Born Into Flames

Films that truly express the power and diversity of women are hard to find, not only in contemporary cinema, but in films all throughout history. The film industry has been dominated by men since it became clear that the medium would be popular enough to generate staggering profits. This comes in spite of the fact that the first director was, in fact, a woman by the name of Alice Guy Blanche. After Alice made several films, she moved to the United States, only to return to her home country of France to find her work had been credited to a man. Lizzie Borden's "Born into Flames", however, is a film that gives women a proper sense of power and entitlement, and one that has become very influential in history.

With a very raw, documentary style, this narrative piece takes on a sense of truth and importance that is often times denied to fiction films. It was hard at times to tell whether the film was real or not, especially since I am from another generation and unfamiliar with what the times were like when the film was made. Granted there are parts where everything is just too off to be mistaken as truth, there is still an undertone that says this film could have been a documentary. The circumstances are not unimaginable, in both the society of today and yesterday, and that is a bit disturbing.

One of the most powerful scenes in the entire film was the one where the woman is being raped and several other women ride in on their bicycles with whistles to save her. This was a visually stunning scene because the rape itself was intense, and the women riding in to save her were very determined and in controll. This scene, however, is also one that gave the film away as a fiction piece. There is no way that a woman making a film like this would stand by and watch another women be raped as she rolled the camera. There is also no way that two men would do this in front of a camera. On top of that, the odds of just happening to stumble upon an event like this are astronomical. With that aside, however, the scene is still powerful. We are able to forgive the obvious staged action in order to accept the larger issue, which is that women need to help one another because no one else is going to.

Bringing everything full circle, it should be noted that the young Katherine Bigelow who appears in "Born into Flames" became the first female director to ever win an academy award in 2010 for her film "The Hurt Locker". This is a sign that we are taking back the film industry, and gaining respect from men everywhere.