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. (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 , 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. The difference is simply surface, it's color, it's not a source of identity, or division, strife, and inequity. It's in response to that that I would like to show, by bringing together a whole slew of different people affected by HIV, how difference actually does make a difference.

There's the assumption that, perhaps because we're all threatened by this one particular adversary, no other threats really matter, and that the ways we threaten and oppress each other don't measure up in in significance to this common adversary. That's what gets erased in history in our understanding of political and social struggle and, in turn, perpetuates our inability to rise up to `defeat the master,' to use old terminology. As much as the majority resists us, we resist dealing with each other.

Cineaste: Let's talk a bit about the troubled exhibition history and right wing abuse of Tongues Untied. Pat Buchanan used footage from the film in one of his election campaign spots to denounce the Bush Administration's arts funding policy. What was your reaction to that?

Riggs: I was surprised but not shocked because that kind of misappropriation and abuse of works dealing with homosexuality had been occurring quite frequently, whether Mapplethorpe's or Todd Haynes's work was at issue, or even Jenny Livingston's, which I find politically fairly untransgressive. I'm not saying I didn't like it, but it's not as if it really challenges the majority's hegemony in any real way. I found out by calls from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force as well as from people who alerted me about this ad circulating in the primary that used excerpts from Tongues Untied as examples of blasphemous, pornographic art, and was blaming Bush as a supporter of this. It was absurd to the point of being ludicrous. In order to win office and influence, the Buchanan campaign was trying to exploit homophobia, racism, and the attempted repression of all kinds of communities who, particularly since the civil rights movement, have been asserting their voices. I wanted to show how Bush is complicit in that, not to let this president get off the hook, so that Buchanan was the bad guy and Bush was by comparison benevolent, but to realize how he was as much a part of that dynamic and as destructive of the fabric of this society as the Buchanans and David Dukes and all the other people to the right. This politics of enmity treats others as enemies, which then creates fear and consolidates this majority, which is fractured as any other group of people, into believing that they share a common adversary and therefore need to bind.

Cineaste: Was your article in The New York Times op-ed page your only response?

Riggs: In addition to The New York Times piece, I also appeared on talk shows, was interviewed any number of times by the media, and also alerted other constituencies who were being hurt by this ad. It was important to critique not only Buchanan's ad but also the reporting about Buchanan's ad. Both amounted to the erasure of black gay men from a work designed to empower and affirm us. The media often simply mentioned the footage of the white men with buttocks showing but hardly mentioned my name or, even more importantly, the cultural and social context of this work or its original intentions.

Cineaste: Did you approach The New York Times or did they approach you?

Riggs: The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, particularly in the person of Robert Bray, approached the Times who were quite enthusiastic, to my shock. Then I had a conversation with a Times editor, a member of the editorial board, who was extremely delighted and welcomed the editorial and was, quite frankly, a delight to work with. I was shocked that they were so supportive.

Cineaste: What struck me, reading the editorial, was that apart from emphasizing how the ad breeds and exploits homophobia, you also stressed that Tongues Untied had only been indirectly funded by the NEA. Did you have certain editorial restraints?

Riggs: They asked me to include that, because I hadn't originally thought about it. But the point to register was that, apart from a number of fabrications going on in the Buchanan ad itself--one, the grant was given during the time of the Reagan and not the Bush Administration; two, this was not an NEA grant but given by an NEA-sponsored organization--it was a wholesale disregard for facts, I not simply the blatant misappropriation of the work but just a I general lie. It was this indifference to any factfinding, which was part and parcel of this campaign, that needed to be illuminated. I needed to show that not simply the politics of enmity but the politics of dissembling had become a commonplace feature of American electoral politics. No one really seemed to be bothered by it.

Cineaste: Tongues Untied was also involved in the debate around public television. Although your film had been accepted by P.O.V., some PBS stations refused to show it for fear of alienating their audiences. What was your reaction?

Riggs: It was extremely clear to me from the beginning that there would be a very bitter fight, and that not only would the right wing nuts come out again and lead an attack against P.O.V. and Tongues Untied, but also that many of the stations would collude in that attempt of censorship and repression. That's because many of those who run public television are in many ways no different ideologically--except perhaps in their politics of addressing such issues--from those on the right. And I knew that would be thrown into stark relief by Tongues Untied. I began writing letters alerting agencies and community groups to the fact that this work will drop by the wayside if we allow it, and that we should force the stations, if not to broadcast Tongues Untied, at least to own up to their racism and homophobia.

Cineaste: The Senate recently passed the budget for PBS, so that's a good sign...

Riggs: It's a good sign because at least public television continues to exist as a site through which we can contend the various representations of us--or their absence. At the same time, though, I think most publicly funded institutions these days are chilled by the right's largely successful attacks against them. Therefore the address of sexuality in any way, not simply homosexuality, and the attempt to include feminist perspectives, will be a long time in coming. You see this kind of chill already happening at the NEA in an explicit fashion. The acting director of the NEA, Ann Radice, could have simply carried out her desire not to deal with "sexually explicit" works without telling anybody. The NEA today has become equated with Ken Burns and his Civil War series. I mean, how safe can you get? I'm not saying I didn't like that series, but to move everything back another century and deal with the struggle for national identity where it's reduced to a very clear cut, manichean world, is too easy. It doesn't address any of the pressing issues that divide us today.

Cineaste: Your new video, Color Adjustment, seems to be a much more straightforward documentary.

Riggs: Even though people have been saying that it's straightforward, one should always ask "straightforward in relation to what?" I think, it uses a form that seems conventional on the surface to deliver a very strong critique, not simply of television, which is easy to do, but also of our investment in the American Dream, particularly for those of us who have been locked out of that dream. This is something that can be extremely discomforting to us, especially since we've never really questioned it. We've questioned the barriers to our entrance into the mainstream of America, but not what the mainstream is, and what costs there are in trying to live up to that aspiration. I think it is, in some ways, a classic form of African-American signifying in that what seems on the surface to be very familiar and almost corroborative of the majority's esthetics is, in fact, in disguise undermining us.

Many of the things that aren't explicit in the documentary are really passing by people. The use of James Baldwin's quotations, for example, the use of still images, or even the use of statistics on the increasing number of TV spectators over the years. The viewer is thereby made aware of not only one's own individual responses to the work, but also those of a community and of a larger political and social context in which television is watched, and through which we come to define and understand ourselves as a nation. This project was always wholly different from Tongues Untied. Tongues Untied offers a certain kind of emotional empathy and cathartic release that I knew Color Adjustment would never achieve because it wasn't designed to. Color Adjustment is deliberately cool.

Cineaste: Color Adjustment focuses on the theoretical and historical implications of assimilation. How do you see commercial black filmmaking functioning in this context in the U.S. today?

Riggs: Like anyone who is African-American today, I'm heartened by the appearance of so many black filmmakers who are doing work that speaks to some degree to the issues and experiences in our community. That said, I'm disheartened by the fact that, too often, what seems to be privileged is a very old-fashioned patriarchy in which misogyny, sexism, and homophobia are simply taken for granted in the empowerment of young black men. Over and over again, we are confronted with the glorification of violence and phallocentrism as the means by which we redeem ourselves, in which black male empowerment is assumed to be equivalent to black liberation.

So I really question whether we can call this tremendous progress, as some are lauding it, simply because we now have a number of black filmmakers who are doing work. For me, I think, as Isaac Julien has said, that it's not sufficient to just have a black face or a black director, but also to ask what the work or that face signify in terms of blackness. Are we treated to a fairly standard, internalized notion of what it means to be a man, or a woman, a family, a nation? Are our visions really expanded beyond these fairly pernicious boundaries in which we police difference, even within our own communities? Unfortunately, I see us doing much of the latter, and, to that degree, I can't join in the celebration, the kind of enthusiasm, that I see so many of us now engaging in.

Ethnic Notions and Color Adjustment are distributed by California Newsreel, 149 Ninth St., , CA 94103, phone (415) 6216196.

Tongues Untied is distributed by Frameline, P.O. Box 14792, San Francisco, CA 94114, phone (415) 861-5245.

No Regrets is distributed by Fear of Disclosure Project, 800 Riverside Dr., Suite 2E, New York, NY 10032-7404.