Born in Flames · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two radios, both illegal. Honey broadcasts as Phoenix Radio. Adele Bertei broadcasts as Radio Ragazza. For most of the film they are not talking to each other, and they are certainly not talking to us. They are talking to whoever in New York has a receiver switched on, ten years after a revolution that was supposed to have settled everything. The most important characters in Born in Flames are voices, and the voices arrive before the movement they keep describing.

That is the film in miniature. It is also the fastest way into an idea of Deleuze's that this movie demonstrates more plainly than most of the films he actually wrote about.

Deleuze noticed that political cinema broke in half. In the older kind, the people are already there. Soviet montage assumes a proletariat that exists and needs only to be shown its own power: collide two shots, a third meaning jumps out, the audience recognizes itself. Then that confidence collapsed. In what Deleuze calls modern political cinema, the filmmaker finds instead that the people are missing — the collective the film would speak for has not been assembled yet, and pretending otherwise is a lie the film can feel. What replaces the confidence is fabulation: story-telling as a way of calling a people into existence, filming people in the act of legending themselves.

Borden's science-fiction premise turns this from a theory into a plot. The war of liberation was won a decade ago. Social democracy arrived. The women discover that equality stopped at the paperwork. So the missing people here is not a figure of speech. It is the situation the characters wake up inside: a revolution happened, and its people did not include them. Every broadcast in the film is an attempt to make that people exist by talking as if it already does. This is why the radio matters more than any character. A voice on a pirate frequency addresses a listener who has not yet decided to be part of anything, and by addressing her, recruits her.

The form argues the same case. There is no heroine. There is no single voice. Deleuze has a name for this scattering, the dispersive situation, many weakly-linked people whose lines never resolve into one action. In most films that produces drift and malaise. Borden makes the dispersal the political content. Black women, white women, queer women, straight women, working-class women, each faction with its own frequency and its own grievance, converging slowly into a Women's Army that has to be argued into being rather than assumed. Plenty of movies invoke coalition. A montage of clasped hands costs nothing. This one dramatizes the labor: mistrust, disagreement, separate rooms. And the labor was real. Borden shot for five years on something like forty thousand dollars, cast friends, activists and non-actors out of downtown's no wave scene (a pre-directing Kathryn Bigelow among them), and assembled the polyphony in the editing room over those years. The film's form is the record of its own coalition-building.

Because the cast are largely playing near-versions of themselves, the speech in the film belongs to two people at once. Deleuze's term for that fusion is free indirect discourse: you cannot cleanly separate the author's vision from the character's, because the camera is speaking for and with them at the same time. Borden did not write these women a politics. She built a frame their politics could occupy.

Now the trick that makes the whole thing work. We arrive at any handheld, grainy, badly-miked footage with a reflex: this happened. Documentary form is a contract. Borden borrows the contract to vouch for events that have not happened, splicing faked news footage, surveillance reports and agitprop montage into one texture. Deleuze calls this the powers of the false — not lying, but making truth and falsity undecidable and putting that undecidability to work. The false here has a job. It is a rehearsal. The film's newsreel grain says this is how it will look when it comes, and the borrowed authority of reportage is what lets a wish be seen as a fact.

The debts are specific. The Battle of Algiers established the exact register, a clandestine cell insurgency restaged with non-professionals in newsreel grain. Ice gave the structural template: a speculative near-future America built as a fictional documentary of scattered urban-guerrilla cells and their underground media. Punishment Park supplied the handheld crew improvising through a dystopia of state repression. Medium Cool embedded staged fiction inside real upheaval. La Chinoise handed over the Brechtian machinery, direct address, slogans, collage, talking politics straight to camera. The Cool World brought 16mm vérité and non-professional Black street voices into fiction. Borden's own invention, the thing none of those films have, is the radio. Sound detaches from bodies, so a voice can narrate footage of people it has never met, and the cut between a state surveillance memo and a broadcast and a street can join two arguments instead of two spaces. That is the irrational cut, the join across a gap, and it is how a film with no protagonist still moves. She replaced the protagonist with a frequency.

Its influence traveled the way the film did, in worn prints passed between people, championed by Black and queer feminist critics as one of the few films that dramatized coalition rather than gestured at it, until Anthology's 2016 restoration put it in front of audiences arguably better tuned to it than 1983's. Whether that makes it prophetic or simply patient is worth arguing about.

Watch it once for the story. Watch it again for what the radio does to the picture — where the voice comes from, whose bodies are on screen while it speaks, who the film thinks is listening. The question it leaves open is the good one: can a film actually assemble a people, or only broadcast to one that hasn't shown up yet?