Paris Is Burning

Ball culture in New York from the mid to late eighties. At competitions run by Black, Latino, gay and trans people, contestants walk in set categories and are scored on dance, clothes and how convincingly they can appear to be someone else. That skill is called realness. Jennie Livingston directed. The shoot ran seven years and over 75 hours of footage were cut down to 78 minutes. The documentary is what introduced voguing to a wide audience: a dance built on frozen, glamorous poses. Financing was hard. Support came from ten separate sources, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the PBS station WNYC. Clearing the music rights cost nearly as much as the entire production. Payment became a dispute. The filming was done as unpaid documentary work; after the film sold, the producers distributed around 55,000 dollars among 13 participants. Some considered legal action and accepted payment once they saw they had signed standard model releases. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 99 percent. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Teddy Award in Berlin, and entered the National Film Registry in 2016. The academic argument continued too; critics including bell hooks and Judith Butler debated Livingston's position behind the camera and the question of representation. Who it is for: viewers who like subculture documentaries and want to know where today's pop language came from. Who it is not for: anyone expecting detachment. The question of who is telling whose story never left this film.