Paris Is Burning Jennie Livingston

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 then. The film holds a score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 54 reviews, with an average rating of 7.83/10. 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."[10]

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 well known for his role in Marlon Riggs’s classic 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."[11]

Yet the film was not without detractors even after its initial release.[12]

Writing for Z Magazine, feminist writer bell hooks[a] 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".[13] Realness can be described as the ability to appropriate an authentic gender expression.[14] 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.[13]

hooks also questions the political efficacy of the drag balls themselves, citing her own experiments with drag, and suggesting that the balls themselves lack political, artistic, and social significance. hooks criticizes the production and questions gay men performing drag, suggesting that it is inherently misogynistic and degrading towards women.[15] Butler responds to hooks' previous opinion that drag is misogynistic, stating in her book, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex":[16]

The problem with the analysis of drag as only misogyny is, of course, that it figures male-to-female transsexuality, cross-dressing, and drag as male homosexual activities — which they are not always — and it further diagnoses male homosexuality as rooted in misogyny.[14]

Both hooks and Harper criticize the filmmaker, Jennie Livingston, who is Jewish, gender-nonconforming, and queer, for remaining visibly absent from the film. Although the viewers are able to hear Livingston a few times during the production, the director's physical absence while orchestrating the viewer's perspective, creates what hooks calls an "Imperial Oversee(r)".[15]

Livingston's visible absence from the film can be attributed to a style of documentary filmmaking called cinéma vérité, an approach in which the filmmaker remains off camera and observes the events unfolding onscreen. The goal of cinéma vérité filmmaking is to capture situations and events that occur naturally, without any input or direction from the filmmaker. Some scholars have argued that the use of cinéma vérité in Paris Is Burning makes the film appear ethnographic in nature. Ethnographic films are typically made by western filmmakers aiming to document the lives and practices of people belonging to non-western cultures. Ethnographic documentaries are often seen as problematic because they allow western filmmakers to put forth their representation of a group which they do not belong to, thereby manipulating audience perceptions of that group.[17] In a similar way, Judith Butler argues that, by remaining off-camera, Livingston uses a shared sense of identity with the group she films (i.e., her queer identity) to “claim [...] a shared sense of marginalization” with them while simultaneously maintaining “phallic power” over them because she as the filmmaker decides how they will be portrayed.[18]

In the years following the film's release, people have continued to speak and write about Paris Is Burning. In 2003, the New York Times reported that more than a decade after its release, Paris Is Burning remains a commonly cited and frequently used organizing tool for LGBT youth; a way for scholars and students to examine issues of race, class, and gender; a way for younger ball participants to meet their cultural ancestors; and a portrait of several remarkable Americans, almost all of whom have died since the film's production.[19]

In 2013, UC Irvine scholar Lucas Hilderbrand wrote a history of the film, a book detailing its production, reception, and influence, Paris Is Burning, A Queer Film Classic (Arsenal Pulp Press). In 2007, writer Wesley Morris, in a print-only section for children for The New York Times, wrote "12 Films to See Before You Turn 13". The piece recommended kids see films like Princess Mononoke, The Wiz, and Do the Right Thing. About Paris Is Burning, Morris says "seeing [Livingston's] documentary as soon as possible means you can spend the rest of your life having its sense of humanity amuse, surprise, and devastate you, over and over."

Awards

• 1990 – IDA Award, International Documentary Association
• 1990 – LAFCA Award Best Documentary, Los Angeles Film Critics Association
• 1990 – Audience Award Best Documentary, San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
• 1991 – Grand Jury Prize Documentary, Sundance Film Festival[20]
• 1991 – Teddy Award for Best Documentary Film, Berlin International Film Festival[21]
• 1991 – Boston Society of Film Critics Awards (BSFC) Best Documentary
• 1991 – Open Palm Award, Gotham Awards
• 1991 – NYFCC Award Best Documentary, New York Film Critics Circle Awards
• 1991 – Golden Space Needle Award Best Documentary, Seattle International Film Festival
• 1992 – Outstanding Film (Documentary), GLAAD Media Awards
• 1992 – NSFC Award Best Documentary, National Society of Film Critics
• 2015 – Cinema Eye Honours Legacy Award
• 2016 – Added to the National Film Registry[22]

Controversy

The film received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts during the period when the organization was under fire for funding controversial artists including Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Aware that publicity surrounding her project could result in revoked funding, Livingston avoided releasing many details about the project outside of her small circle of producers and collaborators.

Although there had been no agreement to do so, the producers planned to distribute approximately $55,000 (1/5 of the sale price of the film to Miramax) among 13 of the participants. While Dorian Corey and Willi Ninja were very happy to be paid for a film they'd understood was an unpaid work of nonfiction, several other film participants felt they were not properly compensated and thus retained an attorney, planning to sue for a share of the film's profits in 1991. When their attorney saw they had all signed standard model releases generated by WNYC Television, they did not sue and accepted payment. Paris Dupree had planned to sue for $40 million.[4]

Responding to the financial dispute, Livingston has expressed that documentaries are works of nonfiction and journalism, and that it has never been standard practice to pay their subjects. She states that she paid the principals as a matter of respect at a time when this was not commonly done, and she argues that they received considerably more than they would have received if they had been actors in an independently-made drama feature.

Upon its release, the documentary received exceptionally good reviews from critics and won several awards including a Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, a Berlin International Film Festival Teddy Bear,[23] an audience award from the Toronto International Film Festival, a GLAAD Media Award, a Women in Film Crystal Award, a Best Documentary award from the Los Angeles, New York, and National Film Critics' Circles, and it also was named as one of 1991's best films by the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, Time magazine, and others.

In spite of the many positive reactions and film awards earned, Paris Is Burning did not receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature that year. This generated accusations that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was homophobic and transphobic.[24]