Paris Is Burning (film)

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Paris Is Burning
Directed by Jennie Livingston
Produced by Jennie Livingston
Cinematography Paul Gibson
Editing by Jonathan Oppenheim
Distributed by Miramax Films
Release date(s) August 1991
Running time 78 minutes
Country USA
Language English
Budget $500,000 USD (estimated)
IMDb profile

Paris Is Burning is a 1990 documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston. Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the poor, African American and Latino gay and transgendered community involved in it. Many consider Paris Is Burning to be an invaluable documentary of the end of the "Golden Age" of New York City drag balls, as well as a thoughtful exploration of race, class, and gender in America.

Contents

[edit] 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, Anji Xtravaganza, and Willi Ninja. Many of the contestants vying for trophies are representatives of "Houses" (in the fashion 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 never went to film school and who spent 7 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.

In explaining the rules of the Balls (and the slang and terminology that goes along with them) the film also shines light on the societal hardships of Ball community members (such as racism, homophobia and poverty) and how these obstacles influence the participants (some are sex workers, some shoplift clothing to wear in the Balls, some were thrown out of their homes by homophobic parents, some are saving money for sex reassignment surgery). It follows several participants through candid one-on-one interviews (both in and out of the Balls) to give insight into their lives and struggles, and ultimately 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 (see Drag). 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 transsexual 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). Pop star Madonna would, one year before Paris Is Burning was completed, bring the phenomenon to the mainstream with her number one song "Vogue".

[edit] Critical reception

Anji Xtravaganza in a still from the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning.
Anji Xtravaganza in a still from the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning.

Upon its release the documentary received rave reviews from critics and won several awards. Some notable raves include Terrence Rafferty writing in the New Yorker, prominent Black gay poet Essex Hemphill writing in The Guardian, and filmmaker Michelle Parkerson writing for The Black Film Review. Outrage ensued when Paris Is Burning failed to earn an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature that year. Long out of print on videocassette, the film was finally released on DVD in 2005.

Paris Is Burning is frequently used as a study tool in university classes on film, cultural and critical studies, African American and Latino studies, queer and gender studies, anthropology, and dance. One criticism of the film is that Livingston, who never appears onscreen and who can only rarely be heard asking questions, makes her subject position as a white, middle class woman essentially invisible to the viewer. However, at the time, Livingston felt her subjects were more interesting than she was and was more interested in creating a complex and perhaps conventional portrait of a vibrant community than in following up-to-the-minute ideas about subject position.[citation needed]

[edit] Trivia

  • When interview subject Dorian Corey died in 1993, a mummified corpse was discovered in a trunk in her apartment. The body, which had been there for at least 20 years, was identified as Robert Worley (aka Robert Wells). [1]
  • In an NPR interview director Livingston said that early in the filming she was standing next to a patron who, assuming she was a man in drag, said "Honey, you're GOOD!"[citation needed]
  • Most of the film was completed in 1990, but the movie still lacked titles, as the filmmakers had no money to do titles or to create a proper print in which sound and picture were married. (For this reason, when Paris Is Burning had its film premiere, at the Frameline Festival in San Francisco, at the Castro Theater, the film was shown in "double system" (sound and picture running separately) and there was a 10 minute break for a reel change.) When the film was accepted to Sundance, the filmmakers created a 7 minute credit sequence, which included outtakes from the film, including Chipper Corey's inspired lipsync performance of "Over the Rainbow". Several sources, such as IMDB, credit the film as having been completed in 1990, but in 1990 it was 7 minutes shorter.

[edit] Awards

[edit] Notable personalities in Paris Is Burning

[edit] See also

[edit] DVD release

Paris Is Burning was released on Region 1 DVD on September 6, 2005.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Drag Queen and the Mummy, by Edward Conlon; Transition, No. 65 (1995), pp. 4-24; doi:10.2307/2935316
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