by Courtney Desiree Morris, PhD student
African Diaspora Studies Program in Social Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin
Introduction
For those of us committed to thinking through the politics of racial identity and how something as abstract yet painfully material and concrete as race is created and permeates every level of social reality, these two films demonstrate new ways that we might approach old questions. Although they tackle similar issues from different sides of the Atlantic, Black gay filmmakers Marlon Riggs and Isaac Julien present a vision of how to destabilize comfortable (and often, stereotypical) assumptions of racial difference and the processes by which we come to understand ourselves and others as racial subjects. How does a group of people come to be defined as “Black” from within and without? These two films both explore the ways in which Blackness as identity is lived, created, embedded in everyday experience, and ever-evolving. Putting these two extraordinary and truly groundbreaking films in dialogue with each other helps us to think through racial formation as a two-pronged process – that which is imposed externally; and that of self-making, the ways in which communities attempt to create their own sense of self in tension with external stereotypes.
The filmmakers share many similarities that contextualize their filmmaking styles and the themes that permeate their body of work. They are clearly contemporaries and their work engages the same kinds of issues albeit from different sides of the Atlantic. Born in the 1950s and 1960s, both of these men came of age during moments of accelerated societal change around issues of race during the period of the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. and the 1980s in the U.K. The influence of broad-based movements for racial justice in their home countries is readily apparent in their work and the types of films they each produced. Riggs and Julien both demonstrate a clear commitment to engaging issues of sexuality, masculinity and gender, interrogating the Black body as a site of both pleasure and racial oppression, and disrupting easy understandings of identity that idealize homogeneity and marginalizes difference. As political gay Black men, both Julien and Riggs have mobilized art in the forms of filmmaking, visual art, performance and cultural criticism as a form of political activism. Their work, while avoiding the tendency to preach, is deeply political and engaged in the struggle for social transformation and racial justice. They prompt us to rethink the relationship between art and political struggle, as well as to understand how those communities that were seen as marginal to the struggle against racism, particularly women and queer folks, are re-imagining and re-shaping the terrain of political struggle. Finally, both of the films being screened tonight were released in 1995. Their meditations on the same themes from different locations helps us to conceptualize Blackness on a global scale while understanding the ways in which it is differently shaped and produced in local contexts.
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (directed by Isaac Julien, 1995)
“Oh, my body, make me always a man who questions.”
Frantz Fanon
In Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995), Isaac Julien explores the work of one of the most important critical thinkers of the 20th century. Born in 1925 in Martinique, Fanon would become one of the most important theorists of the “colonial condition,” and the contours of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. Julien adapted the film title from Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1961), which drew from his observations while serving as a psychiatrist in Algeria. These experiences proved to be both intellectually and politically formative and later led to his leaving his medical post and becoming an active participant in the Algerian struggle for national liberation. As Jennifer Poulous notes, Black Skin, White Masks is “part manifesto, part analysis; it both presents Fanon's personal experience as a black intellectual in a whitened world and elaborates the ways in which the colonizer/colonized relationship is normalized as psychology.” Fanon’s personal reflections on both his work as a psychiatrist and his initial encounters with the brutal reality of French racism inform this text and provided the foundation for his broader body of work. During his brief life, he published three other books including Toward the African Revolution (1967 [1964]), A Dying Colonialism (1965 [1959]) and his most famous work, The Wretched of the Earth (1963). This work is largely considered to be the intellectual ancestor to contemporary post-colonial studies and is used across disciplines in critical studies of race, subaltern identities, and neocolonialism. It was translated into more than twenty-five languages. Fanon was already considered a noted theorist and revolutionary during his time; before the full promise of his work could unfold, however, he died in December 1961 finally succumbing to leukemia. Much of his work was published posthumously and it continues to resonate with contemporary activists and scholars.
For Fanon, studying the psychological disorders of colonial subjects illuminated the alienating effects of colonialism – in other words, his work demonstrated how what appeared to be psychological aberrations were, in fact, the logical outcomes of the psychological domination of colonized peoples. Indeed, Fanon was among the first critical thinkers to link individual manifestations of psychological dis-ease with the social processes of oppression. His work with psychiatric patients was enmeshed with his own political concerns regarding national liberation and the black man’s struggle to regain his humanity. In the film, Fanon’s brother, Joby Fanon, “explains insightfully how Fanon chose to study psychiatry as a way to help patients regain the freedom they had lost in madness…[this connection] cuts to the very core of his…work as a psychiatrist, his writings in liberation philosophy, and his participation in the struggle for independence.” For Fanon, the attempt to restore mental wellness could not be uncoupled from the fact that it was the very experience and institution of colonialism that was the root cause of mental disorder. White supremacy and the dehumanizing effects of this process were enacted on every level of the lived experience of the colonized. Indeed, as a Martinican, Fanon was not immune from this reality.
Black British scholar Stuart Hall expounds on Fanon’s own experience of interpolation in his discussion of the colonial gaze. In this moment, according to Hall, Fanon “sees himself being seen” and in that moment realizes that he is in fact Other and that his blackness negates his very humanity. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon recounts his experience of interpolation in which he confronts the specter of racialization and his inferiority as a colonized subject which renders him an object. He speaks of being shattered by the gaze of the colonizer as embodied in the statement “Look, a Negro!” His internal sense of self is irreparably damaged by this external reading of his black body. Fanon writes “My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly.” The deeply traumatizing effects of this experience are palpable in Fanon’s work and it shapes his sensibilities of whiteness/the colonizer as an encompassing structure controlling Black people’s lives and identity formation. When he states “All around the white man…All this whiteness that burns me,” it is clear that he is pointing to the ways in which colonialism creates a sense of being dominated both internally and externally and rendered non-human. Equally interesting for Julien, is the way in which Fanon interprets the sexualized nature of the white gaze and how sexuality permeates Fanon’s thinking of what it means to be free. As a psychiatrist his interest in sexuality is unsurprising, and his analysis of the politics of race, sexual desire, and colonialism raise important dilemmas, particularly around gender.
Fanon’s analysis centers squarely on the struggle of the colonized to reconcile his (this is deliberate, for Fanon, the colonized is always gendered as male) sense of self with the external reality of the colonizing gaze that positions him as inferior and Other. Indeed, through his work as a psychiatrist, he worked to help free his patients from the white supremacist gaze. Interestingly, colonized Black women are not understood as colonial subjects in the same way as Black men. Françoise Verges, a lecturer at the Center for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London, offers a critical reading of the chapter “The Woman of Color and the White Man” in Black Skin, White Masks, in which Fanon excoriates the work of Mayotte Capécia, a French Caribbean woman novelist who penned Je suis Martiniquaise. Colonized Black women who desire white men, whether for economic or personal reasons (often both) are criticized for having internalized wholesale the presumed inferiority of Black people. Hence her inability to desire Black men and the pursuit of whiteness is indeed pathological. These desires make these women artificial and shallow as opposed to the much more sympathetic and contextualized treatment given to Black colonized men who desire and marry white women, as Fanon did. This critical reading of Fanon’s work demonstrates the ways in which gender hierarchy was enacted not only in Fanon’s work but in much anti-colonial literature.
This film provides a great introduction to Fanon’s life and thought, in a vehicle that is conceptually imaginative and engaging. Rather than attempt to construct a linear narrative of Fanon’s life and intellectual production, Julien creates a highly textured visual experience, weaving interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, film and newsreel footage, letters, dramatic reenactments, and commentary from contemporary cultural critics such as Stuart Hall and Françoise Verges. They situate Fanon in his own time and suggest ways that his work can be and is being used in more contemporary analysis. Julien also incorporates reflections from Fanon’s brother, Joby, and Fanon’s son, Olivier Fanon. Olivier and Hall discuss how Fanon’s understanding of the Algerian Revolution was profoundly limited by his inability to see how religion, ethnic differences, and struggles for political power in the postcolonial state would significantly undermine the liberatory potential of the nationalist struggle. The interviews with Joby provide viewers with materials and documents that were previously inaccessible to the public. I was particularly overwhelmed when Joby read the last letter that he ever received from his dying brother; more than thirty years after his death, Fanon’s loss is palpable for his loved ones and we can see the impact that Fanon had not only in intellectual and political spaces, but in his relationships with those closest to him.
The film’s dramatizations, which incorporate text from Fanon’s published work, letters, and accounts of his work with psychiatric patients in Algeria, are imaginative and visually stimulating. Although they often fluctuate between compelling and melodramatic, the dramatizations illuminate the inner workings of Fanon’s thought, his genius, and his personal contradictions. Colin Salmon’s performance lays bare the truly poetic and deeply personal dimensions of Fanon’s work. Indeed Fanon was always inside of his own analysis, grappling with his internalized colonial condition as he struggled to make sense of the broader social consequences of colonialism and anti-Black racism. He was just as likely to refer to his own experience as empirical evidence of the effects of colonialism as the observations he made of psychiatric patients or Algerians involved in the struggle for liberation.
Julien’s film reflects the ongoing interest in and the continuing influence of Frantz Fanon’s political thought. Since the early 1990s there have been several edited volumes, monographs, and critical reflections published meditating on the impact of his work during his life and its continued significance in thinking through dilemmas of race and postcolonial identity. His work has been reviewed by a wide range of scholars from fields as diverse as cultural studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, African Diaspora studies, feminist theory, and theorizing postcolonial African nation-states. Although there has never been much of a lull in interest around his work, Fanon’s analysis has become particularly useful for scholars attempting to think through the perpetuation of racism at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, in a time when racism in its most crude biological form has ostensibly been eradicated. For activists and progressive artists his work remains salient. The Wretched of the Earth was required reading for new members of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s. In a more contemporary example, Fanon’s name was invoked by the rap/rock group Rage Against the Machine: "I bring the sun at red dawn upon the thoughts of Frantz Fanon/ So stand at attention devil dirge/ You'll never survive choosing sides against the Wretched of the Earth." It is clear that despite his death, Fanon and the struggles for which he stood are still very much with us. Isaac Julien’s work as a filmmaker and visual artist seems to take up many of the issues that Fanon wrote about, but does so with a twist by centering a more nuanced analysis of sexuality and gender as they intersect with race and the colonial imagination.
Born in London’s East End on February 21, 1960, Isaac Julien was one of five children. His parents originally migrated to England from their native St. Lucia. His childhood was spent in a mostly working-class environment and he attended local schools. His interest in film and visual art was apparent at a young age and by his teens he was an active participant in several groups including the London Youth Dance Theatre, Four Corners Films, and the Newsreel Collective. He studied fine art and film at St. Martin’s School of Art and completed his studies there in 1984. It was at St. Marks that he co-founded Sankofa, an independent Black film collective and completed his first film, Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983). This film addressed the death of a young Black man while in police custody – although it was considered highly controversial, it was a film well-suited for its time. The 1980s were a particularly tense period in the UK as the specter of racial violence against Black and Asian Britons exploded under the administration of Margaret Thatcher amidst an economic downturn. Nativist sentiment turned against the children of the former colonies, many of whom began migrating to the United Kingdom immediately following the end of World War II as the Empire looked to the colonies to help in its rebuilding efforts. According to the BBC News, between 1990 and 2000, there were approximately 1,350 deaths of men in police custody. This film presents the first of what would be many films focused on themes of social (in)justice, blackness, sexuality, identity, and the politics of pleasure. As a filmmaker who is also a visual artist, Julien’s work tends to defy disciplinary boundaries, cutting and mixing sounds, images, and techniques from different artistic methods in order to create a multi-layered, visual experience. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, much of his creative work is done through the medium of art installation and since the late 1990s, he has focused a great deal of his creative energy on installations. Since 1995 he has created and exhibited more than a dozen audio-visual art installations. He has worked as an educator as well, holding visiting scholar positions at both Goldsmiths College in London and Harvard University.
After his first film, Julien produced three more films: Territories (1984), The Passion of Remembrance (1986), and This is Not an AIDS Advertisement (1987). Julien came to prominence as a filmmaker with the 1989 film Looking for Langston. Like Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, this film was a critical reflection on a noted figure, the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. In this piece, Julien recuperates Hughes as a Black gay artist and icon and investigates the ways in which homophobia and heterosexism kept Hughes closeted throughout his personal and professional life. The film is a meditation on questions of Black masculinity and the politics of sexuality within diverse Black communities. This work was followed by Young Soul Rebels (1991), which explores the politics of sexuality and youth music and subcultures in the United Kingdom. This film was awarded the prize for Best Film at the Cannes Film Festival. Throughout the 1990s many of his films were made for television and he has used this vehicle to share his work with the public in an accessible medium. More recently, he has shifted from his use of public television for his films and has turned his attention to other areas such as film art installation. Since his earlier work he has produced nine films with a total of fifteen film shorts, documentaries, and feature films to his credit. Julien offers a vision of what a more liberatory and critical form of multiculturalism might look like and holds onto the hope that we might see and create it in our lifetime.
Sources:
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Reprint of Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris, 1952.
___. 1965. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Reprint of Les damnes de la terre. Paris, 1961.
Goodey, Daniel. 2001. “Film Review.” Philosophia Africana. Vol. 4, No. 2.
Poulous, Jennifer. 1996. Frantz Fanon.
Screenonline. 2007. Julien, Isaac.
“It seems difficult to define, in any absolute sense, what it means to be black.”
- Angela Davis
Black Is...Black Ain’t (1994)
Marlon Riggs, dir.
Black Is...Black Ain’t takes up the question of “What does it mean to be Black?” While the question may seem fairly obvious on its surface it becomes decidedly more complex when we disrupt the notion of blackness as a coherent, unitary, and immutable identity. Black Is...Black Ain’t suggests that since the arrival of enslaved Africans to the Americas, with specific attention focused on the U.S., Blackness has been constituted by the depth and magnitude of its internal diversity. As one participant in the film states, “There are as many different ways of being Black as there are Black people.” However, the reality of this diversity has not stopped some community members from policing the boundaries of blackness and deciding who gets to be a member and which experiences come to stand in as representative of the Black Experience (writ large) in these United States. What happens when we challenge these normative assumptions and juxtapose the ideal of Black identity with the messy, complicated pastiche of Black culture and experience? In the beginning of Black Is...Black Ain’t we see Marlon Riggs walking naked through the forest, slapping away brush, making his way through the thicket, unashamed, appearing to live fully in his own skin despite the reality, that he was, in fact, dying at the time. These scenes in which we encounter Riggs’ naked body suggests that the work of the film and Black people is to strip down, pull away pretense, and come to terms with being comfortable in our own skin – fully recognizing that while they might share similarities no two bodies are ever completely alike. The point is to get Black folks (and other people) to begin talking about the harm that is inflicted by the violence directed at people who are positioned as Other within the Black community. It was a position that Riggs was intimately familiar with throughout his life.
Marlon Riggs was born in Fort Worth, TX February 3, 1957 into a military family and spent his childhood in Texas, Germany and Georgia. He attended segregated schools for much of his childhood before leaving home to attend Harvard University. He graduated from Harvard in 1978 and completed an M.A. in Journalism in 1981 at the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to teach documentary film at Berkeley in 1987 and held that post until his death in 1994. He received an honorary doctorate from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1993. He produced several video documentaries mostly for television. His experiences of racism with segregation and more covert forms of racism in higher education combined with his emerging sense of himself as a gay Black man and propelled him into diverse forms of media activism. His filmmaking was one avenue through which he launched critiques of racism and homophobia. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, Riggs was also a well-known cultural critic who would frequently weigh in on dialogues about the challenges independent filmmakers faced in the 1980s and early 1990s as well as sexual politics. His essay “Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a Snap! Queen” reflects his skill as a public intellectual as he cuts through the ideologies of homophobia and black inferiority that positioned gay Black men as non-members of the Black community. He also critiques “Negro Faggotry,” that is, the way in which gay Black sexuality is caricatured and rendered minstrelsy by homophobic Black comedians, intellectuals, and, Black communities. He states: “I am a Negro faggot, if I believe what movies, TV, and rap music say of me. Because of my sexuality, I cannot be Black. A strong, proud, ‘Afrocentric’ Black man is resolutely heterosexual, not even bisexual…Hence I remain a sissy, punk, faggot. I cannot be a Black Gay Man because, by the tenets of Black Macho, Black Gay Man is a triple negation.” This essay was featured in the Black American Literature Forum and the collection of essays and poems Brother to Brother (1991), one of the first anthologies of writing by gay Black men. The essay is a critical analysis of racism and homophobia as two sides of the same oppressive coin – a quick and essential read for those of us who still believe in freedom.
Riggs was an award winning filmmaker whose career is perhaps best defined by his commitment to using public television to engage controversial social issues and debates. Although conservative politicians and the Religious Right hated his work, film critics generally loved it. He received an Emmy Award twice in 1987 and 1991 and the prestigious Peabody Award in 1989. Despite, or perhaps due to, AIDS cutting Riggs’ life tragically short, he was an incredibly prolific filmmaker. Between 1987 and his death in 1994, he completed five television documentaries, each dealing with his chosen themes of race, representation, identity construction, sexuality, and gender. There is a clear sense of urgency to his work and it is clear, particularly in Black Is...Black Ain’t, that his explorations of these larger questions are also deeply personal and rooted in his own attempts to make sense of his identity as a political queer Black man committed to creating communities with enough space for everyone’s differences. The trajectory of his work demonstrates a shift from the focus on representations and controlling images of African Americans to work that is decidedly more confrontational and engaged in controversial issues. His first television documentary Ethnic Notions (1987) explored the historical roots of contemporary stereotypical images of Black people that circulate in U.S. popular culture. In this work, he traces the genealogies of these images to slavery and demonstrates how different stereotypes of Black people reflect the racial commonsense of a given political moment. It was well received and has since become practically mandatory in Introduction courses to African American Studies in American high schools and universities. Its “sequel” Color Adjustment (1989) addressed similar issues by analyzing representations of African-Americans in fifty years of American television. Deconstructing popular shows such as Julia, Amos ‘n’ Andy, and Good Times, Riggs juxtaposed earlier blatantly racist images of Blacks with those of the post-Civil Rights era and delineated the disruptions and continuities between past and contemporary images of Black people in television.
It was for his work in Tongues Untied (1988), however, and the subsequent political controversy that followed its airing, that Riggs would achieve notoriety. The film focuses specifically on the experiences, cultural production, and political activism of urban, gay Black men in the 1980s. This film takes sexuality from the private sphere and asserts that it is fundamentally political. The film cuts no corners, presenting words, sounds, and images of flesh-and-blood Black men in all of their humanity, their vulnerability, and yes, their sexual desire. Men touch, embrace, kiss, fuck, and make no apologies for who they are and what they do with their bodies. The images of Black men proclaiming their desire for one another as lovers, but also on another level, as Black people and partners in struggle, raised the ire of a number of people, particularly Pat Buchanan and advocates on the Religious Right. Buchanan decried the use of federal funding for “obscene” films and likened the film to pornography. PBS executives eventually decided to yank the film during its airing amidst accusations of censorship and buckling under political pressure. In response to this experience, Riggs became a vocal critic of censorship and expanded his media activism to address these issues. In spite of the furor that surrounded its airing, Tongues Untied received numerous awards including Best Independent Experimental Work by the Los Angeles Film Critics and Best Documentary of the Berlin International Film Festival. Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, along with other noted Black gay artists and activists of the time, are featured in the film and visually speaking, it is clear that Riggs drew much of the inspiration for Black Is...Black Ain’t from this work.
Black Is...Black Ain’t is as much a personal journey for Riggs as it is an analysis of what it means to be Black in the post-Civil Rights era. He began the project after almost dying from kidney-failure related to HIV/AIDS. Despite the fact that his condition continued to worsen throughout filming he remained committed to the project, determined to complete it. Riggs’ awareness of his own mortality is exemplified in the interviews that he did for the film, many of them from his hospital bed. The sense of urgency embedded in his statements and his concern about the violent intolerance of difference in the Black community is clear. Scholars such as Cathy Cohen and Patricia Hill Collins as well as countless queer Black artists and activists have analyzed the ways in which homophobia and sexism have exacerbated the AIDS crisis. Riggs recognized that only honesty, open dialogue, and a genuine commitment to change would stem the crisis and empower Black people to engage in liberation struggles that would include all Black people, not just the straight, the male, the wealthy, etc. Riggs succumbed to the illness in Oakland on April 5, 1994. The film was completed posthumously by co-producer Nicole Atkinson and co-editor Christiane Badgley and aired on public television in 1995.
Much of the film grapples with what has historically been understood as normative Black identity. Too often community gatekeepers have attempted to rigidly confine the possibilities of Blackness with homophobia, colorism, and sexism. This policing misses the point – if, as Riggs suggests, Blackness is a gumbo culture, what makes it flavorful is the many distinct, contrasting, and yet complementary spices, tastes, and ingredients it contains. Blackness is constituted by its very internal difference and those differences need not diminish its significance as a collective identity anymore than the roux in a gumbo diminishes the multiple tastes swirling in the pot.
The documentary explores themes such as the politics of skin color within the Black community and the ways in which lighter-skinned and darker skinned Black people have negotiated their place within the U.S. racial hierarchy. Interviews from folks from New Orleans; the Georgia Sea Islands, located off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina; Mississippi; Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Bay Area; and New York City discuss the ways in which perceptions of Black beauty and identification shifted with the emergence of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Riggs shares his own personal reflection of his childhood attempts to convince a friend that “Black is Beautiful.” After telling his friend that “Nobody is colored anymore – you Black!” his friend tells him to take it back, “Or I’ll kick your Black ass.” The association of “Black” with an insult or offensive remark and Black people’s struggle to redefine these terms leads into the following issue: processes of self-naming and self-definition.
As Angela Davis aptly notes, “Perhaps we have an obsession with naming ourselves because for most of our lives we have been named by other people.” The transformation of Black people’s collective sense of self and the search for positive, life-affirming identity is intimately connected with the experience of self-determination embedded in the ability to name oneself. This is particularly true given the experience of enslavement and the fact that enslaved Black people were forced to bear the name given to them by the slave owner as a form of both physical and psychological control. Although it has its limits, self-naming is an important and liberating experience that has been noted in the memoirs of many Black intellectuals and activists – consider the enormous transformations that were exemplified in one man’s life when he changed his name from Malcolm Little to Detroit Red to Malcolm X to El Hajj Malik al Shabazz – it is hard to overstate the magnitude of this shift. Likewise we can consider the shift from nigger to negro to colored to Black to Afro American to African American as marking profound changes in the broader society as well as in the ways that Black people understand and construct their own identities. Riggs taps into the heart of this process and suggests that in order to understand Black people, we have to understand self-naming as being about far more than mere semantics.
Finally, although Riggs covers a lot of ground, arguably the film’s strongest thrust comes in its critical analysis of the role of gender and sexuality in shaping what it means to be Black. Angela Davis, bell hooks, Barbara Smith and Michele Wallace each address the way that the struggles of the Black community, while anti-racist, often reproduce misogyny and sexism as well as homophobia, particularly as demonstrated in the Black nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. bell hooks shares her personal experiences of watching patriarchal violence unfold in her childhood home and suggests that what have often been billed as struggles for black liberation are really “a dick thing.” In other words, the struggle for Black empowerment was less about the empowerment of all Black people and more about the assertion of a patriarchal identity for Black men in order to claim their manhood in the face of white supremacist subjugation. Riggs disrupts the tendency to make “gender” synonymous with “women” and instead turns the camera onto Black men and interrogates the ways that Black masculinity is constructed and popularly understood to be rooted in an ethos of violent homophobia and patriarchal domination. Although he acknowledges the way that Black men are victimized by racism, he is unrelenting in his challenge to rethink Black manhood. Cornel West offers a particularly incisive analysis by suggesting that the association of Black manhood with fear and violence both by Black people and the dominant white culture makes it difficult for Black men to access and embrace their own humanity. Patriarchy alienates Black men from their very selves. The Black Church and ostensibly more progressive African cultural communities are also called to task for the ways in which they attempt to naturalize gender subordination of Black women and queer people through a discourse of divine order or a gender hierarchy rooted in the African past.
This is an amazing film -- Riggs manages to present the audience with multiple complex ideas, deconstruct commonsense understandings of the “Black Experience” and suggest alternatives for how we might understand Blackness as constructed, variegated, and dynamic. Blackness is not merely an identity for Riggs, it is a process. Although the questions that the film raises are deadly serious, as demonstrated by Riggs’ own struggle with AIDS, it also engages the ways in which Black people in the U.S. continue to affirm their own humanity through the use of humor and their ongoing struggle to create beauty under the most horrific circumstances. The film combines truly heartbreaking moments with unapologetic hilarity – Blackness is more than oppression; there is also profound beauty. We are convinced when Riggs takes us from the battle-torn streets of South Central Los Angeles after the 1992 uprising to his hospital room where he pontificates on the many musical stylings of Black Americans. One hardly knows whether to fall out laughing or crying as we watch Riggs, deteriorating before our very eyes, singing Parliament and threatening to “turn this mother out.” Ain’t no mistake, about it, he certainly did. The hospital scene encapsulates the central paradigm of the film: namely that although the struggle to survive has been a defining characteristic of what it means to be Black in these United States, Riggs is equally interested in exploring joy, those aspects of Blackness that emerge in opposition to the annihilating effects of racial oppression. His work presents us with an alternative vision of what Blackness might look like uncoupled from the crushing experience of white supremacy.
Riggs’ use of the gumbo metaphor extends to his narrative techniques in the film as well. He deploys a pastiche method combining poetry, dance, performance, song, critical commentary, interviews, historical analysis and archival materials to create a radically different vision of the Black experience in the United States. He features commentary from prominent Black feminist scholars and public intellectuals Angela Davis; bell hooks, Barbara Smith, a founding member of the Combahee River Collective and author of the Truth that Never Hurts; Michele Wallace, author of the controversial and groundbreaking Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman; Maulana Karenga, an Afrocentric scholar who came to prominence for developing the African-based holiday Kwanzaa; Essex Hemphill, renowned poet and Black gay activist; and noted choreographer, Bill T. Jones.
There is a clear visual style that pervades Riggs’ work, most clearly in Black Is...Black Ain’t and Tongues Untied. Invoking a black aesthetic that is rooted in the historical experiences and cultural production of Black people. His use of the sounds of the Black church, oral history/story teller tradition, and the practice of “call and response” that is the way in which Black people in diverse cultural spaces understand language as an ongoing dialogue in which we are all both the speaker and the listener. This is especially evident in the introduction to the film – voices softly chanting “Black Is...Black Ain’t” slowly give way to a more raucous and intense polyphony of voices, male and female, singing in true gospel style the virtue and the vices, the contradictions and complexities of being Black. There are always several voices present in any given moment and Riggs challenges the tendency in documentary filmmaking to present one expert after another, privileging instead the voices of everyday people alongside those of noted intellectuals to create a rich dialogue about how we might understand Blackness. In Riggs’ vision of documentary film everyone has a role to play and something to say.
Riggs deploys a circular rather than linear narrating style to engage his subject. Throughout Black Is...Black Ain’t one has the feeling almost of being outside of time – the past and the present are juxtaposed and layered on top of one another demonstrating that Black identity is best understood in an historical continuum. In other words, it is nearly impossible to think through how Blackness is constructed in an historical vacuum, since past experiences continue to shape perceptions of Blackness in the present. In this sense, Riggs is less interested in creating a clear teleological narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. I believe this style is ultimately more challenging not only for the filmmaker (especially since it walks a fine line between brilliance and incoherence) but also for the viewer. There is no passive way of watching Black Is...Black Ain’t, the experience is interactive and the viewer is forced to talk back to the discussion taking place; to imagine him or herself a part of that conversation. And Riggs does not tell the audience what to make of everything happening, there is no neat conclusion – “And that’s what Blackness is.” There are no easy answers given, only the opportunity to reflect on what these things, be they music, struggle, or the experiences associated with being black, mean to us and how they come to carry such meanings. The answer to what it means to be black at the end of the 20th century is left up to the viewer; since he spent the better part of the film disrupting the tendency to police Black identity and marginalize differences, Riggs is not about to do the heavy lifting for the audience. Black Is...Black Ain’t seems to me to be Riggs’ attempt to do in film what he did in life – build bridges and open dialogue between folks. But he says it better than I can, and so I close with his own words, recorded before his death.
“There’s a cure for what ails us as a people and that is for us to talk to each other. We’ve got to start talking about the ways in which we hurt each other and the ways in which we hurt each other is also through silence. Because nobody can unload the pain or the shame or the guilt by not speaking.”
Amen, Brother Marlon. We miss you.
-- Courtney Desiree Morris, PhD student, African Diaspora Studies Program in Social Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin
Sources:
Museum of Broadcast Communication. Riggs, Marlon.
Riggs, Marlon T. "Black Macho Revisisted: Reflections of a Snap! Queen.” Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 25, No. 2, Black Film Issue. (Summer 1991), pp. 389-394.
Thompson, Cliff. “Review: Black Is…Black Ain’t.” Cineaste, V. 22, No. 4 (Fall 1996), p. 55-57.
