People warned me that my first Berlinale would be surreal, but nobody prepared me for the experience of sitting down to interview the director of one of my favourite films of the festival with a side of complimentary mini bratwursts. The director in question is Leilah Weinraub, whose documentary Shakedown (2018) spans ten years of Shakedown parties in just over an hour. These were queer Black women’s strip parties that took place at various venues in L.A. and ran until they were shut down by the police, just before Ronnie Ron, the organiser, hoped to get a license for a permanent venue. But despite the parties themselves no longer existing, Shakedown feels like a film that’s extremely timely – as a Black woman trying to take stock of my race and sexuality and how these intersect, I can tell you that there’s a lack of narratives that give queer people and Black people (and especially people who are both) authority and autonomy, which is something that Shakedown does effortlessly. The film invites us into the type of space that the forces of evil in the world seem to intent on eradicating. It’s safe, welcoming and kind – but most importantly, it’s really, really hot.
Speaking of kind – when I meet her, I’m delighted to find that Weinraub is a filmmaker with whom it’s possible to have an easy rapport. She treats me as an acquaintance rather than an interviewer, eating bratwursts and bouncing around subjects from astrology (she feels an extreme kinship to Mary J. Blige as they’re both Capricorns, she tells me) to the imminent release of Black Panther. I feel so at ease that I show her my one of my favourite memes around the film’s release: two young boys trying to sneak into a screening of the film dressed in an adult’s trench coat. The radical intimacy of the documentary makes sense: it doesn’t surprise me at all that someone so personable would be allowed to spend ten years intimately following the lives of those who worked at and frequented Shakedown.
For Weinraub, the project began as an effort to document life rather than to create a piece of art. The people in the film are friends and this is why Weinraub documents them. It’s thanks to this that Weinraub was left with over 400 hours of footage to choose from when it came to piecing the film together. In a Q&A that took place the day before we spoke, she mentioned that she was also asked to create something about the Shakedown club for TV, but she knew that she wanted it to be a cinematic experience. I ask if she’d ever be tempted to revisit the footage for another project, but no, she tells me, this is it. After a decade of filming, she’s found the story that she wanted to tell, about what she described as a “utopic moment”.
According to Weinraub, utopic moments are moments when you know that you’re part of something special and sacred. While Weinraub had been to gay clubs previously during college in Ohio – “outside of the air force base, next to a cornfield, in the dark, where it had like a slat on the door they’d open… I loved it” – she’d never been anywhere like Shakedown before. Shakedown, she says, was exactly what she was in the mood for. Everyone was gorgeous. “I was like…” She pauses and looks to the sky, as if praising a Black queer god. “Finally! Thank you!”
One of the best things about Shakedown is that there’s no clear narrative arc – there are no heroes and villains here. Like Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning (1990), which documents the Black and Latino participants in New York’s Ball Culture, this is both an exploration of a subculture and also just people living their lives. Weinraub was keen for the film to be an introspective experience, feeling that a lot of ‘issue’ documentaries problematise their subjects. She didn’t want it to ever feel like “someone needed to intervene into this world and help.” Rather, she wanted her subjects to feel like the living, breathing people that they are.
There are a few films that can be compared to Shakedown in the way in which they let their protagonists live out their authentic lives and detail their queerness with love and respect. The first is Dee Rees’ debut feature Pariah (2011), the story of Black queer teen Alike’s coming of age. In the film, she frequents Black queer female strip clubs just like Shakedown, filled with Black women of all shapes and sizes finding kinship and love set to the incomparable sounds of artists like Khia. While one is fiction and the other fact, the films resemble each other in both subject matter and aesthetic. Queer Black female desires are validated and respected here, and there are safe spaces for these women to explore who they are and what they want.
Another comparable film is a more obvious one, the aforementioned Paris is Burning. Comparisons to the film are already arising, to no surprise, and I asked Weinraub if it was a deliberate influence on Shakedown. While she agreed that there was definitely a similarity between the two films, she was also keen to point out a difference: “There’s this whole thing in Paris is Burning where they’re talking about how voguing is about wanting to be a rich white woman. I would disagree with that, but I can’t tell if that’s what the movie imposed narratively, or if that’s what people were going through at the time. It doesn’t seem to me like ballroom culture is derivative of anything, it seems like it’s its own thing.”
When I point out that Paris is Burning also happens to be directed by a white woman, Weinraub reinforces her previous point about not wanting to problematise her subjects: “I just wanted to make sure that what I was showing was fab Black culture, period.” And show it she does. Rarely have I seen such an array of queer Black women on-screen before – young, old, femme, butch, dark and light-skinned. Weinraub tells me that she never strove to showcase diversity in the film, but “that’s just the way the world really is, and there’s an editing process where people try and simplify things. I just tried to be accurate, and that was what I saw.”
Watching Shakedown is like entering a new world. Thanks to the dreamy visuals and editing paired with a soundtrack by Gang Gang Dance’s Tim Dewitt, it’s a documentary that often feels more like a fever dream than a series of real life experiences. It’s a world that the viewer is fully invited to be a part of, regardless of race or sexual identity. While the film particularly speaks to queer Black women, and never panders to those outside of this group by explaining labels like ‘femme’ and ‘butch’, Weinraub says it was crucial to recognise a wider audience outside of the queer community that might watch the film. “It’s important to respect an audience, and to remember that audiences are willing to engage and learn something new.”
The film also never critiques stripping and female entertaining. “If the film had come out ten years ago, there would’ve been a pressure to over-explain everything.” Weinraub tells me, laughing. “But now… I just don’t give a fuck. Over-explaining doesn’t seem like the right thing to do.” You’d think that because of Weinraub’s laissez-faire attitude towards stripping, she’d be critical of other films about the subjects, but it’s quite the opposite. When I ask her how she feels about films about strip clubs of recent years, she’s keen to state her emphatic love of Showgirls (1995) to me – “it’s a masterpiece”.
Critically panned at the time of its release, and now often mocked and memed for its bad performances and sex scenes, ‘masterpiece’ may not be a universally accepted way of looking at Showgirls, (22% on Rotten Tomatoes speaks for itself) but I truly hope that it’s the way in which Shakedown is viewed in years to come. Weinraub tells me that she’d love for the film to contribute to the history and catalogue of Black cinema, and it would be a crime if it didn’t. It’s a shame that in 2018, a film like Shakedown still feels revolutionary. But to see Black women – and queer Black women at that – expressing their sexual desires and needs feels major, and Weinraub’s nuanced portrayal of stripping and female entertainers is also important. Weinraub tells me that in the future, she wants to create more films about women, history, sexuality and power – “films that make you feel like you’re in the middle of the storm.” If Shakedown is the beginning of the storm and there’s more like this to come, then I say let it pour.
Shakedown is out on limited release this week in the UK
Grace Barber-Plentie is a writer and one third of Reel Good Film Club, a film club focused on promoting the work on people of colour in film through non-profit and inclusive screenings and events.
