Critics reviews

[W]hat’s laid bare here is an intimate portrait of a micro-community’s vivacity and bashfulness, power and need, pride and perplexity. The overall effect is carnal but also reflective. Shakedown (both the club and doc) created room without apology or over-explanation.

Weinraub’s documentary takes an inside look at a space otherwise completely neglected in cinema, and her camera is unafraid to capture the explicit side of queer existence. In Shakedown, black lesbian sexuality is given a platform free from the suffocating expectations of white, heterosexual culture.

Indeed, what’s striking about Shakedown onscreen is its unabashed physicality. It’s a fundamentally sensual film. The footage is explicit and lascivious, and money participates in, and drives, the show—bills flood the floor as the angels perform.

Weinraub finds a place of distance and subtle re-calibration where nothing is what it at first appears. This is a fitting approach for a film that celebrates a communal physical and symbolic space in which one can create a perfectly fluid, slippery identity to be desired and worshipped for — a state of grace, as we come to understand, that still rarely exists outside subaltern club culture.

Following the eight-year run of its titular, L.A.-based, black lesbian strip-night and underground party series, Shakedown foregoes a tired, conventional documentary structure in favor of a more textural morphology that draws viewers into its world in a way that is at once hypnagogic and lushly formed.

Alternatively, in SHAKEDOWN, Weinraub offers us an example of a past world where the fissure of prioritizing Black queer and trans joy, within fervent anti-Blackness, inspires imaginings of comparable futures. In this way, she presents something similar to what is articulated by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, whose scholarship on “queer utopian memory” signals to the utility of resurfacing blissful, subjective and emotionally preserved moments in helping to reorient present-day freedom struggles toward future world-making.

Through the grainy, steadfast lens of Weinraub’s camera and a deft, dizzy score by Tim DeWit, we find ourselves at the provocative intersection of community, eroticism and work. These sometimes uneasy bedfellows find their visual manifestation in the film’s most dazzling aesthetic coup: the repurposing of pixelated DIY club flyers as dazzling cinematic spectacles – proud, arousing and ephemeral all at once.

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.

Rich with personalities, politically astute, and as nasty as it wants to be, Shakedown is a queer cultural intervention on par with Paris is Burning(1990), without the touristic undertones.

As a director, Weinraub resists operating as a liaison between viewer and subject; she seems more interested in the play between voyeurism and fantasy. “Shakedown” is neither an experimental art film nor an anthropology of gay, black femme performance in L.A. Rather, Weinraub sought to capture a moment and turn it into cinema.

It’s a dreamlike, behind-the-scenes glimpse at a forgotten moment of the Y2K era that influenced fashion, video vixens, and hip hop, while also subtly reminding viewers just how trailblazing marginalized people from underground culture really are.

Weinraub’s seductively illicit and frequently joyous film lets us voyeuristically enter an underground black lesbian strip club in the Mid-City neighborhood of Los Angeles and revel in the frenzied atmosphere of exuberant nudity, physical prowess, and, above all, black queer desire.