Paris Is Burning is a 1990 American documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston.The Criterion Collection Filmed over a period of seven years from 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.Janus Films
Critics consider the film to be an invaluable documentary chronicling the end of the “Golden Age” of the New York City ballroom scene, 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”. It has since been ranked by numerous publications as one of the greatest documentary films of all time.
Content Filming through the mid-to-late 1980s, Jennie Livingston explores the elaborately structured ball competitions in which contestants, adhering to a very specific "category" or theme, must "walk", much like a fashion model parades a runway. The balls are viewed as sites for performance, fame, and exclusive celebrity status in the subculture of queer Black and Latino folks, who are rarely afforded the opportunity to exist in mainstream culture. Contestants are judged on criteria including their dance talent, the aesthetic beauty of their clothing, and the "realness" of their drag - i.e., their ability to pass as a member of the stereotype, gender, or sex they are portraying. For example, the category "banjee realness" comprises gay men portraying macho archetypes such as sailors, soldiers, and street hoodlums. "Banjee boys" are judged by their ability to pass as their straight counterparts in the outside world.
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" that serve as intentional families, social groups, and performance teams. Houses are led by "mothers" who are viewed as the best, most powerful, and a maternal figure of their "children". Houses and ball contestants who consistently win trophies for their walks eventually earn "legendary" status.
Livingston, who moved to New York after graduating from Yale to work in film, spent six years making Paris Is Burning, and interviewed key figures in the ball world. Many of them contribute monologues that shed light on gender roles, gay and ball subcultures, and their own life stories. The film explains how words such as house, mother, shade, reading and legendary gain new meaning when used in novel ways to describe the gay and drag subculture. The "houses" serve as surrogate families for young ball-walkers who face rejection from their biological families for their gender expression, identities, and sexual orientation.
The film also explores how its subjects deal with issues such as AIDS, racism, poverty, violence and homophobia.The Criterion Channel Some, such as Venus Xtravaganza, become sex workers to support themselves. Near the end of the film, Angie Xtravaganza, Venus's "house mother", reacts to news that Venus is found strangled to death and speculates that a disgruntled client killed her. Others shoplift clothing so they can "walk" in the balls. Several are disowned by transphobic and homophobic parents, leaving them vulnerable to homelessness. Some subjects save money for gender affirming surgery; while a few have extensive surgeries, others receive breast implants without undergoing vaginoplasty.
According to Livingston, the documentary is a multi-leveled exploration of an African-American and Latino subculture that serves as a microcosm of fame, race, and wealth in the larger US culture. 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 display to survive in a "rich, white world."
Drag is presented as a complex performance of gender, class, and race, and a way to express one's identity, desires and aspirations. The African-American and Latino community depicted in the film includes a diverse range of sexual identities and gender presentations, from "butch queens" (gay cisgender men) to transgender women, to drag queens, to butch women.
The film also documents the origins of "voguing", a dance style in which competing ball-walkers pose and freeze in glamorous positions as if being photographed for the cover of Vogue. However, Livingston maintained in 1991 that the film was not just about 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.
Conception and production Livingston studied photography and painting at Yale University. After moving to New York, she worked for the Staten Island Advance, a local newspaper. She left for one summer to study film at New York University in Greenwich Village. She was photographing in that neighborhood's Washington Square Park, where she met two young men and was intrigued by their dancing and the unusual slang they were using. She asked what they were doing, and they told her that they were voguing. She attended her first ball, a mini-ball at the Gay Community Center on 13th Street, which she filmed as an assignment for her class at NYU.
At that mini-ball, Livingston encountered Venus Xtravaganza for the first time. Later, she spent time with Willi Ninja to learn about ball culture and voguing. She also researched African-American history, literature, and culture, and she also studied queer culture and the nature of subcultures. She conducted audio interviews with several ball participants: Venus and Danni Xtravaganza, Dorian Corey, Junior Labeija, Octavia St. Laurent and others. The main self-funded shoot was the Paris is Burning ball in 1986.
From that footage, Livingston worked with editor Jonathan Oppenheim to edit a trailer, which was then used to obtain funding from some grants, including awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Paul Robeson Fund, and the Jerome Foundation. Finally, Madison Davis Lacy, the head of public TV station WNYC, saw the material and contributed $125,000 to the production. The producers still needed to raise additional funds to edit the film, which came primarily from executive producer Nigel Finch at the BBC-2 show Arena.
There was some follow-up production in 1989: to tell the story of voguing's entry into mainstream culture, and to tell the stories of Willi's international success as a dancer and of Venus Xtravaganza's murder, which remains unsolved to this day. The filmmakers also did an additional interview with Dorian Corey, talking about "executive realness", "shade", and "reading".
The documentary took seven years to complete due to production costs and difficulties in obtaining funding. Livingston edited the final cut down to 78 minutes from over 75 hours of footage, all shot on expensive 16mm film. After the film's completion, the producers still needed to raise funds to get permission to use the music played in the ballrooms. It cost almost as much to clear the music as it did to shoot and edit the entire film. The production team had to rely on 10 separate funding sources over the course of the project.
Home video In 2020, the Criterion Collection re-released Paris Is Burning on Blu-ray with features including new interviews and conversations with cast members, scholars, etc. The UCLA Film and Television Archive restored the film into a new 2K digital form. This was done in collaboration with the Sundance Institute and Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, under the supervision of Jennie Livingston. Also included is footage of a conversation betwern Livingston and Sol Pendavis, Freddie Pendavis, and filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris. In another interview, gay and lesbian film historian Jenni Olson shares her views and opinions on Paris Is Burning. The re-release also includes a 2005 audio commentary from Livingston, Freddie Pendavis, Willi Ninja, and film editor Jonathan Oppenheim. An episode of The Joan Rivers Show from 1991 with Livingston, Dorian Corey, Pepper Labeija, Freddie Pendavis, and Willi Ninja, is also included Michelle Parkerson's essay "Paris Is Burning: The Fire This Time" and Essex Hemphill's review of the film are also included in the re-release.
The re-release also includes over an hour of new outtakes. In one scene, Venus Xtravaganza is shown at her grandmother's house, detailing her goals and hopes for the future, as well as her devotion to her grandmother. Dorian Corey is shown getting ready for a ball as gunshots are heard outside. Dorian mentions to Livingston that this is a common occurrence. This is also one of the few times Livingston and the crew can be seen on screen.
Reception and legacy The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews from a number of mainstream and independent presses, remarkable at that time for a film on the LGBT community, given the enormous legal and cultural obstacles that they faced during the time period.
The film holds a score of 99% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 120 reviews, with an average rating of 8.1/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Paris Is Burning dives into the '80s transgender subculture, with the understated camera allowing this world to flourish and the people to speak (and dance) for themselves." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 82 out of 100 based on 22 critic reviews, indicating “universal acclaim.”
Terrence Rafferty of The New Yorker said the film was "a beautiful piece of work—lively, intelligent, exploratory …. Everything about Paris Is Burning signifies so blatantly and so promiscuously that our formulations – our neatly paired theses and antitheses – multiply faster than we can keep track of them. What's wonderful about the picture is that Livingston is smart enough not to reduce her subjects to the sum of their possible meanings..."
Filmmaker Michelle Parkerson, writing for The Black Film Review, called the film "a politically astute, historically important document of our precarious times.”
Essex Hemphill, the poet known for his role in Marlon Riggs's film Tongues Untied, reviewed the film for The Guardian, celebrating how the documentary created a forum for the people in it to speak in their own voices, and writing: “Houses of silk and gabardine are built. Houses of dream and fantasy. Houses that bear the names of their legendary founders…Houses rise and fall. Legends come and go. To pose is to reach for power while simultaneously holding real powerlessness at bay." Reprint of
Yet the film was not without detractors even after its initial release.Burning down the house: why the debate over Paris Is Burning rages on|Movies|The Guardian Writing for Z Magazine, feminist writer bell hooks criticized the film for depicting the ritual of the balls as a spectacle to "pleasure" white spectators. Other authors such as Judith Butler and Phillip Harper have focused on the drag 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.