Paris is Burning Response Paper. Visual & Performing Arts Movie Review

Paris is Burning Response Paper
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Paris is Burning Response Paper
In the 1990 movie “Paris is Burning," by Jennie Livingston, the documentary focused on way on how the minority groups, especially the LGBTQ+, deal with the demands of society's conventional norms and values. The movie talked about varying perspectives of the characters to fully understand the difficulties of being homosexual during the 70's and the 80's. In the movie, they emphasized that the white male often stereotypes and marginalize homosexual behavior, so, they needed a way to defend themselves against homophobic prejudices and discrimination by creating their own social norms and values where they can express whatever they wanted to be without any judgement. Voguing is the dance style on which the LGBT+ in the movie tried to express their identity and thinking. Although there are many ways on which the LGBTQ+ express their sense of identity in the movie such as the Harlem balls, the houses and extravagant outfits, the purpose of voguing for self-empowerment and throwing down “shade” provides further insight on the way where the community communicate their thinking and identity.
In the movie, the LGBTQ+ community used voguing to empower themselves in controlling the factors that molds their sense of identity. This community knows that they are the owner of their own bodies and they control the way their body would look, so, dancing is one way for them to show empowerment. In class, I often generalize the form of dance as the art of expression through bodily movement, but watching the movie made me realize that dance is also associated with a group’s sense of identity where the slightest movements are associated with their thinking and image projection on how people want themselves to be viewed by others. Additionally, we learned the elements that generally represent voguing. I observed that the dance is specific in the movement of the extremities and its relationship with your inner feelings like having a pictorial session and successfully projecting yourself like a model. The movie explained that it is because voguing is based from the magazine “vogue” and the steps are based from the poses of magazine models. This implies that the dance is related to the vision of being socially accepted like those magazine models through the engagement of the whole LGBTQ+ community by voguing.
Voguing is a way to communicate thinking; particularly, throwing insults or “shade” against other members of the LGBTQ+ community. Initially, I thought that expression is only for the self or group identity, but I learned in the movie that voguing can also communicate insult in a symbolic and indirect way. In the movie, if you hate something about another including make-up, clothing style, or hair styles, you just need to “shade” them by showing-off your vogue dance moves; whomever had the best moves will win. According to Dorien Corey, one of the interviewed characters in the documentary, “Shade is I don't tell you you're ugly, but I don't have to tell you, because you know you're ugly. And that's shade” The movie emphasized on the vogue dance battle aspect of sha...