Regrouping

With Regrouping, Lizzie Borden initiates an exploration into the social dynamics of female collectivity that she would continue to pursue in her subsequent feature films, Born in Flames (1983) and Working Girls (1986). Borden began Regrouping as an attempt to work together with four artists to document the interactions in their women’s group. However, as she states in the text that opens this highly reflexive work, “Gradually the terms of the film changed: they began to drift away; more and more, it became my film.” The final result is “a manipulation, a subjective statement” that uses fragmentation, repetition, overlapping voice-overs, and disjunctive sound-image relations to sketch the vicissitudes of group belonging. After a handful of screenings at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and Anthology Film Archives at the time of its release, Regrouping disappeared from circulation. Borden put the sole print of the film in her closet for some forty years, yielding to the complaints of its participants, who were unhappy with the outcome. Now, with their permission, it is circulating once more in a new restoration by Anthology Film Archives.

European premiere of the restoration, presented by Shai Heredia with the film director Lizzie Borden.