Black Steel (Born in Flames) (2012)

Black Steel (2012)

Higher quality version with integrated subtitles: enter the password revolution

I made this vid as a transformative homage to Lizzie Borden’s 1983 film Born in Flames, as part of my efforts to think through how the film visualizes revolutionary becoming in a past speculative future that resonates discomfortingly with the present. When a practice developed around remixing popular culture interfaces with the world of the independent, the significance of transformation and subversion is far from clear cut. My creation of this vid is part of a larger project to explore what happens when the interpretive practices of vidding, developed to transformatively recreate mass media texts, meet politically and aesthetically radical independent film and artistic production.

I took key elements of the film and transposed them into a different style and genre, but my intention was to keep the original spirit very much alive––and to take it into contexts that would be unlikely to know the original. In vidding the film, I came to new understandings of its documentary style, of its depictions of transformative media, and of its efforts to wrestle with political violence.