It’s again, double-bill time! Two seminal documentaries invite us back to the 1980s, Jennie Livingston’s PARIS IS BURNING is an eye-opening watershed to survey Harlem’s drag ball subculture, and by extension, queer existence, meanwhile Hiroshi Teshigahara’s ANTONIO GAUDÍ lingers mesmerically in Barcelona mostly, to arrange a tour of the starchitect’s jaw-dropping achievements.
For anyone who has been acquainted with Ryan Murphy’s hit FX drama POSE (2018-), PARIS IS BURNING gets audience a vantage point of its real-life inspirations, interviewing prominent figures of the participants, both legendary “mothers” of different “houses”, and their “children”, also presenting footage of various competitions that can bring the house down (the fad of voguing is a benediction), candor and amazement is in equal measure under Livingston’s circumspect gleaning, for one thing, no poignancy is permitted to color the film’s holistic positiveness that encompasses hopes, dreams, yearning, being yourself and blatant exuberance, introspection is merely a side dish.
And that lies exactly the strength and extraordinariness of Livingston’s work, since there are already too many instances of sorrow, discrimination and horror incurred to these marginalized individuals (gays, queens and transexuals, predominantly African-American and Hispanic), it is core-shattering to find out that one of the interviewers, Venus Xtravaganza is brutally murdered in 1988, aged only 23, two years before the film’s release, and obviously Livingston resists a great temptation not to put that pathos-driven message on the screen for sensationalizing or eliciting our rage and outcry, in the last resort, PARIS IS BURNING is the celebration of a subculture and its members, to inspire and encourage.
The ball competition sustains as the apex of its participants to obtain some semblance of mainstream conformity, to prove they can cut it for any stereotypes residing in a heteronormative society, but also playing up their glamor, flamboyance to the eleven if the category fits. The yen for acceptance while retaining one’s uniqueness is soberly laid bare in this culturally influential and tactically formulated time capsule.
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