Paris Is Burning is a 1990 American documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston. Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the African-American, Latino, gay, and transgender communities involved in it. Some critics consider the film to be an invaluable documentary of the end of the "Golden Age" of New York City drag balls, and a thoughtful exploration of race, class, gender, and sexuality in America.
In 2016, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Video Paris Is Burning (film)
Content
The film explores the elaborately-structured ball competitions in which contestants, adhering to a very specific category or theme, must "walk" (much like a fashion model's runway) and subsequently be judged on criteria including the "realness" of their drag, the beauty of their clothing and their dancing ability.
Most of the film alternates between footage of balls and interviews with prominent members of the scene, including Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, Angie Xtravaganza, and Willi Ninja. Many of the contestants vying for trophies are representatives of "Houses" (in the fashion-brand sense, such as "House of Chanel") that serve as intentional families, social groups, and performance teams. Houses and ball contestants who consistently won in their walks eventually earned a "legendary" status.
Jennie Livingston, who moved to New York after graduating from Yale to work in film, and who spent six years making Paris Is Burning, concentrated on interviews with key figures in the ball world, many of whom contribute monologues that shed light on the ball culture as well as on their own personalities. In the film, titles such as "house," "mother," and "reading" emphasize how the subculture the film depicts has taken words from the straight and white worlds, and imbued them with alternate meanings, just as the "houses" serve as surrogate families for young ball-walkers whose sexual orientations have sometimes made acceptance and love within their own families hard to come by.
The film depicts people with different gender identities or communities and their different forms of expression. It also explores how its subjects dealt with the adversity of racism, homophobia, AIDS and poverty. For example, some, like Venus Xtravaganza became sex workers, some shoplift clothing, and some were thrown out of their homes by homophobic parents. One participant was saving money for sex reassignment surgery. According to Livingston, the documentary is a multi-leveled exploration of a subculture in African American and Latino cultures that proves to be a microcosm of society, which was an underappreciated and arguably underground world that many Americans were unfamiliar with. Through candid one-on-one interviews the film offers insight into the lives and struggles of its subjects and the strength, pride, and humor they maintain to survive in a "rich, white world."
Drag is presented as a complex performance of gender, class, and race, in which one can express one's identity, desires and aspirations along many dimensions. The African-American and Latino community depicted in the film includes a diverse range of identities and gender presentations, from gay men to butch queens to transgender men and women.
The film also documents the origins of "voguing", a dance style in which competing ball-walkers freeze and "pose" in glamorous positions (as if being photographed for the cover of Vogue). Artist Malcolm McLaren (with Mark Moore of S'Express and William Orbit) would, two years before Paris Is Burning was completed, bring the phenomenon to the mainstream with his song "Deep in Vogue", which sampled the movie and directly referenced many of the stars of Paris Is Burning including Pepper LaBeija and featured dancers from the film, including Willi Ninja. The single went to number 1 in the US Billboard Dance Chart. One year after this, Madonna released her number one song "Vogue", bringing further attention to the dancing style.
However Livingston maintains that the film is not just about "a cute dance." "This is a film that is important for anyone to see, whether they're gay or not. It's about how we're all influenced by the media; how we strive to meet the demands of the media by trying to look like Vogue models or by owning a big car. And it's about survival. It's about people who have a lot of prejudices against them and who have learned to survive with wit, dignity and energy. It's a little story about how we all survive."
Music producers C&C Music Factory sampled some of Paris is Burning in one of the tracks from their Gonna Make You Sweat album, entitled "Bonus" or "Shade". Famous drag queen RuPaul has also sampled a few of the quotes from the documentary in her film Starrbooty, as well as on her TV show RuPaul's Drag Race.
Maps Paris Is Burning (film)
Controversy
The film received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts during the period when the organization was under fire for funding controversial artists including Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Aware that publicity surrounding her project could result in revoked funding, Livingston avoided releasing many details about the project outside of her small circle of producers and collaborators.
Several of the most heavily featured performers wished to sue in 1991 for a share of the film's profits, because they were unequally paid. Paris DuPree sought the largest settlement: $40 million for unauthorized use of her ball. The producers stated that they had always planned on compensating the principal participants. All dropped their claims after their attorneys confirmed that they had signed non-disclosure agreements, and they did not have enough resources to continue paying for lawyers. The producers then distributed approximately $55,000 among thirteen of the participants.
Another critique of the film, was that the lens of the movie left out crucial parts of the story like Venus Xtravaganza being murdered during the film shooting. This was considered concerning due to the fact that the director, Jennie Levingston is a cisgendered white woman trying to tell a story about queer and trans people of color's stories, and therefor lost depth and authenticity
Upon release, the documentary received rave reviews from critics and won several awards including a Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, a Berlin International Film Festival Teddy Bear, an audience award from the Toronto International Film Festival, a GLAAD Media Award, a Women in Film Crystal Award, a Best Documentary award from the Los Angeles, New York, and National Film Critics' Circles, and it also was named as one of 1991's best films by the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, Time magazine, and others.
Paris Is Burning failed to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature that year, adding to a growing perception that certain subjects and treatments were excluded from consideration for Oscars, and leading, in part, to a change in how documentaries are nominated for the Academy Awards.
More than two decades later, Paris Is Burning remains an organizing tool for gay and trans youth; a way for scholars and students to examine issues of race, class, and gender; a way for younger ball participants to meet their ancestors; and a portrait of several remarkable Americans, most of whom have died since the film's production.
Critical Reception
bell hooks, a feminist writer who is not LGBT-identified, criticized the film for reinforcing the socialized idea that white femininity is the proper gender expression to aspire to. She states, "The femininity most sought after, most adored, was that perceived to be the exclusive property of white womanhood" Other authors such as Judith Butler and Phillip Harper have also pointed towards the queens desire to perform and present "realness". Realness can be described as the ability to appropriate an authentic gender expression. When performing under certain categories at the Ball, such as school girl or executive, the queens are rewarded for appearing as close to the "real thing" as possible. A main goal amongst the contestants is to perform conventional gender roles while at the same time trying to challenge them.
hooks also questions the political efficacy of the drag balls themselves, citing her own experimentations with drag, and suggesting that the balls themselves lack political, artistic, and social significance. hooks criticizes the production and questions gay men performing drag, suggesting that it is inherently misogynistic and degrading towards women.
Judith Butler responds to hooks' previous opinion that drag is misogynistic, stating in her book, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex":
The problem with the analysis of drag as only misogyny is, of course, that it figures male-to-female transsexuality, cross-dressing, and drag as male homosexual activities- which they are not always- and it further diagnosis male homosexuality as rooted in misogyny.
Both hooks and Harper criticize the filmmaker, Jennie Livingston, a white lesbian woman, for remaining visibly absent from the film. Although the viewers are able to hear Livingston a few times during the production, the directors physical absence while orchestrating the viewers perspective, creates what Hooks calls an "Imperial Oversee(r)". In addition, hooks questions Livingston's depiction of the drag balls, arguing that it reduces the experiences of drag queens to a mere spectacle:
Much of the film's focus on pageantry takes the ritual of the black drag ball and makes it spectacle. Ritual is that ceremonial act that carries with it meaning and significance beyond what appears, while spectacle functions primarily as entertaining dramatic display... Hence it is easy for white observers to depict black rituals as spectacle.
In White Filmmakers and Minority Subjects: Cinema Vérité and the Politics of Irony in Hoop Dreams and Paris Is Burning, Kimberly Chabot Davis, also criticizes the film as being sensational and racially problematic due to the directors position as a white woman. She states, "the power wielded by the camera, over both the audience and subject, has been a central concern in the history of documentary film".
Judith Butler draws upon this film to comment on the role of interpellation in the social construction of gender. Butler describes interpellation as the idea that individuals and their gender identities are not fully formed until another person acknowledges them. Davis argues that as the film director, Livingston, has the power to create the drag queen and manipulate viewers assumptions of gender.
Awards
- 1990 - IDA Award, International Documentary Association
- 1990 - LAFCA Award Best Documentary, Los Angeles Film Critics Association
- 1990 - Audience Award Best Documentary, San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
- 1991 - Grand Jury Prize Documentary, Sundance Film Festival
- 1991 - Teddy Award for Best Documentary Film, Berlin International Film Festival
- 1991 - Boston Society of Film Critics Awards (BSFC) Best Documentary
- 1991 - Open Palm Award, now called Breakthrough Director Award Gotham Awards
- 1991 - NYFCC Award Best Documentary, New York Film Critics Circle Awards
- 1991 - Golden Space Needle Award Best Documentary, Seattle International Film Festival
- 1992 - Outstanding Film (Documentary), GLAAD Media Awards
- 1992 - NSFC Award Best Documentary, National Society of Film Critics
- 2015 - Cinema Eye Honours Legacy Award
- 2016 - Added to the National Film Registry
References
External links
- Paris Is Burning on IMDb
- Paris Is Burning at Rotten Tomatoes
- Paris Is Burning at Box Office Mojo
- From the New Yorker Magazine film file
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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