Jennie Livingston‘s film Paris is Burning was named by New York Magazine‘s 40th anniversary issue (2008) as one of the most important cultural works to have come out of New York in the last 40 years.

She is presenting Fellini’s 8 1/2 as part of the Queer/Art/Film series at 92YTribeca—a celebration of all things hybrid and polysexual. “It’s important to know that fitting in, while not wrong, is certainly not the thing that makes you more lovable, more interesting, more human,” Jennie told us via email. In this third installment of interviews with presenters, she spoke of fantasy in her films, challenges that queer filmmakers face, and she answered, as did all interviewees, “what does ‘queer’ mean to you?”

The interview after the jump:

In your description of 8 1/2, you remark that part of what affected you about the film was how Fellini takes the viewer in and out of fantasy. Since your first feature, Paris is Burning, was a documentary, how does fantasy factor into it?

In the drag ball world Paris documents, the characters are involved in elaborate fantasies about fitting into a mainstream world that, in many cases, rejects them for their sexual orientation, gender identity, class and race. Sometimes these fantasies are realized, as in, a biological man who’s transgender and passes for a woman. Sometimes they’re realized in that someone has a talent that he or she is able to take outside the ballroom. Gay culture has often been associated with fantasy – fantasies of acceptance, fantasies of fabulousness, fantasies of transcendence through creative works and creative living.  As more and more states put gay marriage into law, some of those fantasies have become civil rights struggles that are succeeding, both at the global and local level.

And I must say, in light of the drag balls allowing participants to envision themselves as powerful and beautiful, that in 1985, when I first went to a ball, an African American or biracial president would have been considered a very wild drag fantasy indeed. While the act of envisioning ourselves as powerful can’t, by itself, make it so, it’s part of the process of making change, and that’s the point of both the ball world and of the very act of imagination itself.

Fellini’s influence can definitely be seen in your short narrative Who’s the Top, which features fantasy musical sequences. Are there any scenes in that short that directly quote from a Fellini film?

As far as I know, there are no direct quotes, but Who’s the Top? (a film about a couple who can’t agree sexually) is full of the kind of flights of fancy (sexual fantasies, dance numbers) that are, for me, very much about Fellini and his influence. I first had the idea for Who’s the Top? while watching a new print of 8 ½ in the early 90s.

There is, however, a direct quote from Bunuel’s Belle de Jour!

You were among the filmmakers cited as being a part of the New Queer Cinema that emerged in the early 1990s. What were some of the challenges facing you and other filmmakers back then that you think have changed over the years? What challenges haven’t changed?

There are more LBGT themed films and a much greater network of LGBT film festivals where they can be shown. There are mainstream films (Alexander, Brokeback Mountain, Milk) with big stars playing gay or bisexual characters. There have been TV shows (Will and Grace, Queer as Folk, The L Word, Six Feet Under) that feature gay characters and subject matter. That’s all very very different and incredibly wonderful. What hasn’t changed is invisible lesbians still are in the movies, and by and large, in television.

What’s gotten harder, in queer film, and in film in general, is making films that are formally challenging. I’m much less taken by films that are “gay” or “lesbian” in their content, much more interested in filmmaking that can said to be “queer” the way that Fellini and Bunuel and John Waters and Chantal Ackerman are (i.e., odd, formally challenging, intellectually and visually surprising). This is not about touting the “good old days” (hey I was just a kid or a teenager) but about a need for filmmakers to continue to expand the medium of cinema as it deserves to be expanded!

My new project Earth Camp One is more literary or European in sensibility—more like Fun Home or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or The Gleaners and I or Waltz with Bashir than like a “documentary’ like Paris is Burning. If you think about the power of YouTube and the blogosphere, first-person storytelling is where we are, as a culture, headed. As forms change, content expands. There’s a greater potential for poetry in film, and films needn’t be “experimental” to acknowledge that potential! Particularly in a struggling economy, individuals who still have the means, and institutions that care about how the arts are evolving, as well as audiences that pay to see movies, ought to support more innovative filmmaking. (That’s what I envision when I enter my own world of fantasy….)

Who are the young, up-and-coming filmmakers today that you find exciting, and why?

In truth, I’m so busy working to complete my current project, that I don’t see enough new films to answer that question in as broad and deep a way as it deserves to be answered! Better to ask my friends who are festival programmers and film critics, although I will say that, of films released in the last few months, Wendy and Lucy, Sleep Dealer and Waltz with Bashir were three features that were particularly wonderful. Each film is formally very much its own animal; the choices feel like they’re about a filmmaker’s vision and experience; and each film tells a story I hadn’t heard before. These are political films, but not about organizing a particular campaign or creating direct impact: they’re works of art that are urging you to think, and to feel.

The use of the term Queer seems wide reaching nowadays, not restricted to “gay” individuals. For instance, we have heard it used by heterosexual people who identify as Queer, which implies definitions aside from sexual. Do you agree? What does “Queer” mean to you?

At the first Yale LGBT reunion which I attended this Spring – I was on a film panel with Bruce Cohen (Milk) and Eva Kolodner (Boys Don’t Cry), Eliza Bayard of GLSEN talked about the two kids that killed themselves this Spring because of bullying, much of which was anti-gay. The verbal violence that drove these two boys to suicide had nothing to do with sexuality: one boy was 11: too young to have a fully formed sexuality and he did not identify as gay. As Bayard pointed out, both victims of bullying were “queer” enough to be literally hounded to death. I supposed “queer” is a word that once meant (and can still mean) odd, in a pejorative sense.  Since the 90s, it’s been used by LGBT people to denote a difference that sparkles, people who set themselves apart, (in relation to gender identity and sexuality) because they don’t fit the norm. It’s important to know that fitting in, while not wrong, is certainly not the thing that makes you more lovable, more interesting, more human.

Previously: