Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic by Lucas Hilderbrand (review)

Rich in content, thorough in its analysis, and insightful in its theoretical framing, Lucas Hilderbrand’s Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic, explores the history, politics, and affective potential of the highly provocative and widely debated documentary, Paris is Burning. Engaging in a fresh rereading of the two-decade-old film in his attempt to locate affective sites of queer resistance, Hilderbrand provides a lush context for understanding the social politics surrounding New York City’s 1980s drag ball scene and its stars. Released in 1991, Paris Is Burning dazzled moviegoers with images of queer creativity and glamor while highlighting the agency and voices of drag ball participants and their audiences. The film generated significant debate about a variety of issues including the intersectionality of race, class, and gender; trans-visibility; queer-of-color politics; the fluidity of identity; and the ethics of documentary filmmaking.

Hilderbrand’s approach to the documentary is unique in that he offers an historical, theoretical, and formal reading of the film all within the same text. Repeatedly acknowledging his own subjectivity in order to highlight the affective relationship that exists between the film and its fans, Hilderbrand historicizes the documentary, and the multitude of responses it generated, by documenting the film’s initial promotion on the festival circuit, analyzing its theatrical reception among different audiences, and weighing the debates the film encouraged within academic and activist circles. Hilderbrand makes three main arguments concerning the film: first, the formal structure of the film suggests the possibility of achieving self-actualization and locating a supportive community; second, Paris is crucial in exploring notions of identity, queer-of-color politics, and pleasure as a survival tactic; and finally, the film exists as a tribute to its subjects and that its strength lies in its ability to effectively demonstrate the potential for queer worldmaking.

Hilderbrand skillfully constructs an invaluable context that nourishes our understanding of the film and the tumultuous milieu in which it was released. Despite Hilderbrand’s multifaceted reading of the film, the structure of his book is deceptively simple. In chapter 1, Hilderbrand engages in an illuminating formal analysis of the documentary. Analyzing the structural elements of the film and exploring the skillful editing techniques employed by the filmmakers, he argues that the very structure of the film suggests the possibility of achieving self-actualization and locating a supportive community. Locating it within the subversive cinéma vérité tradition, Hilderbrand suggests that the film be understood as a series of cutaways that create meaning through the juxtaposition of scenes in which social criticism and class fantasy are presented as mutually constitutive. He claims that the juxtaposition of these scenes presents ball participants and their audiences in a way that conveys a sense of community in the gay world. This formal analysis lays the foundation for the social and political context. In chapter 1 and throughout most of chapter 2, Hilderbrand traces the history of drag balls, constructions of “realness” within the drag ball scene, the economic and social climate in which the film was created and released, and the debut of “voguing” in mainstream popular culture via Madonna’s appropriation of the dance style in the late 1980s. He also acknowledges filmmaker Jennie Livingston as a white, affluent Jewish lesbian who was conspicuously absent on the screen as well as some of the criticism she received for that absence. These histories provide a context for understanding the 1991 film alongside the variety of other responses it prompted.

For example, in chapter 3, he asserts his argument that Paris is a text that explores notions of identity, queer-of-color politics, and pleasure as a survival tactic. Here Hilderbrand demonstrates his incredible ability to situate the film within a shifting and dynamic queer-feminist context while effectively highlighting the politics of an era in which conceptions of intersectionality and identity were being heavily challenged and critiqued. In one of the most fascinating points in the...