Marlon Riggs - Film Career

Film Career

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 19th and early 20th 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 HIV 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 1992 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. 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 , 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.

Shortly after completing "Color Adjustment", Riggs began work on what was to be his final film Black Is. . . Black Ain't, a project that 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)