In the most poignant moments of Jennie Livingston’s
groundbreaking documentary PARIS IS BURNING, Venus Xtravaganza and
Octavia St. Laurent reveal their dreams. Octavia wants to be a high-
fashion model; Venus would like to be wealthy, live in the country, and
be loved and admired. If they were middle-class white girls, these goals
might be attainable, but Octavia and Venus are male, black or Hispanic,
and gay, relegated to the fringes of society. Before gay marriage,
before Ru Paul’s Drag Race, before “fierce” was a household term, were
the drag balls, ecstatic underground gatherings of the largely
non-white, gay and transgender working class community of New York City,
as captured in this now iconic 1991 documentary which captured the last
days of the scene that inspired Madonna’s Vogue and Malcolm McLaren’s
Deep in Vogue.
Livingston spent years
constructing this intimate portrait of New York’s subterranean
transsexual/transgender community and the parties—known as balls—its
members use to express themselves and forge fragile, but resilient,
identities. These balls, likePARIS IS BURNING, feature “voguing,” an
energetic fusion of break dancing, gymnastics, and runway parading
borrowed from fashion modeling. “You can become anything and do
anything,” one participant tells us. “It’s our fantasy of being
superstars.”
PARIS IS BURNING maintains a rare
balance between fly-on-the-wall objectivity and compassionate
interaction with its subjects. The film shared the documentary Grand
Jury Prize at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival and won multiple other
awards. This new, digitally restored print, a collaboration between
Sundance Institute, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the
Outfest Legacy Project, makes this seminal work shine as brilliantly as
the unknown stars of the film itself.