Pleasure Principles
with Leilah Weinraub

The Artist, Director, and Hood By Air Co-Founder on How To Make Your Own Utopia

Interview: Tiana Reid
Images/Photos Courtesy Of: Leilah Weinraub
Illustrations: Sierra Datri

This article is featured in Issue 3 of the SSENSE biannual print publication.

Leilah Weinraub’s genre is long-term projects. “I spent almost half my life making that movie,” she says of Shakedown, her 72-minute tour de force. Though she always knew she wanted to make films, it has been a meandering journey to make this one. After graduating from Antioch College in 2003 and attending grad school at Bard for film, she began her work with the ingenious fashion brand Hood by Air aka HBA, at first directing and producing, but soon becoming a partner. HBA shows could make people cry—whether over fear, depression, or ecstasy. In their SS16 show “Galvanize,” directed by Weinraub, the opening model shockingly took the runway walking backwards. The fashion industry took note of their frantic influence (HBA won a LVMH prize and the CFDA Award), but it went beyond fashion, ultimately playing with proportion, noise, and image in such a way that was off-balance, reconstituting where the streets reside.

World-building inside but against institutions takes time. Both HBA and Shakedown messed with gender with an unprecious yet complicated gusto, leaning into the noir textures of a radical and experimental underground, and arguably without selling it out. And if Hood by Air managed to skirt its relation to the governing terms of luxury fashion, famously declining outside investors, Shakedown—for which Weinraub shot 400 hours of footage—similarly sits in an unconventional zone between the worlds of documentary and art.

Premiered at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2018 after a cut was shown at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Shakedown records an early 2000s moment where “if you’re straight you don’t need to be in the front, period.” The short of it is that Shakedown is about its namesake, a roaming black lesbian strip club in South Los Angeles, but the long of it is that the sexy performances, nuanced worker inquiries, and noir score also tell a story about labor conditions, intimate-yet-vexed relations, unlawful dreams, and the limits of documentary, all through a cast of brilliant personalities including emcee, Ronnie-Ron, and star, “Shakedown Angel” Egypt. Credited as a writer for the film, Weinraub lifts herself from the role of the so-called objective documentarian (which she is not), in an onscreen moment near the finale, we sense her disappointment and confusion over the club’s shutdown. Now Weinraub is (slow) at work on new things in a warehouse in LA, where she’s from, where she found refuge at the start of the pandemic, and where she thinks she now lives.

Tiana Reid

Leilah Weinraub

How are you?

I've been kind of speechless recently. I didn't have an immediate outward response to everything that's happening right now, and I’m just going through my own personal, emotional…I don't even know how to finish the sentence. It just feels emotional.

Yeah, same. I think there's been a lot of cool shit happening in New York, with mutual aid, the protests and the uprisings. But I'm always going through my own relationship to what it means to be in a public space, or join a public. How have you been spending your time?

At the beginning of the pandemic, before this consciousness-raising period that we're in, I was at my normal level of quarantine, just alone for many days in a row. I had a lot of fear about what could be ushered in by the current government during this crisis period. I’m really surprised that the opposite is happening, or feels like it's happening. What was I doing? I mean, technically I'm working every day.

What are you working on?

I'm developing new projects, new films. So I’m doing a lot of research trying to figure out how to get films made. I'm in LA right now because I am trying to work in Hollywood, and maybe even make a studio film.

Is working in Hollywood something that you always want to do?

I always wanted to be a director, and it's such a blur to figure out how to be in the profession that you want to be in. It feels like there's somebody who needs to tell you like, "Oh, at this point you have arrived to the place where now you're a director, or now you're an artist." I think before I went to grad school, I really had a thing about calling myself an artist. I felt so shy about it, and scared, honestly. I was like, "No, there are things that have to happen before you can call yourself that.”

How long were you working on Shakedown?

I started when I was 22 and I'm 40 right now. I was filming consistently for like seven years. And then I moved to New York to go to grad school in 2010. I would still come back to LA and visit, mostly with Egypt, and continue this decade-long conversation we were having about labor. And I think that those interviews, the ones that happened 10 years in were kind of my best work, or my best moments, because I created a practice that was maybe even inspired by my therapy. I was in therapy, so I had a better understanding of my own motivations to be there. Being in the moment is the best way to interview. Somewhere in there I got kicked out of grad school—

For what?

They didn't like my work. They thought it was not art, were the exact words. I was like, "Is this even possible?" It was such a terrible experience. I think that institution has changed a lot since then, but I was one of two Black students at that time. The only Black faculty member they had was AJ [Arthur Jafa], and he kind of didn't show up a lot. He was in the middle of his own career. But he was the reason that I went there. Also, the technical way that a grad program works, they wanted me to enter and finish Shakedown, and I didn't have the money or the resources to finish it in the way that I thought it needed to be. So I was like, "Well, if you need it to be done, it's done." That didn't really fly. I was living in New York and saw the social economy there—who was getting shows, who was making money already, and I was pissed. I felt really competitive, and had a point to prove, I guess. That was the beginning of my work with Hood by Air. From the beginning, that was a project about being commercially successful.

How has it been now with the movie being streamed in such wide availability? I saw it at Gavin Brown in Harlem, and then rewatched it more recently.

Did you watch the whole thing there?

Yeah, I did.

Did you like it in that space?

Oh, I loved it. It was the middle of the workday, and it was me and my friend there with maybe two other people. We were just giggling and laughing, and squeezing each other’s hands, and also watching how the other two white girls were watching. Obviously the experiential aspect was similar with any kind of moviegoing experience, but it just felt more communal.

That was the idea behind the Pornhub experience: opening up a chatroom, and having people watch it together, because it was so fun. I watched it with people maybe 50 times, and it's just an experience you'll never forget. It's sexual, you're like, "I can't believe I'm watching it with someone else." God, it's just fun.

How did the Pornhub conversations go?

The collaboration was experimental, and I had to carve a space for the film in the world of Pornhub. I felt a lot of pressure for myself to do that right, and make sure that I actually did what I was supposed to do, which is bring this film to a bigger audience. All throughout that, the communication about the film was huge. I work with a team of people that only focus on the language surrounding the film, and in the beginning it was really hard to get it right.

What didn't you like about it?

People phrase headlines in a really exploitative way. It’s not nuanced. In the beginning a lot of the writers were white, and they felt like they were speaking outside of their area of expertise, and it wasn't really additive. I think writers really add to the placement of the work, they do a service to the work as the intermediary between the work and people. It was like that with Hood by Air, too, we had to spend a lot of time talking about how people can talk about the work, because it was really corny. It was simplifying things, and also making it so much about identity. Well, maybe that was your experience of viewing the work, but the work is inside of that already?

Utopia is a word often used to describe either the film or that club experience in LA but what I find generative is that that utopia space also exists with this threat of the police. What’s your conception of utopia? How does it play out in your work?

I think [Shakedown] is a legend or road map on how to make your utopia. Sometimes people see the film and they're like, "Oh my God, is that still open? I'm going to go there." It's like, you have to make that. If it doesn't exist you literally have to make it. I do think that I haven't seen many times in my life where [utopias are] about women and pleasure, period. That's a really rare thing. Women often assume roles of service and care, but pleasure and defining a space for rest and pleasure is rarer. Pleasure, meaning like a tripped-out fantasy, not even pampering. I'm not talking about spas, I'm talking about a sexual experience—the freedom and safety to have sex. I’m also comparing it to gay guy culture. They really know how to chill. I guess I'm just jealous. I've been a part of a few utopic things in my life, and it's like an agreement between a group of people to work on one project at the same time. That doesn't always last, they're not maybe even built to last, they're experiments. A utopic club or a utopic moment or a group, or a collaboration is hard to sell. It’s not a franchise, it's an experience. It's an exchange between people. There’s also some privacy involved in it. It's a little bit closed. That's like rerouting the kind of energy that people are giving right now. Your expression doesn't have to be able to reach everyone on earth, you can actually have a smaller group of people that you're communicating to in a one-on-one way. The hyper-local feels more utopic to me. I don't want to say that all utopia has to be around sex, but I'm just looking for enough safety and freedom for women to feel like that's an area for them.

Tiana Reid is a writer and a PhD candidate at Columbia University. She lives in New York City.