Paris Is Burning

Jennie Livingston's documentary Paris Is Burning, which covered the 1980s New York City drag ball scene, has become an enduring document of queer culture. Nearly a quarter century after its release, the film has inspired passionate audience responses and attracted criticism from academics. In this latest installment in the series, Hilderbrand (film and media/queer studies, Univ. of California Irvine; Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright) examines the film's legacy, documents its production and subsequent theatrical release in 1991, and reconciles his own feelings with its contested place in academic debates. The author's compact history is dense with intertextual references, examining writings by gender theorist Judith Butler and thoughtfully questioning activist and cultural critic bell hooks, who famously condemned the production as a "white imperialist project." This series aims to create (or restore) a canon for queer-themed films that were perhaps underappreciated at the time of their mainstream releases, and Hilderbrand does an admirable job of placing the film in conversation with contemporaneous works (Marlon Briggs's Tongues Untied; Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho) and recent films that show its influence (Dee Rees's Pariah, Daniel Peddle's The Aggressives).