Frameline 29: Who's the Top and Paris is Burning
What is there for us to point out about Paris is Burning, a 1990 documentary about Harlem drag balls, that hasn't already been said by far greater minds than our own? Between 1987 and 1989, filmmaker Jennie Livingston followed, interviewed, and created an intimate portrait of urban men -- mostly black, mostly poor -- who devoted a simply awe-inspiring amount of energy to creating competitions in which they could hone their imitations of realness. These folks created an entire world in which they could be loved and admired for dramatizing the state of being rich, or feminine, or young, or geneerally enfranchised. It's all just absolutely incredible, and that's all you need to know about that.
And now, fifteen years later, Jennie has a new piece to exhibit, this time a narrative short called Who's the Top. And it sure is different from PiB. We'll get to that in a minute.
Paris is Burning is one of the most studied documentaries of the late 20th century, so what's left for us to observe? Well, we happened to see it in an interesting context -- adjacent to Transgeneration, a documentary about trangender college students, and just a few days after Pups and Ponies, a collection of documentaries about people who role-play as animals. There's a sort of an escalation of wishfulness here, from people who wish they were animals, to poor men who wish they were rich women, to girls who wish they were boys -- some of whom are physically adjusting their gender so that they are, in fact, transformed, making their wishes very, very, very nearly true. What's the difference between those transformers and transformees, and what do those differences mean? We have no idea; but we expect your essay on that topic to be placed in your thesis advisor's mailbox no later than midterm. Or leave a few words here in the "comments" section. Whichever.
Who's the Top is all about lesbian stuff. Had we known this at SFist, we might not have dispatched a gay man to the screening (the majority of his notes came back reading, "we will NEVER EVER EVER understand women") but oh well. The voice of the main character shuttles the audience back and forth in time, as well as into a visualization of her unconscious mind, which is rendered as a fancy, cavernous dance hall populated by women in adorable outfits. Hmm, maybe women aren't that hard to understand after all. Her plight mainly concerns her girlfriend's disinterest in any sex besides vanilla, and a tempting butch domme. "What gives us our power?" the narrator wonders, pondering her girlfriend's tight control of their sex life, as well as her desire to be dominated. It's a thoughtful, relatively quickly-paced story, and even though we didn't understand it, Steve Buschemi has a minor role and we like him. So ... yay.