Paris Is Burning (1990)

There's a moment in Paris Is Burning where Dorian Corey, sitting in what looks like a dressing room surrounded by sequins and memories, talks about the difference between leaving a mark on the world and simply surviving it. It's so quietly devastating that you have to remind yourself you're watching a documentary and not a perfectly scripted drama. That's the kind of film this is. It catches you off guard, again and again.

Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary drops you into the ballroom scene of late-1980s New York, a world built by Black and Latinx queer and trans communities in the margins of a city that largely wanted nothing to do with them. The ballrooms are these extraordinary spaces, smoky and electric, where people "walk" categories on makeshift runways, competing for trophies, bragging rights, and something harder to name: the feeling, even briefly, of being seen and celebrated. The houses function as chosen families. The categories on the runway let participants embody fantasies of wealth, beauty, gender and power that the outside world systematically denied them. It's performance as survival.

The subjects Livingston films are remarkable people. Pepper LaBeija carries herself like royalty because, within this world, she is. Willi Ninja is a physical phenomenon. Venus Xtravaganza speaks about her hopes with a directness that breaks your heart, partly because of what you'll learn before the film is over. And Dorian Corey, wise and wry and seemingly unbothered by everything, offers some of the most clear-eyed observations about ambition and acceptance you'll hear in any film, documentary or otherwise. These are people with wit, wisdom and real vulnerability in equal measure, and the film is at its best when it simply lets them talk.

As a historical document, it's invaluable. Paris Is Burning introduced the concepts of voguing, "reading" and house culture to mainstream audiences long before any of that vocabulary became fashionable. You can draw a direct line from this film to a huge amount of popular culture that followed. That matters. I kept thinking of Style Wars, another documentary from roughly the same era that captured a marginalised New York subculture with a similar intimacy and urgency, and wondered what it is about that city in those decades that produced communities so creatively alive under such pressure.

But I can't leave it there, because the film's legacy is genuinely complicated, and pretending otherwise would be doing it a disservice. Livingston is a white, gay woman filming communities that are not her own, and the documentary doesn't really interrogate that position. The camera observes, and often observes beautifully, but observation isn't the same as understanding, and it's not the same as accountability either. Venus Xtravaganza's fate, which I won't spell out here, is mentioned almost as a footnote. The AIDS epidemic, which was absolutely devastating this community at the very moment of filming, hovers at the edges of the film without ever being properly confronted. The systemic forces crushing these people are captured but not always contextualised.

Questions about compensation and creative agency for the subjects have followed the film for decades, and they're not unfair questions. There's a fine line between bearing witness and treating someone's pain as material, and Paris Is Burning doesn't always stay on the right side of it. The gaze can feel touristic, like we're being invited to admire and be moved by lives the film doesn't fully commit to understanding. It opens doors, but sometimes it also keeps you standing at the threshold.

I'd also point anyone interested in this corner of documentary filmmaking towards Shinjuku Boys, which raises similar questions about identity, community and the ethics of the documentary gaze, and handles some of them with more care.

So where does that leave Paris Is Burning? Informative, often deeply moving, culturally essential, and ethically unresolved. It opened a window onto a world that deserved, and still deserves, to be understood on its own terms. Whether it fully achieves that is a conversation the film itself started, and one that hasn't finished. I think it's worth your time, and I think you should watch it with your eyes open to all of it.

Rating: Not rated  | Year: 1990  | Watched: 2026-04-05

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Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca

More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More documentary: Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Style Wars (1983) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)