bock, Kathleen Mooney, Glenda Hydler, and Marion Cajori. Shooting them in a cinema verité style over several months in 1974, Borden accompanied them to film their dinners, discursive exchanges, and reading sessions at a downtown loft. Here, everything, even casual hanging out, was foundational to devise how one should exist in a “correct” feminist way.

Lizzie Borden, “Regrouping,” 1976, film still

Lizzie Borden, “Regrouping,” 1976, film still

In one of the early scenes, a voice echoes over the women dining: “This is a beginning of sisterhood.” Among themselves, the members discuss, and the “personal problems become common problems. This is the honeymoon period of the group.” The honeymoon period was also the beginning of the era marked by consciousness-raising, which aspired to a radical reconfiguration of both collective identification and knowledge production. Women, allegedly regardless of their race and class differences, shared a unique perspective on the world, hence an unrevealed site of political power. Ignited by polemics such as ­Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, the atmosphere in New York of the 1970s was ripe for overturning gender hierarchies, sexuality, and family structures. It provided fertile ground for industrious artists like Borden, joined by others who happen to appear in her film (such as Barbara Kruger, Kathryn Bigelow, Nancy Holt, Pat Steir, and Joan Jonas). Compounded with New Left commitment to alternative media, and a countercultural do-it-yourself sensibility, an active infrastructure for feminist organizing was corroborated by grant initiatives, museum programs, festivals, and production companies such as Women Make Movies and such magazines as Women & Film, Jump Cut, and Camera Obscura. In this atmosphere, it wasn’t unimaginable to make your own feature film, get Sol LeWitt to produce it on a mere $3,000 budget, pick up skills from editing a Richard Serra film, and, as an Artforum critic, peruse the available social network. Which is what Lizzie Borden did.

After the initial honeymoon period, the hurdles start. The promise of collaboration slowly dissolves: whether the intruder’s presence (as Borden tags herself) incites the group to close off, or whether she, frustrated by their supposedly clandestine behavior, gets fed up with their wish to control their public image. Borden gets called out for being covert and sneaky. This doesn’t stop her; she delves in even further, conducting interviews with other women about the group (the most memorable of these being the public shower scene where naked Joan Jonas and Pat Stier chat about their discordances). Borden even assembles another all-women circle to reflect on the first one.

Soon enough, it becomes obvious what Borden makes of the mandates issued by the original group: created to provide an illusion of unity, they seem to cloak problems instead of grapple with them. Policing is used to induce conformity. The personal might be political, but the group’s politics are not reflected in their actions. An explanation for their disintegration, as well as their falling out with Borden, can be recognized in bell hooks’s reflections on white women liberationists: “that the white ‘lady’ (that is to say a bourgeois woman) should be protected from all that might upset or discomfort her. […] Their version of Sisterhood dictated that sisters were to ‘unconditionally’ love one another; that they were to avoid conflict and minimize disagreement; that they were not to criticize one another, especially in public.” [3]

Lizzie Borden, “Regrouping,” 1976, film still

Lizzie Borden, “Regrouping,” 1976, film still

The film detaches from its subjects. The voice-over comments, “Gradually the terms of the film changed: they began to drift away; more and more, it became my film.” The cacophony of voices and sparring opinions surface along with the images: the repressed concocts its own aesthetic form. If “editing is a form of writing,” what occurs on the splicing table is that the script, dissevered from its particular subject, sharply turns toward the scrutinizing of hierarchy, authority, and sexuality. [4] Comingling in a group hallucination, it regroups – recognizably as a Borden film.

What is constituted through the disbanding of the image and sound is a picture of fissure and conflict – not only of the filmmaking process itself but of any type of democratic organizing in which unity of the group is set as a counterpoise to individual agency: “We resent leaders and disapprove of domination.” The complicated question trailed the film’s release – of the collective involvement and of Borden’s right to use her subjects against their desires in order to make a film on the dark side of sisterhood. One also wonders, if made today, would it again be chastised, or even more, would Borden be called a bad feminist by the vigilant moral absolutists?

The answer to this question is hardly straightforward. In 1973, the Santa Cruz Women’s Media Collective made a black-and-white docudrama tellingly titled Wishfulfilming: A Women’s Film Collective. The film they initially attempted to make never gets made. They say, “It was one thing to have an idea of overcoming hierarchy, and another one to do it.” Instead, they arrive at film as process: discussing concepts of nonhierarchical work and a vision of a society based on needs instead of profit. As a result, the film changes. Or, take William Greaves’s metacinematic Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, in which the director’s intentionally aloof and sexist conduct produces a schism within the predominantly white film crew. The reversal of power structures leads to interrogation of racialized hierarchy underlying the filmmaking process.

To question the auteur versus the collective was a common stance of the independent filmmaking of the 1970s. Borden stepped into the project with one idea. Yet, during the filming process, a moment of contestation happened, in which she not only had to grapple with her autonomy within a group but also had to confront her own sexuality. The film shifted from a documentary toward a more autobiographical form: it is not that Borden felt less involved, but more; the film’s inner conflicts and contradictions became hers. A scene that appears somewhat unexpectedly decoded much of this reading for me. It is also related to the one question that the director, whether intentionally or not, didn’t answer at a Q and A, when a friend of mine said, “The lesbian scene in the film was so beautiful. Could you speak a bit more about it?” Different from the rest of the footage for its gliding camera close-ups, the scene is a delicate but graphic long take of lesbian sex, initiated reportedly at the director’s apartment by two of her friends. At some point, one of the off-screen voices explains how she wanted to be a lesbian (during the 1970s, much of the discourse was dominated by discussions of lesbian feminism) but was repelled by women’s large breasts, and another commentary states that “they were not emotional lesbians, but politically motivated heterosexuals.” Some of the original cast involved were upset and protested the possibility of being misrecognized as the participants of the scene. Here, Borden is also taking on what might have been one of the initial conflicts – the group not allowing her to fully participate with them, on the grounds of her dating “one of the men that were known as chauvinists” at the time (“A woman who sleeps with the enemy risks her political integrity”). Although the group claimed Ti-Grace Atkinson’s “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice,” they were actually only dabbling in it – while Borden was experiencing a slow coming out. This cannot be taken lightly, since the scission from second-wave feminism would significantly mark her later films. Particularly vocal is Born in Flames (1983), with its lesbian and Black feminist love politics and revolutionary freedom-dreaming – what Rox Samer calls “lesbian potentiality” [5] – a way of thinking beyond what the lesbian was in the cultural context of the ’70s in favor of how the lesbian signified what could have come to be. It became, I suppose, what she had wanted all along. [6]

Lizzie Borden, Regrouping, 1976, 74 minutes.

Dora Budor is a Croatian-born artist and writer based in New York. In 2022, her work was presented in the solo exhibition “Continent” at Kunsthaus Bregenz and in the 59th Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams.”

Image credit: Courtesy of Lizzie Borden and Anthology Film Archives

Notes

[1]So Mayer, “Working Girls: Have You Ever Heard of Surplus Value?,” Current, online magazine of the Criterion Collection, July 13, 2021.
[2]In addition to this, Jonathan Rosenbaum notes in his review of the film at the 1976 Edinburgh Festival: “Before the screening, a New York critic publicly conveys no less than nine charges against the film made by one of these women. Foremost among the objections are that Borden received no clearance from any of the people involved, misrepresented the women’s group that the film is ‘about,’ and made a work that is ‘sexist’ and ‘reactionary.’” See Rosenbaum’s “Regrouping: Reflections on the Edinburgh Festival 1976,” Sight and Sound (Winter, 1976/77), reposted at: https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/11/regrouping-reflections-on-the-edinburgh-festival-1976/.
[3]bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 46–47.
[4]Quoting Borden, from the talk after the screening of Regrouping at Anthology Film Archives, New York, May 27, 2022 (personal recollection).
[5]Rox Samer, Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).
[6]To rephrase a quote from Regrouping: “The film ended, then, as a manipulation, a subjective statement. It was, I suppose, what I had wanted all along.”