Jennie Livingston’s record of the Harlem balls is 78 minutes long and says more about class, race and wanting than most films twice its length. It is funny, sharp and generous; its one real gap is that the maker keeps herself entirely out of the frame.
Paris Is Burning is 78 minutes of people saying what they want. Jennie Livingston takes a camera into the drag balls of Harlem in the late 1980s, where black and Latino gay men and trans women compete to look most like the people the world outside would rather they were not: executives, schoolboys, girls from the right side of town. The film is warm, quick and sure of what it is looking at, and it did not reach British cinemas until 5 January 2007, sixteen years after it was made. We would recommend it to almost anyone.
The shape of it is Jonathan Oppenheim’s. He cuts ball footage against interviews in kitchens and on beds, and between them he puts a single word in white on black (house, mother, shade, reading, voguing) and lets someone explain it. Dorian Corey, the oldest of them, does much of the explaining, sewing a gown at her mirror while she talks. Shade, she says, is when you do not need to tell someone they are ugly, because they already know. Every time the film returns to her it gets steadier. She is the best thing in it, and she is not in it nearly enough.
Paul Gibson shoots the halls handheld with whatever light there is, so the footage is grainy, the colours run hot and the edges of the frame fall into the dark. Outside, on the streets in daylight, the picture is flat and grey. Lynn Geller is credited with the music, and it is the music the halls played, loud and unbroken. It runs while Willi Ninja vogues down the floor, dropping from pose to pose like a fashion magazine flicked at speed. Ninja is the one performer who talks about the dance as a craft, wrist and angle and where the eye goes, and the film is right to give him the space.
The moment that got us is smaller than any ball. Venus Xtravaganza sits on a bed and says she would like a husband, a house in the suburbs and a washing machine; she would like, in her own words, to be a spoiled rich white girl. She says it without irony and Livingston adds none. We had come for the costumes and found ourselves watching someone ask, quite reasonably, for the most ordinary life in America, and knowing as she spoke how far away it was. It hurt more than we expected a film this lively to hurt. Octavia St. Laurent, who wants to be a model, does the same thing to us a few minutes later.
The houses are the other subject. Pepper LaBeija, mother of the House of LaBeija, holds court at the ball in gold and then, at home, talks like a headmistress about the boys who arrive with nothing and nowhere to sleep. A house is a family with a mother, a name and rivals, and the film is honest about what it costs to keep one dressed: several of the younger men say plainly that they steal, and nobody on screen pretends to be shocked. Junior LaBeija, calling the categories from the microphone, is the film’s chorus.
What the film does not do is look at itself. Livingston never appears and is heard only as an occasional question from behind the camera, and the questions sometimes steer. This is a film made by someone from outside about people who were not asked how they wished to be shown, and it does not say so. A minute in which the director said where she stood would have made it stronger. The world beyond the halls is sketched rather than drawn, too. The epidemic already in the city is mentioned and moved past, and the streets where the money came from are glimpsed.
Set against the talking-head documentaries of its time it is fast, funny and unsentimental, and it never puts an expert between us and the people it is about. Much of what it recorded has since been lifted wholesale: the words, the walk, the reading. Watch it with the sound up. It runs 78 minutes at certificate 15.
