(“Reels of Yore” is a new column by our film reviewer, Michael Campbell, which casts a critical eye on selected films of the past.)

A Jennie Livingstone documentary set in the cosmopolitan, queer ballroom scene of 1980s New York, Paris is Burning captures a world both fragile and defiant. The film’s palette is all teals, reds and sequins. The textures are warm and the film preserves the images and atmosphere in its 16mm film. From this baroque mosaic emerges characters like Pepper La Beija, one of the film’s strongest presences, a queen of the Harlem night and a performer of light humour and gravitas. The film is endlessly quotable and outrageous but also a document of survival, of style as social intelligence, and of the necessity for reinvention.

Large sections unfold as a chamber piece of sorts in a theater heavy with velvet and dust and decadent haze. The queens occupy spaces that are grand and decaying, birthing new ways of thinking in the ruins of another era. The gallery of participants emerge with the narrative urgency and script of a Vladimir Propp character type: too well spoken and witty to be true or unscripted. Everyone is photogenic as Livingstone’s camera finds them in their world that is already composed in perfect frames. You can pause Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon at any point and hang the frame on the wall as a painting; pause Paris is Burning at any point and you have a perfect meme.

The declarative cinema verité style is nicely at odds with the extravagance of the people and spaces. It’s a contradiction that can be central to the ethics of the ballroom: the need to be seen and the need to remain “real,” and that realness operating in tandem with theatricality with the theater being a source for the authentic self.

The art direction is something discovered in the houses and supplemented by Harlem itself, capturing its geometry, sharp warm color, streets and interiors. It’s nearly a chamber piece, despite its social range, because so much of its power comes from its proximity—backstage corridors, cramped rooms, changing rooms. Even the title cards seem declarative, in budget friendly black and white, another product of this culture of emphasis and announcement.

Just as the audience grows accustomed to the languid pace and “yass” iconography, the film twists violently from exuberance to pain. The curtain pulls back and reality calls. The tragic culmination reminds us that these people are not exempt from violence, precarity and loss. The conditions of 1980s New York and the AIDS epidemic cast a shadow that made such performances and safe houses necessary in the first place.

Central character Dorian Corey’s sage wisdom—“You don’t have to bend the whole world,” they say— takes the form of a eulogy and strangely universal advice. The realities of growing older, fading hopes, the ability to endure with some grace; a soliloquy on ambition as well as compromise, endurance and dignity.