Dienstag 24.07.2012
20.30 Uhr
vorgestellt von Stefan Butzmühlen
„Jennie
Livingston’s documentary about gay black and Latino men who compete in drag
balls is a beautiful piece of work—lively, intelligent, exploratory. The drag
queens we see here seem to be holding up a mirror to the world of the empowered
as they see it in movies, TV shows, and magazines. In the ballroom, some
present themselves as elegant, glamorous women in designer outfits, and walk
with the hip-swinging slouch of runway models, while others adopt more mundane
personas: college students (of both sexes); military men; Wall Street
businessmen; aristocrats at play, dressed for yachting or riding to hounds. The
criteria by which all these turns are judged is verisimilitude—“realness.” The
material is almost too rich, too suggestive. Everything about the ball culture
signifies so blatantly and so promiscuously that the movie induces a kind of
semiotic daze. Livingston is smart enough not to reduce her subjects to the sum
of their possible meanings, perhaps because she realizes that the way the drag
performers manipulate image and fetishes and the iconography of popular culture
is for many of them a sophisticated form of humor. The most self-aware of the
gay men in this picture revel in the ironies of their social and sexual
identities, and Livingston makes us appreciate the comic grace and the strange
wisdom of that approach. Like all the best documentary filmmakers, she does her
subjects the honor of allowing them to retain some of their mystery.“ (Terrence Rafferty im New Yorker)
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