By Lizzie Borden and Jessie Rovinelli
SO PRETTY is being released on June 12 by Sentient.Art.Film in the US. International outreach will begin in July.
EMPATHY is available to stream free on Vimeo via the filmmaker.
WORKING GIRLS is available to rent via Vimeo on Demand, for £0.79/$0.99, via the filmmaker.
BORN IN FLAMES (new restoration) is also available to rent or buy on Vimeo On Demand via First Run Features, and is available free on Kanopy for US viewers with a library card.
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On March 19, a stay-in-place order went into effect in California because of coronavirus. I was terrified for my stripper friends here. I’d already read dispatches from around the world and knew sex workers faced a terrible choice – to shelter or continue to work. As they organized, all I could contribute was a small act of solidarity. On March 20, I posted WORKING GIRLS – my 1986 film about women working in a brothel – free on Youtube. I posted a link on Twitter: “Stay safe, especially sex workers.” It was my prayer. A couple of weeks later, something remarkable happened.
On March 31, Screen Slate tweeted:
The article included glowing reviews of both films. The director of EMPATHY, Jessica Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli tweeted:
I was astonished. Who was this filmmaker – whose beautiful face gazed from a tiny photo on Twitter – recommending another person’s film over her/his/their own? I followed the link to EMPATHY. — Lizzie Borden
4/11 Lizzie
Hey Jessica, is this your preferred name? I loved EMPATHY. I loved the way it was shot and edited. I loved the extended scenes – especially the shower. I loved the way you included a slate at the end… a “performed” documentary. I want to read everything about it. Love from LA to you wherever you are social-distancing or quarantined.
4/11 Jessie
Thank you, it means so much to hear it. I thought about WORKING GIRLS a lot when making it and admired your work since I was a teen. If you’re interested I can send you my second feature, which is a sort of a trans and gay utopian film called SO PRETTY.
4/11 Lizzie
I’d love to see SO PRETTY. I’ll send you my email. Are you in NY? LA feels more chill than what I’ve read about NY…
4 /12 Jessie
I’m in NYC, which doesn’t feel very chill at the moment. I’m just taking photos and cooking. I’m just hoping that this moment can bring something better instead of something worse. It’s been nice to be able to organise rent negotiations and strikes with tenants around me if nothing else, and it feels hopeful. And yes, I just changed my professional name to Jessica, although I might go back. I’ve changed my name with each new film and I’m trying to keep that up for a little bit. We’ll see if this one sticks. I’m still using Jessie in my day to day.
4/24 Lizzie
I saw SO PRETTY and had to think about it for a while. Your aesthetic is so gorgeous. I read in your Filmmaker interview you don’t mind if people fall asleep while they watch it and I admit I did… it is lulling… and had to watch it over a period of nights. It captures something I saw last year when I did a Pilllow Talk (a series of ongoing readings/shows curated by writer Fiona Alison Duncan) and showed a short piece of WORKING GIRLS along with Alexis Blair Penney‘s slide show about queer living spaces in Brooklyn (a lot messier than your dreamy ones…!)
There are scenes I had to watch twice because they are so radical – the kitchen scene where everyone talks at once. In some ways, SO PRETTY reminds me so much of where I was when I made REGROUPING (about a women’s group disintegrating and another one forming…) and BORN IN FLAMES… but of course with diametrically-opposed techniques. While you explore an individual’s passion, I focus on “the group” and never allow anyone to look at anything too long. I love how you work non-professional actors. The silence on set. They really listen to each other; their arguments are hushed; their pain is muted. The sexuality and nudity is casual.
And that kitchen scene where everyone is talking is what I was trying to accomplish with all of BORN IN FLAMES – polyphony – one has to just experience it because you can’t make out any single strand.
SO PRETTY is important and will be a touchstone for many other films. Maybe you could think about showing it now. It belongs on screens in museums and theaters but this pandemic will stretch through next year as far as I can tell…
4/24 Jessie
If EMPATHY had me always thinking about WORKING GIRLS, I was consciously thinking of trying to find a new style for a new BORN IN FLAMES with SO PRETTY – it’s cited in all the original treatments and pitch packets ? I’m so glad it connected!
4/26 Lizzie
It is astonishing that BORN IN FLAMES was in your mind. If I had the tools of production and knew digital editing (I edited BORN IN FLAMES and WORKING GIRLS but never learned digital), I might find a way to be in these empty streets. It wouldn’t have to be about a pandemic – that would be so old in a year or two. I just remember using the city as a backdrop and now both cities feel so haunted.
But I know SO PRETTY was so much about interior space. I loved the scenes of bed-making… cooking. I could watch the shower scenes (in both your films) forever.
4/26 Jessie
Hehe you’ve managed to described exactly the two films I’m doing — I’m helping my cinematographer (at a distance) work on a 35mm film of empty streets and his empty home. Because he’s doing that, my wife and I are making a short, a sort of pornographic ode to marriage and female Christian mystics entirely in her apartment — locked off, very quiet. I’m scared of it becoming “just” a corona film though, it’s already delicate enough for me to be doing a film about marriage that by virtue of my body and my politics was always both a sort of joke on the idea of marriage and a way to take it very seriously as something as beautiful as it is absurd for me. (We got married after two months of dating about a year ago, simply because it seemed too silly not to try.) If it becomes a corona film I think I’ll lose that balance, it might simply become “oh I love my wife,” which though part of what I want, isn’t the entire goal of the film as it was intended. But my friends tell me to just do it because if nothing else they can see it and it will make them happy, so that’s reason enough. At least I’m comfortable shooting domestic space until the day I die.
4/25 Lizzie
I love the short scenes in SO PRETTY of raves and your characters walking to demonstrations but I would have been interested if everything had taken place in the bedroom – boredom irritation desire dominance submission anger, how people move around each other, with each other. You are lucky you have friends as your audience because I would say just make a film for yourself.
4/26 Jessie
It’s funny you bring up raves because my partner works running sound at (mostly semi-illegal) raves in New York, and it’s where we met and grew our friendship over the last few years, so beyond clubs forming the fabric of much of my life these last few years, the question of how clubs change us and how we move through them is at the forefront of my artistic mind and my material life. We’re desperately hoping something returns because her jobs in that world have given her so much of her strength and money and freedom — she’s one of a very small number of women in the field, too. I’m curious, scared, and hopeful about what comes next and how it changes. We need spaces, and lights, and sounds, and people. Are you working on anything now?
4/26 Lizzie
I was developing a couple of projects about strippers, one a potential series with Antonia Crane – writer/educator/stripper/sex worker – but I think post-corona, ideas about intimacy will change. I also have such an internal battle with straight-line narrative. In order to finance the films I’m making I can’t be strictly experimental. I wish I had ideas I could execute for $100,000 or less… it is brilliant you are able to work within a lower-budget framework.
Also, I’m editing a book of stories by strippers. I interview some of the writers or they interview each other to convey the feeling of community. A publisher has it now but I told him to hold off – I’d like Antonia to write a new story about stripping after corona.
4/26 Jessie
I recently saw and loved SHAKEDOWN by Leila Weinraub. I’d love to read those stories.
4/26 Lizzie
And then because production is delayed, I’m outlining another one about Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with the American writer, Nelson Algren (who wrote Man With The Golden Arm.) Beauvoir was “wed” intellectually to Jean-Paul Sartre but they both had “contingent” relationships with both men and women. But Beauvoir and Algren fell in love and he helped her articulate the ideas behind The Second Sex. Her novel, The Mandarins, made her a “star,” but she betrayed Algren by writing about him in and lying about it… and she could never leave Sartre. Algren was battered by McCarthyism in the US while Beauvoir, being essentially an intellectual “mandarin” in France, continued to rise. It ends up being a tragic love story. In the end, she is able to transcend both men and “become” herself.
4/26 Jessie
It strikes me that part of the contemporary feminist and gay/trans project has to be taking a more active involvement in what it means to be straight, or more interestingly, to engage in “straight” relationships, especially for those who are not exclusively that. I’d always thought there was something hiding in relationships in the 50s, like de Beauvoir’s. To come at these questions from a new angle. To tie communism and McCarthyism into that seems crucial. These questions are always also political, but in a sly way. I wonder if it’s why you and I both made sex work films — it’s a way in from a new angle.
4/29 Lizzie
Actually, I made WORKING GIRLS because that’s what I did for a while to make money while I was making BORN IN FLAMES. I assumed you knew although I haven’t been that public about it. I don’t think I could have done it unless it was a place where other women I know worked, so it was our kind of secret… but once you work, even if only for short time, you cross a line… it’s an “us and them”…as Jo Weldon puts it. I could never have stripped. I was too shy. I love the bravado of strippers.
5/6 Jessie
I actually didn’t know you’d worked in that field, although given the film and your politics in general I’m not at all surprised. I’ve never done it myself but it’s always been something a significant portion of my friends are doing at any given time. My partner (Wife, haha!) and I keep debating live-streaming that sort of thing to make a little money and to take advantage of the particular niche we happen to occupy, but the old body image and the long memory of the internet give me pause … it seems on the one hand public and shameless in a way that appeals both as a way to earn money and as an outgrowth of my art that uses my own body, but it’s also so much work and still so uncommon for a director! I guess I’ll take the unprofitable route of a short film with the same subject matter for now.
I think the rituals of bodies moving together tie the club and the protest together. Maybe that’s part of the appeal of marriage, with its own weird rituals.
I love the idea of Simone as a woman who created a woman to be. I think all women have to do this in order to be free, it’s something of course relevant in too-obvious ways for me as a transwoman, but as time passes I’m realizing it’s something that binds me to all women. So many transwomen chase the idea of a “generic woman” and in the process we fall victim (of course, and it’s by no fault of our own) to the same misogyny every woman faces. Realizing I could take hold of both my womanhood and my transwomanhood in order to be who *I* actually could live as has been something that has helped me so much in the last few years.
5/6 Lizzie
I understand about body image. I could never have stripped with anyone looking at me from a distance. My strategy with “working” was to try to make regulars out of the older men and stay close and partly clothed so they couldn’t really see me. I’ve never felt comfortable naked. And you have a beautiful body. But you are a director now and were you to do camming of any kind, not only would you be recognized, it would be a label attached to you before any reckoning with the values of your work.
How do you structure your time during the pandemic?
5/6 Jessie
I find myself completely losing track of it. My partner and I have started beginning each day by making the most mundane of plans so at least there’s a “schedule.” I finally started working with the local mutual aid group, too, so going out and delivering free groceries to undocumented folks gives me something resembling a “job.”
5/6 Lizzie
I think it is wonderful that you’re delivering groceries to the undocumented. Any kind of “reading/writing/working” in this moment may be clinging to a hope that the “future” will have a familiar shape and you’re in the present, doing the absolute and necessary.
5/15 Jessie
If all goes well I’ll shoot next week. I’m thinking about the ecstatic again, it seems to be in the air for me and others, in this moment. There is something about burrowing into the self and having to drag something out of it. Last weekend we blacked out the windows in our apartment, fired up our CDJs, and DJ’d for 8 hours straight and made a tiny world, a rave of 2. Suddenly it feels that my body, my gender, my art no longer matter much because there’s no one there to witness it or to care. But then, of course, we go to the streets and do the menial labor that feels most helpful to others. The smile on an old woman’s face when I bring her the medication she can’t pick up. You’re right, I think, that the future that existed a few months ago doesn’t anymore. But I can’t imagine that there is no future, that punk side of myself disappeared years ago when I realized how actually at risk the people around me are. I think we have a to make a future. I feel I am at my best and my worst. Sometimes I cry for no reason, just sitting there. At other moments I feel so free.
5/22 Lizzie
Sometimes this pandemic feels like some kind of collective (un)conscious moving in waves over the earth and affecting us differently in different time zones and cultures in strange and mysterious ways. I think it’s also experienced differently within age groups – yours and mine – the “at risk” groups.
5/26 Jessie
My friends in Berlin are having a very different set of experiences than I am. But there is so much movement on the streets here these days, block parties, people walking, riding, people blasting music from cars and stoops, even basketball games in the courts attached to public housing. Even with risks, there’s something to be said for the psychological and political benefits to a population slowly coming outside but we need to honor the ceaseless desire of people to mingle and connect, and to make use of it.
I’ve been radiantly happy, suddenly, out of nowhere. I’m not sure why. It could be this sense of awakening, or just that there’s a lot more sun lately. But I think its also just because this weird time has given me space to learn how to just live, nothing more, for once.
On a sad note, my dear friend (in whose apartment I shot SO PRETTY in, and who you can see briefly in the film) has gotten sick, with COVID symptoms. Normally I wouldn’t worry, but they have asthma and host of other conditions, and it’s hitting hard. I’ll be bringing them groceries if they aren’t able to go outside for a while. It’s the first person I know personally to get sick of whom I can’t just easily say “they’ll be fine.” There’s also no one in the world I’m closer to than them, so that hits too.
5/29 Lizzie
I feel the same way about people outside without masks, bursting out. It feels as if some people are saying they don’t care anymore – it happens or it doesn’t. And now George Floyd’s murder has pushed the pandemic to the background. People demonstrating and not caring how close they are to anyone…I get it!
How is your friend?
5/31 Jessie
My friend is feeling better, thank god. Their partner is sick too now but he seems to have it much less bad.
I just finished a cut of the short and then it became clear that we had to go to the streets, where we’ve been ever since. In my 30-ish years in America and my 10 in New York I’ve never seen anything like it. It feels that something is happening, and that it needed to. It’s such a strange feeling to see the (masked) faces of all the people I haven’t seen in months, to want to hug them but to hold back, and to have, on one occasion, that brief reunion ended in seconds by a wall of officers slamming us apart, never to be reunited that day. My adrenaline hasn’t gone down for a moment since you wrote. I ran into a friend, DeForrest Brown, Jr, a philosopher of black rhythm whose book is published this August, who said this was a rave as much as anything, individual bodies using the city however they chose to, a union of action between them arising from the shared space.
6/1 Lizzie
I love what your philosopher friend said. I love that you use your body as an antenna – your conduit and arbiter. Your intuition is so acute yet your aesthetic so “cool.” Yes, a rave… you are part of this new language. As a white cis woman, I must often shut up and listen. There is a new world, a new language, systems are in the process of change. I think I always misunderstood the meaning of the word “rave.”
6/4 Jessie
What times. I think at moments like this all I can do is stop trying to predict what comes next and just throw my body where I think it is useful. And remember, sometimes to take a moment to sit in the sun with friends and sleep long enough to have strength for another day.
6/4
I don’t know any voices that stand out – what seems so specific about this movement and moment is that it feels like the culmination of the last 10 years of activism, where the on-the-ground tactics and the discourse are fully dispersed among the people, leaderless, atomized, rudderless, but somehow finding a way to make a virtue out of that fact. Impossible to pin down? Everything is on Twitter, voices rising up and dispersing, and everything is bodies rushing around chaotically on the streets, different people, purposes.
As for ‘overtly’ political work, I don’t know. I’ve always said that politics must be an element of every film, that to not use politics as an artistic element is idiotic as well as mildly unethical, but that I’d never seen much utility in works that seek to be activism in and of themselves. I’m wary of saying a film is ‘enough,’ or that they can be political on their own. I find they become helpful in the context of history and in the context of communities, things to rally around, things to provide hope, things to provide images of worlds that don’t exist quite yet or ways of seeing a world that does.
This is, I think, why everyone is gravitating towards BORN IN FLAMES right now, even if they think it’s for more didactic reasons. The film is an image of what is and what could be. It obviously couldn’t be more vocal about politics but the joy of it is seeing so many voices threaded together in a unified cacophony.
6/4 Lizzie
My neighborhood had/has become a hub of protest. I live near the middle of demonstrations where vast caravans of peaceful protests pass by on their way to Hollywood. Flowers and water handed out as speeches are made before hundreds and sometimes thousands of protestors march on. I’ve demonstrated on the fringes (COVID) but you are using your body so differently. (I am in awe!)
By overt politics, I didn’t mean as overtly as a film like BORN IN FLAMES – agit-prop – but just reversing the proportions of the political as in SO PRETTY. But your naked body is political in itself. I love your aesthetic. And I love who you are – you who have been been putting yourself on the front line every day.
6/4 Jessie
I’m starting to question my own beliefs. Seeing how people reacted to SO PRETTY made me think maybe films have a bit more power than I gave them credit for. With regard to this moment, I can’t see myself making a political work that “takes a lead,” I feel like that has to be something I aid black people in rather than the other way around.
But I do think I can make work that continues to create an aesthetic and political ground that opens space for others, and employment, of course. I view a film as a way to create a space that integrates ideas and gives them power.
Images from Born in Flames, So Pretty & Lizzie Borden
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WORKING GIRLS was taken down from Youtube on 9 June at the polite request of Criterion Films, which is planning to restore and release it for an early 2021 release, along with REGROUPING. Additionally, the Criterion Channel will be showing BORN IN FLAMES beginning on 25 July.
If any group of sex workers wishes to have a private, free screening of WORKING GIRLS, please DM @LizziebordenLA on Twitter.