Paris is Burning
Context:
Directed by Jenny Livingston and documented in the mid 1980s in New York. The film was produced and distributed in 1991 by Miramax Films, with a budget of about $500,000.
Content:
“Paris is Burning” is about large events that take place in New York called “balls”. Balls are drag and voguing competitions that take place within different categories of the balls. A few categories are “Pretty Girls,” “Town and Country,” “Executive Realness,” and “Butch Queen”. The competitors are transwomen that dress and perform in these categories which depict different types of women in “the real” world. There is a runway that participants walk down and at the end there are judges who score them on how close to they look to “the real” women. Pepper LeBeija, the mother of House LaBeija, says, “A ball, to us, is as close to reality as we’re going to get.”
Form:
It was a documentary film that consisted of interviews of the drag-ballers, those living in the community who had heard of the balls, and the actual balls themselves. During the interviews, the person being interviewed was set up within the frame in order to give context to their lives (whether they were in their home and had their personal items in the frame with them or they were on the streets with people and places the interacted with everyday). You can tell the film was made on a low budget due to the little use of cinematography within the film, making it even more apparent that the film was a documentary.
Analysis:
Livingston has agreed that she was able to do this documentary because of her social standing as "educated" and "white", whilst the drag queens would not have had access to the grants and financial aids necessary to the making of the film. Moreover,it has been said that while the documentary made a filmmaker out of Livingston, the drag queens remained in the same financially-strapped and discriminated-against position as before the film. bell hooks also commented on her displeasure of the film, stating that although it pointed out negative social constraints of the binaries of gender, the subjects in the film were clearly trying to imitate white gender normatives.