Happy Anniversaries!
Congratulations to the Rachel Maddow Show and to Indigo Bridge Books for great first years! Congratulations to UNL for opening a childcare center on campus! Congratulations to Obama for another great, important speech!
Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry. I have been going through it. But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.
Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross. Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years.
What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning. Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty. At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie. They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.
Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths. We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film. Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.
When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire. I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with. Livingston didn't say.
Thanks for checking in here; I've been out of commission for about a week, and I'm sorry. I have been going through it. But no worries, and I'm back better than ever.
Last night, I was happy to catch the free screening of Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning at The Ross. Livingston herself was there, and she not only took questions but also screened 27 minutes of a new work-in-progress that's about her own family--the loss of her parents, grandmother, uncle, and beloved older brother in the span of a few short years.
What struck me was the way that, in just 27 minutes, the filmmaker's own life managed to function as a painful mirror for the desires expressed by the poor, gay, transgendered African American and Latino drag ball regulars in Paris Is Burning. Again and again, the subjects of the first documentary expressed their desire for wealth, ease, luxury, glamour, and beauty. At the drag balls, they dressed up not only as women but also as military men and male executives in suit and tie. They talked about inclusion, access, and privilege against visual backgrounds of severe economic struggle.
Livingston's montage of home movies, by contrast, showed her family's homes and multiple Mercedes in L.A., while the voiceover described dividing up the family silver and diamonds after her parents' deaths. We saw the grandmother who paid Livingston's way through Yale, the grandfather who was an actual military hero (a WWI balloon spy), and the uncle, a Hollywood producer? director?, who gave Livingston her first job in film. Her life seemed to possess most of the attributes that her Paris Is Burning subjects longed for.
When asked about the continuum between the two films, Livingston made no mention of socioeconomic class or the structuring of capitalist desire. I wondered how it felt to interview people who wanted so badly a taste of what she'd grown up with. Livingston didn't say.
Carla said:
Class is always the elephant in the room when talking about art, it seems. No one wants to examine the very frequent class privilege of filmmakers, photographers, painters, etc.--in fact, when my partner was in grad school one of her colleagues wanted to write her dissertation on the subject and was told no. Very few poor and working class people in this day and age enter these mostly non-remunerative creative fields, which results in a very narrow group often being the ones telling the story of the Other without a lot of self-examination. Thanks for your thoughtful post.
September 14, 2009 10:13 PM