Marlon Riggs - Themes and Style

Themes and Style

Riggs's 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.”

According to Nichols, Marlon Riggs used the Performative Mode for films such as Anthem and Tongues Untied. His use of poetry and performance conveys the "affective and emotion-laden quality of performative Documentary. Tongues Untied is another highly personal, emotional, and artistic form of the Performative Mode that Marlon's films evoke.