NO, NOW, NEVER: RADICAL NEW YORK CINEMA

WHEN: Tuesday 5 February 2008, 6pm

WHERE: 53 Washington Square South, Room 428

All Welcome. Refreshments provided.

“The right to violence is like the right to pee: you’ve gotta have the right

place and the right time.” One of the headiest, most fiercely out-there

independent films of the 1980s, BORN IN FLAMES is an unclassifiable mash-up

of science fiction, post-No Wave docudrama and exercise in radical

dialectics. Set ten years after the Social Democratic War of Liberation, it

depicts a tumbledown, self-proclaimedly Socialist New York in which

competing groups of women, when they’re not pedaling across the city on

their bicycles in order to attack macho idiots and discontented hard-hats

hitting on their sisters, fight for a braver, more combatively feminist new

order.

BORN IN FLAMES is a seething, combustible and strangely joyous time capsule

of a film, populated by black separatists, vigilante groups and brusque FBI

agents, that was inspired in part by the Italian free-radio movement of the

1970s and 1980. It features a range of downtown luminaries – Adele Bertei

(The Contortions, The Bloods), Kathryn Bigelow and, in his first screen

appearance, Eric Bogosian – and is accompanied by a terrific soundtrack of

post punk, art rock and hip hop. A feminist classic, a piercing critique of

the media structures that pervert and betray social reality, as well as a

bulletin from the frontline of a still-raging set of ideological conflicts,

its scene of the World Trade Center being bombed alone makes it an absolute

must see.