NEW AGENDAS in BLACK FILMMAKING: an INTERVIEW with MARLON RIGGS Grundmann, Roy
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NEW AGENDAS IN BLACK FILMMAKING: AN INTERVIEW WITH MARLON RIGGS Grundmann, Roy. Cineaste, Dec92, Vol. 19 Issue 2/3. In his relatively short career, Marlon T. Riggs has already made an indelible mark on the documentary tradition and the state of black filmmaking in general. The self-reflexive esthetics of his videos have opened critical trenches and fueled debates on issues of authenticity, impartiality, and truth. Even such relatively straightforward works as Ethnic Notions (1987) never forgo or hide their partisan perspective, which is precisely Riggs's point. His films are politically significant because they have helped redefine agendas of black filmmaking. Riggs is not only black, he is also gay, and as a cultural observer his vision is fused to diverse aspects of black gay life. Tongues Untied (1990) is a passionate exploration of the double oppression black gay men face in our society (see review in Cineaste, Vol. XVIII, No. 1), attacking both white racism and a certain machismo conspicuously coextensive with parts of the African-American movement As much as black gay men's ethnicity makes them subject to racist oppression, their sexuality is used to deny them a share in their African ancestry. As one might expect, the right wing's response to Tongues Untied was not slow in coming, and it bore out its own racism twice over. When Riggs, by addressing issues of homophobia, sought to reformulate received notions of ethnic struggle, Senator Jesse Helms, presidential aspirant Pat Buchanan, and their ideological cohorts promptly turned their attacks against the video into an exclusively antigay, procensorship invective. Interestingly, even the subsequent media debate around NEA funding of homoerotic art somehow omitted the important fact that the men in Tongues Untied were also black. Instead, what ensued were fatuous and highly constructed squabbles over tax dollars and gay imagery, making Tongues Untied a harbinger of things to come in the struggle of getting sexually explicit material funded. Color Adjustment (1991), one of Riggs's two new videos, is a historical outline of the representation of blacks on American television from Amos `n' Andy to The Cosby Show. A mix of talking head commentary, clips from such shows as Eastside/Westside, I Spy, and Julia, and such reflexive devices as superimposed rhetorical questions, explore the presentational trappings of blacks on TV--and, for that matter, the pitfalls and problems inherent in constructing an alternative agenda steering clear of the term `political correctness.' Riggs's other video, Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Regrets, 1992) is about the struggle of confronting AIDS and overcoming shame and self-hatred. Five HIV positive black gay men tell us about their experiences with being seropositive and dealing with their friends, families, workplaces, and the church. No Regrets is Riggs's contribution to the Fear of Disclosure project, an ongoing series of videos addressing communities affected by AIDS and dealing with issues of coming out as HIV positive or having AIDS. The project was initiated in 1989 through the tape Fear of Disclosure by the late Phil Zwickler (Rights and Reactions: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial), in which an openly seropositive man is rejected sexually even though he only wants to practice safer sex. Fear of Disclosure reveals how the double standards many impose on safer sex lead to a new sexual apartheid. The Fear of Disdosure project also includes (In)visible Women, codirected by Marina Alvarez and Ellen Spiro, which depicts the struggle of three women of color in their communities to fight AIDS and its stigmata. Next in the series will be a video by Christine Choy (Who Killed Vincent Chin?) on Asian-Americans and HIV/AIDS. Riggs was interviewed by Cineaste shortly after the premiere of No Regrets at the 4th New York International Festival of Lesbian and Gay Film. Cineaste: How did you come to participate in the Fear of Disclosure project? Marlon Riggs: I met Phil Zwickler at the Berlin Film Festival in 1990. At that time he introduced me to the project of which he had completed the first installment, Fear of Disclosure. He invited me to participate in other productions of Fear of Disclosure, addressing the different communities which have been impacted by the epidemic. I realized that there are many productions coming out of HIV/AIDS activism that really privilege activism, about being in the streets and confronting officials, rather than dealing with issues of shame and self-loathing. For individuals who haven't even made that first step of simply saying, "I am positive"--even to themselves, let alone to others in their circle of friends and family--that kind of activism is very remote. So 1 thought it was necessary to address many of the core issues that many black gay men in this country dealing with HIV confront and try to avoid. There's not simply the externalized conflict with homophobic institutions and family and so forth, but that of accepting and confronting the virus oneself. Cineaste: How did you find the participants in your project? Riggs: Donald Woods and Reggie [Reginald Williams], who is the director of the National AIDS Task Force, are friends. This is central in some ways, because I knew I would not have a lot of time to achieve that level of intimacy, to bring about intimate disclosure and not simply the usual storytelling that you find in so many documentaries. That required a personal relationship preexisting before the taping began. I also felt that I needed to broaden the demographics. Because I knew that this documentary would in some ways involve a reclaiming of spiritual conditions, I wanted someone who was involved in the church and had not simply discarded it when they came to terms with and accepted their sexual identity, someone who had transformed their church as well as their understanding of the church in order to be embraced for the totality of who they are. Cineaste: Doesn't this film and, specifically, the discourse around Joseph Long, who you were just talking about, heavily privilege Christianity at the expense of other religious practices among black people? Riggs: There are all kinds of religious and spiritual paths that black people in America take, but I couldn't bear the burden of representation and trying to address all of them. In many ways this is a documentary that focuses on the prevailing tradition that many black Americans understand or have shared in. For me it was not doctrinaire Judeo-Christianity. I hope that's not what people read from this, even if hearing the spirituals, because those spirituals come from slavery. The use of those songs and the references to the church ground a whole history of struggle behind which our connections to something more transcendent was a driving force: fighting Jim Crow, slavery, and straight discrimination; fighting the internalized self-hatred that comes from being a second class citizen and being considered inferior; fighting the shame and silence that attends the desire to cope and to get by without punishment in a society that discourages you. For me, that's what those songs signified. When I hear, "Freedom, oh freedom over me, I will never be a slave," I'm not hearing simply black Baptist Southern upringing. I'm hearing a whole history resonating struggle, and a refusal to abide by prescribed roles. It's in that way that the church can be and is, in fact, a component in that struggle for life and nobility. No doubt, there's a great degree of homophobia in all kinds of churches, not just in black churches. There's been tremendous denial and silence pervasive throughout Afro-American society. I didn't feel the need to belabor that point. Cineaste: The Fear of Disclosure project aims to bring these films and videos to their respective target audiences, in this case black gay men. Do you hope this tape can also reach other organizations, social workers, and public institutions like high schools? Riggs: That's the ambition for all the work that we do as people of color, as gay men and lesbians, and as people who are dealing in some way or another with HIV--that what we do will not be confined within one particular context and one small community. Because of the nature of the issues and the nature of this epidemic, we hope that the work will transcend those particular boundaries so that we can see our connection with each other and the true kind of groundwork of struggle that is premised upon shared interest and shared identities of degree. Unfortunately, if you limit this video simply to black gay men, and then limit another one to Asian-American gay men or women, and then another one to young people, you miss the opportunity to make these communities see how much their struggles interconnect. Cineaste: But that's a different project, isn't it? Riggs: That is a different project in many ways. To some degree the documentary Absolutely Positive tried to show the connections among all of us within the HIV community. But I think that work did not deal with this as effectively as it might have. If it had been specifically targeted, at African-Americans, for instance, certain issues would have been raised that were not dealt with in that film. For example, the Asian-American participants in that film were treated just as any other group of gay men, so there was no acknowledgement of their specific cultural background, and how the differences that come with it shape the struggle around HIV within that community. I see too often within our own gay and lesbian community how works that are supposed to be multicultural show a range of diverse identities, a certain kind of difference, but in which the difference doesn't really seem to matter.