Paris Is Burning- 1990

[2009AD]

One of the great documentaries of the late 80's early 90's....

Paris is Burning




part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
part 6
part 7
part 8
part 9
part 10
part 11
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_is_Burning_(film)

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.

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.

The film also explores how its subjects dealt with the adversity of racism, homophobia, AIDS, and poverty. For example, some became sex workers, some shoplift clothing, and some were thrown out of their homes by homophobic parents. One was saving money for sex reassignment surgery. 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 (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".

Critical reception

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.[citation needed]
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. The film also helped pioneer a new movement in cinema, New Queer Cinema.

Livingston has agreed that she was able to do this documentary because of her social standing as "educated" and "white", while the drag queens would not have had access to the grants and financial aids necessary to the making of the film.[1] Moreover, it has been said that while the documentary made a film-maker out of Livingston, the drag queens remained in the same financially-strapped and discriminated-against position as before the film.[1]

[Alyssa87]

one of my alltime favorites.

sooo many inside jokes with friends stem from this flick.

[NYTSJulie]

one of my alltime favorites.

sooo many inside jokes with friends stem from this flick.

Oh my Venus lol

[Alyssa87]

one of my alltime favorites.

sooo many inside jokes with friends stem from this flick.

Oh my Venus lol

are you going thru some psychological change in ya LLLife
(for when your girlfriend tries it)

[NYTSJulie]

one of my alltime favorites.

sooo many inside jokes with friends stem from this flick.

Oh my Venus lol

are you going thru some psychological change in ya LLLife
(for when your girlfriend tries it)

lol come on fish work it out for your washer and dryer set

[2009AD]

Best line in the flick....

part 7

"To describe, explain mopping, you go into a store and just look, look for whatever you wanna see, look for whatever ..mopping's stealing"

[NYTSJulie]

I want to watch "How do I look" is it good????

[Willie Escalade]

I STILL haven't seen this documentary! How can that be?

[AllanahStarrNYC]

This movie is sooooooooooooooooo legendary.

I saw this when I was 17 and it was one of my first exposures to transsexuals.

I loooooooooooooove then Dorian explains the shade and reading.
I kiki every TIME.

[flabbybody]

I'd love to see a top Hollywood producer do a re-make of this classic in order to examine how the drag world has evolved during the 20 years since the movie came out