Tongues Untied Lets Loose Angry, Loving Words the Degree of Sexual Attraction
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An Interview with Marlon Riggs Tongues Untied Lets Loose Angry, Loving Words the degree of sexual attraction. I put by Robert Anbian all those kinds of people out of my mind and made it specifically for Berkeley documentarian Marlon Riggs is people who are already engaged best knownfor his 1987 Ethnic Notions, a sympathetically by the subject of the scholarly and sobering examination of 100 black gay experience. At the AFI years of interplay between racist tensions Video Festival the audience was in the U.s. and the images ofblacks in totally the opposite of any I'd ever popular culture. An eventual critical and conceived for this ... in fact I looked at audience success, Ethnic Notions nonetheless faced much initial resistance. the audience at API that night, I said, Despite as scholarship and carefully "Well, I should look at this strategi measured tone, the video's expose of cal/y. This is just so it will be able to racism in American culture discomfited be shown at other film festivals .... " I many, not least of all black and white was preparing myself not to be upset liberals, who may have privately approved that people wouldn't understand, or the piece but who were reluctant to be they would sit there mutely as they publically associated with its painful saw this panoply of drag queens and images. While in lhe process ofproducing black gay men and erotic scenes and the sequel. Color Adjustment: Blacks in angry poetry and it would all go by Prime Time. Riggs look. the time 10 create another work thai comes withoUlthe them, and they'd wonder what the hell varnish oftraditional documenJary was that. In fact, people really objectivity. Tongues Untied shares with understood. They laughed. I heard Ethnic Notions its determination to bring people crying, which I was shocked at, into the light of day taboo material. bUl il because I don't remember crying at does so in aform quiet different. Tongues anything when I looked at it myself. I Untied is an intensly personal and heard people.saying hmmmm, or collective expression of. and delight in, comments where you'd know that being black. gay and male. It is by turns something was striking a chord. poetic, confessional, entertaining. chilling, People clapped just within the first moving and erOlic. It isfull of rage and tenderness. Since its completion. it has two minutes, just within the opening been a breakthrough hit almost elJery sequence! It was just amazing to me. where it has played (Tongues Untied Something that I thought was very screens this month at the Castro Theatre). personal and very specific to the J'!St before his departure for the Berlin community reached beyond that and Film Festival, where Tongues was touched people of diverse back scheduled for screening. Riggs talked with grounds and experiences .... But I never RP aboUl his slwt from the soul. quite know how people are going to react. Most times it's been screened in situations where people in some way What's surprised you about the knew about what they were going to reception Tongues is getting? see. I had a screening at U.C. Berkeley where the students, sociology stu The shocking thing to me is that dents, freshmen and sophomores, had Tongues Untied has transcended my no idea and they were blown out of expectations of who would understand the water. They didn't know what to it, who would be moved by it. I had say. I stood in the background myself. intended this work specifically for I just watched people during the black gay men. Making that very screening, four or five hundred conscious, deliberate choice allowed students ... many of them just didn't me to be very free in terms of my know how to process what they were structure, the form of what I wanted to seeing, partly because of the form of say as well as how I was saying Tongues Untied, but also because of it...how frankly I could speak about the frankness of the subject, that certain things, how upfront, how upfront way it deals with a very erotic passionate I could be ... and not fear image. There was nelVousness. alienating an audience that may not laughter at inappropriate moments, understand the tenns, or the rage or tittering, people getting up, looking March 1990 5 around, asking "What is this?" That's the wholly identify with dominant culture came out of a very desperate drive and only time I've had a bad reaction. anyrrwre? need on my part, partIy because I'd been very, very ill earlier in the year and had a What qualities do you think are reaching I realized when I was in Atlanla recently strong sense of my mortality ... not across boundaries 10 people? that, yes, there are definitely people who knowing what would happen next and identify with society. There are people realizing that I had cerlain gifts, as well You might have to ask other people this, who are not at all conflicted about who as a number of means that most people but I guess what helps translate this they are, where they are, what their place didn't. I knew how to do this work. It's beyond the specificity of the group I in society is. Those people, and there are like the opportunity was presented to me intended it for, is partly that it's a black people like that, especially those as well as the insight that I may not be passionate work, and regardless of the who have reached a comfOrlable level in here in order to continue this, or to put it subject, much of what we see in films and life, don't see any kind of oppression in off and wait till a better day, a more video, even experimental work. is so which they are complicit, and therefore convenient time when my career was passionless. It is so fonnal in a way that don't find anything problematic about more eSlablished and this wouldn't is concerned merely with structure and their relations with others and with the threaten it in any way. I realized I had to sty Ie and not with the meat of the content, world. I think this video does speak to go for broke. I was really very desperate, the viscera of life. Or they're driven by people who are more troubled, who don't adrenaline-rushed, intensely energetic to content but in this delached analysis of fmd it easy to enter society, who have to do this, without thinking about distribu the subject...this cool approach to make their own way ...but again, I wasn't tion and fundraising and so forth. I didn't whatever you're dealing with. Tongues is thinking on that level as I was conceiving think about fundraising, I thought I'd try different in that it's upfront and raw. and doing it. I was focused and specific. two or three places that I hoped might be There's emotion, rage, pain, sadness, amenable to this, but I'm not going to hostility, as well as love and intimacy. I Has this crossover chonged your sense of bother to convince others or wait years really wanted to explore all that in myself the milSS audience? and hope that somebody will fmally [because] my bent, if you will, has been realize that this is a worthwhile subjeCt to towards cool dispassion, and people who It's both changed and affInned what I explore on fihn or video. I didn't imagine know me know that that's been in almost think was always in the hack of my mind, Berlin or the Castro, even when I all my work, and it's something I really that you can do work that is very particu fmished. I imagined groups like the Gay haven't let go of either. My experimenla lar and specific and yet it will appeal Men of African Descent seeing it, or tion with that was to let myself be freer, broadly ...not because it's been watered Black Gay Men United which is here in allow that original, emotional impulse down and made palalable for a mass the Bay Area, or the Black Gay Lesbian that moved me to do this, to be preserved audience, because mass audiences are, in Leadership Forum ... a few film festivals. in the work, even though I think it always fact, made up of particulars. And those dissipates somewhat because you have to particulars often share parallels even Has the black gay mille audience structure it...but to preserve it to some though they're distinct in their own right received it in the way you hoped? degree. I didn't know this beforehand, It's not as if I didn't know that, but I but I realize it does laik to different kinds don't think I practiced it that much Yes. I was a little concerned, because I of experience on a more metaphoric before. Now I realize you can speak in a knew I was putting things out on the lable level, even though I'm dealing with a very small, focused, particular way.. .! that a lot of people feel very uncomfort black gay experience and the conlJicts don't mean in a trivial way, but in a able putting out there for public view- that are attendant to that. People can see particular sense that is a very community ing ... people who feel we can do things in within that particular experience a identified, personal, and yet reach people private, in bars, in our homes, within our parallel to their own, whether that who are not necessarily part of your own community, that's okay.