Marlon Riggs

Marlon Troy Riggs (3 February 1957 – 5 April 1994) was a gay African American filmmaker, educator, poet, and gay rights activist. He produced, wrote, and directed several television documentaries, including Ethnic Notions, Tongues Untied, Color Adjustment, and Black Is. . . Black Ain’t. Riggs’ aesthetically innovative and socially provocative films examine past and present representations of race and sexuality in America.

Riggs was born in Fort Worth, Texas on February 3, 1957. He was a child of civilian employees of the military and spent a great deal of his childhood traveling. He lived in Texas and Georgia before moving to West Germany at age 11 with his family. Later in his life, Riggs remembered the ostracism and name-calling that he experienced at Hephzibah Junior High School in Hephzibah, Georgia. He stated that black and white students alike called him a “punk," a “faggot,” and “Uncle Tom.” He explains that he felt isolated from everyone at the school: “I was caught between these two worlds where the whites hated me and the blacks disparaged me. It was so painful.”

From 1973 to 1974 Riggs attended Ansbach American High School’s opening year in Katterbach, Germany. He was elected student body president at the military dependent’s school. In 1974, Riggs returned to the United States to attend college. As an undergraduate, Riggs studied history at Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude in 1978. As Riggs began studying the history of American racism and homophobia, he became interested in communicating his ideas about these subjects through film.

After working for a local television station in Texas for about a year, he moved to Oakland, California, where he entered graduate school. He received his master’s degree in journalism with a specialization in Documentary film in 1981 from the University of California, Berkeley, having co-produced/co-directed with Peter Webster a master’s thesis titled Long Train Running: The Story of the Oakland Blues, a half-hour video on the history of the blues in Oakland, California.

Upon finishing graduate school, Riggs began working on many independent documentary productions in the Bay Area. He assisted documentary directors and producers initially as a production assistant and later as a post-production supervisor, editor, and sound editor. His first projects included short documentaries on the American arms race, Nicaragua, Central America, sexism, and disability rights. Because of his proficiency in video technology, Riggs was the on-line editor for a video production company. In 1987, Riggs was hired as a part-time faculty member at the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley to teach documentary filmmaking. He became a tenured professor at Berkeley shortly thereafter.

That same year he completed his first professional feature documentary Ethnic Notions. The film was produced in association with KQED, a public television station in San Francisco, and aired on public television stations throughout the United States. In Ethnic Notions, Riggs sought to explore widespread and persistent stereotypes of black people – images of ugly, savage brutes and happy servants – in American popular culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The film uses a narrative voice-over provided by African-American actress Esther Rolle in explaining striking film footage and historical stills which expose the blatant racism of the era immediately following the Civil War. The documentary also presents a set of contemporary interviews with expert commentators, including historians George Fredrickson and Larry Levine, cultural critic Barbara Christian, and many others, who discuss the consequences of historical African-American stereotypes. This film expanded the commonly held assumptions about the parameters of documentary film aesthetics through its bold use of performance, dance, and music to explore a historical narrative.

While Riggs continued working as an educator at Berkeley, he kept making his own films. The 1989 film Tongues Untied, a highly personalized and moving documentary about the life experiences of gay African-American men, was aired as part of the PBS television series P.O.V. The film employs autobiographical footage as well as performance, including monologues, songs, poems, and nonverbal gestures such as snapping, to convey an authentic and positive black gay identity. In order to demonstrate the harmful effects of silence on self-esteem, the film contrasts this image with negative representations of gay black men as comic-tragic stock caricatures and drag queens in contemporary American popular culture. The three principle voices of Tongues Untied are those of Riggs as well as gay rights activists and men infected with the HIV virus Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam. Riggs characterized the film as his legacy, his “last gift to the community,” that displays him as both a filmmaker and a gay rights activist. He described the production as his own personal “coming out” film celebrating black gay life experiences and that he ultimately became “the person, the vehicle, and the vessel” for these experiences. Riggs explained that Tongues Untied was a catharsis for him: “It was a release of a lot of decades-old, pent-up emotion, rage, guilt, feelings of impotence in the face of some of my experiences as a youth. . . It allowed me to more past all of those things that were bottled up inside me. . . I could finally let go.”

In 1988, while working on Tongues Untied, Riggs was diagnosed with HIV after undergoing treatment for near-fatal kidney failure at a hospital in Germany. The film shows the pain as well as the mentally and physically agonizing therapy that Riggs had to go through in order to deal with his kidney failure. But despite his deteriorating health, Riggs decided to continue to teach at Berkeley and make documentaries.

In the short 1990 piece Affirmations, Riggs further developed his critique of homophobia that he originally expressed in Tongues Untied. In Affirmations, a film made from the outtakes of “Tongues Untied”, Riggs included a coming-out story of black gay writer Reginald T. Jackson and footage of black gay men marching in a Harlem African American Freedom Day Parade. In 1991, Riggs directed and produced Anthem, a short documentary about African-American male sexuality. The film includes a collage of erotic images of black men, hip-hop music, and a call to celebrate difference in sexuality.

In 1991, Marlon founded Signifyin’ Works, a non-profit corporation whose mission is to produce films about African-American history and culture.

The 1991 documentary Color Adjustment was Riggs’s second film to air on the PBS television series P.O.V. The film Color Adjustment was Riggs’s follow-up to Ethnic Notions, focusing on images of black people in American television from the mid-1940s through the 1980s. However, unlike Ethnic Notions, which presents a putative, neutral stance on popular American representations of blacks, Color Adjustment presents a cultural criticism of these images through an African-American perspective on race. Co-produced with Vivian Kleiman, the film is narrated by African-American actress Ruby Dee. Using contemporary interviews of television actors, directors, producers, and cultural commentators, the documentary conveys personal reflections and academic analyses of such television programs as Good Times and The Cosby Show.

In 1992, Riggs directed the film [Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Regret)], in which five gay Black men who are HIV-positive discuss how they are battling the double stigmas surrounding their infection and homosexuality. It was commissioned as part of a series of documentaries on the AIDS crisis. In 1993, Riggs received an honorary doctorate degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts. That same year, Riggs’s experimental short Anthem was featured in a collection of short films entitled Boys’ Shorts: The New Queer Cinema.

Riggs began work on his final film Black Is. . . Black Ain’t in 1994. However, several months into developing the film, Riggs became critically ill, and the film was completed posthumously by co-producer Nicole Atkinson, co-director/co-editor Christiane Badgley, and Signifyin’ Works. Much of the final text of Black Is. . . Black Ain’t was developed by Riggs one night in his hospital room. “It was as if the film were rolling before me,” he said, “and I was just transcribing; I almost couldn’t keep up.” The film therefore contains many scenes of Riggs on his hospital bed. The documentary takes on the topic of African-American identity, including considerations of skin color, religion, politics, class stratification, sexuality, and gender difference that revolve around it. "In this film, Marlon Riggs meets a cross-section of African Americans grappling with the paradox of numerous, often contradictory definitions of blackness. He shows many who have felt uncomfortable and even silenced within the race because their complexion, class, sexuality, gender, or speech has rendered them “not black enough,” or conversely, “too black.” The film scrutinizes the identification of “blackness” with masculinity as well as sexism, patriarchy and homophobia in black America." (University of California).

Besides making documentaries and teaching at Berkeley, Riggs also wrote poetry from time to time, as evidenced in Tongues Untied, which contains several of his poems about his life experiences as a black gay man. In his poem “Tongues Untied,” Riggs discusses the racism he encountered as a child while living in Georgia as well as coming out about his homosexuality

Riggs’s writings were published during the late 1980s and early 1990s in various art and literary journals such as Black American Literature Forum, Art Journal, and High Performance as well as anthologies such as Brother to Brother: Collected Writings by Black Gay Men. The themes of his writings include filmmaking, free speech and censorship, and criticism of racism and homophobia.

In his noteworthy essay “Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a SNAP! Queen,” Riggs discusses how representations of black gay men in the United States have been used to shape Americans’ conceptions of race and sexuality. He argues that Americans’ emphasis on the “black macho” figure – the warrior model of black masculinity based on a mythologized view of African history – signifies an exclusion of black homosexual males from the African American community, which results in their dehumanization and rationalizes homophobia. Riggs makes a distinction between the black gay man’s perception of himself and his representation in America as the “Negro faggot,” an extreme displacement and distortion of black homosexuality. He explains that the “black macho” image is sustained through performances such as rap music, television shows, the films of Spike Lee, and the comedy routines of Eddie Murphy. According to Riggs, the black homosexual male is therefore defined as the deviant Other in relation to the African American community, and Riggs claims that this contemporary practice mirrors the historical racist constructions of the African American identity: “Blacks are inferior because they are not white. Black gays are unnatural because they are not straight. Majority representations of both affirm the view that blackness and gayness constitute a fundamental rupture in the order of things, that our very existence is an affront to nature and humanity.”

Soon after arriving in California for graduate school at UC Berkeley, Riggs settled in Oakland. For 15 years, he made his home with his life companion Jack Vincent. His parents Jean and Alvin Riggs and his sister Sascha live in Arlington, Virginia.

Riggs’ films deal with representations of race and sexuality in the United States. Riggs was critical of American racism and homophobia. He used his films to show positive images of African American culture as well as those of physical and emotional love between black men in order to challenge representations of African Americans and black gay men in popular culture. However, he recognized that the images he conveyed would cause resistance among many Americans: “People are often frightened of difference. . . that requires that they rethink their own beliefs, their own premises, their own sense of self, culture and history, and sense of belonging. When you present anything on the level of contention, you encounter resistance.”

Riggs believed that being a filmmaker was a means to communicate his message, not an end in and of itself. Riggs explained that he did not become a filmmaker because he loved films as a child but because he wanted to communicate his message: “I didn’t know anything about filmmaking when I decided to become a filmmaker. What drew me to film and video was that I wanted to communicate so much. . . I wanted to communicate to the broadest possible audience and for me that was television.” Riggs strongly believed in speaking out about the topics he cared about through his films. He explained that whenever he became passionate about an issue, he could not stop himself from speaking out about it: “Silence kills the soul; it diminishes its possibilities to rise and fly and explore. Silence withers what makes you human. The soul shrinks, until it’s nothing.”

As a graduate student at Berkeley, Riggs was educated in conventional documentary filmmaking, which stresses objectivity and employing an academic stance. But his film style quickly evolved to be rather personal and emotional. His first professional film Ethnic Notions, was composed of expert commentary, historical stills and film footage, and omniscient narration—standard elements for documentary films of the time. Yet at the same time, the film greatly departs from the norm of the day through its playful use of performance, satire and audio. Philip Brian Harper, an associate professor of English at New York University, explains that by challenging the norms of standard television documentary, Riggs was an innovator of television programming in America: “Riggs’s work itself challenged television’s generic boundaries. Riggs troubled broadcast convention, seen as implicitly under attack in the presentation of his work.”

Riggs’s documentaries have received much critical acclaim. Riggs received a National Emmy Award in 1987. Tongues Untied was awarded Best Documentary at the Berlin Film Festival. The film also received recognition from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Documentary Film Festival, the American Film and Video Festival, and the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. In 1992, Riggs was awarded the Maya Daren Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. Additionally, Color Adjustment won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, Erik Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians, the International Documentary Association Outstanding Achievement Award, and a premier screening the Sundance Film Festival. Riggs also received the Frameline Award from the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival for his film Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (No Regret). Moreover, Black is. . . Black Ain’t won the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and was praised by the Sundance Film Festival.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Riggs’s production Tongues Untied triggered a national controversy surrounding the airing of the video on American public television stations. Along with private donations, Riggs had financed the documentary with a $5,000 grant from the Western States Regional Arts Fund, a re-granting agency funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency that provides funding and support for visual, literary, and performing artists. The P.O.V. television series on PBS, which Tongues Untied was a part of, also received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts in the amount of $250,000. The film received much contention due to its depiction of nudity, use of street lingo, and scenes of men making love.

News of the film’s airing sparked a national debate about whether or not it is appropriate for the Federal government of the United States to fund artistic creations that to some are considered obscene. Artists stressed their basic right of free speech and vehemently opposed censorship of their art. However, several right-wing United States government policymakers and many conservative watchdog groups were against using taxpayer money to fund what they believed were repulsive artistic works. In the 1992 Republican presidential primaries, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan cited Tongues Untied as an example of how President George H. W. Bush was investing “our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art.” Buchanan released an anti-Bush television advertisement for his campaign using re-edited clips from Tongues United. The ad aired for several days throughout the United States but was quickly removed from television channels after Riggs accused Buchanan of copyright infringement and asked his campaign to stop airing the ad.

Reverend Donald E. Wildmon, the president of the American Family Association, opposed PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts for airing Tongues Untied but hoped that the film would be widely released, because he believed most Americans would find it offensive. “This will be the first time millions of Americans will have an opportunity to see the kinds of things their tax money is being spent on,” he said. “This is the first time there is no third party telling them what is going on; they can see for themselves.”

Riggs defended Tongues Untied for its ability to “shatter this nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference.” He explained that the widespread attack on PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts by moral critics in response to the film was predictable, since “any public institution caught deviating from their puritanical morality is inexorably blasted as contributing to the nation’s social decay.” In his defense, Riggs claimed that “implicit in the much overworked rhetoric about ‘community standards’ is the assumption of only one central community (patriarchal, heterosexual and usually white) and only one overarching cultural standard (ditto) to which television programming must necessarily appeal.” Riggs stated that ironically, the censorship campaign against Tongues Untied actually brought more publicity to the film than it would have otherwise received and thus allowed it to achieve its initial aim of challenging societal standards regarding depictions of race and sexuality. —Wikipedia