Jennie Livingston (1990)

A documentary about contemporary New York’s ‘ball culture’ and, to quote Wikipedia, ‘the poor, African American and Latino gay and transgendered community involved in it’.   Filmed over a period of several years in the 1980s, it’s an interesting description of how this world works – of its structures, categories of performance, vocabulary.  Sequences of ‘walking’ and voguing on catwalk/dance floor are intercut with interviews of various members of the ‘families’ that dominate the scene and others on the fringes of it.  The film-makers seem to assume that, because the setting is extraordinary and absorbing, what the interviewees have to say is bound to be fascinating too.  I didn’t find it so – or not for long anyway (the film runs seventy-six minutes).  The people of the ball world understandably love the attention Jennie Livingston and her camera are giving them.  Their interviews often seem another element of performance rather than humanly revelatory; and the talk about aspirations to glamour and celebrity gets repetitive (this  wouldn’t be regarded as interesting if it was the talk of straight people looking to affirm their identity or express a fantasy of themselves through their dress and style).  The film is relatively light on the history of New York ball culture (I learned more from the brief extracts on Wikipedia from Michael Cunningham’s writings on the subject).  All in all, Paris Is Burning is remarkable as a record of the world it describes but a limited exploration of it.

2 May 2009