Paris Is Burning Film Analysis

The documentary, Paris Is Burning, directed by Jennie Livingston is a documentary focusing on the ball culture of New York City in the nineteen eighties. The documentary highlights black, latinx, queer and the transgender communities in which the ball culture began. The issue of identity, is most prevalent and nothing could be more complex than the identities of the performers of Harlem ball culture of the 1980s. Every cast member of the documentary is intersected by race, class, gender, and sexuality. The stars of the film are in a position where they have limited power in a society that is dominated by a straight white, cisgender men. The documentary is more than just a display of what ball cultures is, but in itself is a product of what ball culture and many aspects of queer culture is. Ball culture originated in black and latinx circles and was kept in black and latinx circles, because white people didn’t want anything to do with things that came from people of colour, unless of course they appropriated it in some way to make it “white’ (which, in the end they did.) The way the gaze of this

Jennie Livingston's approach, while it is not intentional, dehumanizes the queens she interviews throughout the film. While this is the outcome, it is noticeable that Livingston’s argument was to display the struggles that queer black and latinx people go through in their everyday lives, especially in the poor neighbourhoods of eighties Harlem. Jennie Livingston tries to focus on the intersections of how queer and transgender people of colour lived their lives through ball culture in the eighties, while also wanting to have the privileges that white people had, but these arguments are muddled when her approach, in the end, takes away the agency of the individuals she is basing the documentary