Marlon Riggs' Black Is...Black Ain't

In Marlon Riggs' final film Black Is...Black Ain't, he likens the black community to a big ol' pot of Louisiana gumbo that simmers on his mother's stove. "Everything that you can imagine can be put into gumbo," says Riggs explaining that while the ingredients are many and varied, each with their own individual taste, the roux -- the stock-- is that undefined quantity that holds it all together. Through Riggs' signature style-- a cinematic gumbo of dance, music and poetry with the more traditional modes of documentary film like archival footage, still photography and talking heads, the film probes the politics of exclusion within the black community. While the picture is unique in its lyrical, artistic style, it is also unique in that it addresses issues of bias within the black community. As it chronicles Riggs' declining health from AIDS, "Black Is...Black Ain't is the filmmaker's' last will and testament to his community. Riggs speaks from his hospital bed to the camera: "I'm wasting my time if I'm not devoting every moment to thinking about how I can communicate to black people so we can start to look at each other, start to see each other." By turns, sad and jubilant, "Black Is...Black Ain't presents an appeal for both pluralism and unity. Multi-award winning filmmaker Riggs came to national attention when his work was targeted by Pat Buchanan. Buchanan' campaign used a clip from "Tongues Untied, Riggs' celebration of black gay life, to reveal how Bush was "investing our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art too shocking to show." Riggs' responded in the op-ed page of the New York Times: "the specter of Willie Horton has returned, but this time, at least in Mr. Buchanan's distorted view, he is the sadomasochistic homosexual dancing shamelessly in the street." The 1989 film garnered numerous distinctions including Best Video in the New York Documentary Festival. Riggs also won an Emmy for "Ethnic Notions and the 1992 Peabody for "Color Adjustment. Riggs had just become a tenured professor of Journalism at University of California at Berkeley when he selected two of his former students, Nicole Atkinson and Christiane Badgley, to work on the project with him. Eight months into the project, he developed full-blown AIDS and Atkinson, his co-producer and co-director Badgley were asked to take on the daunting task of completing the film should Riggs be unable to. When Riggs died, Atkinson had over 100 hours of footage with which to construct what would be the filmmaker's legacy. "Some of us thought it would never get done," remembers Atkinson. "In the back of our minds there was this feeling of hopelessness because this is a personal film and the person who it's about is no longer here. After he passed, what helped us complete the film was that the whole community knew that this film was being made and knew that this was important to Marlon and we got a tremendous amount of support. Just knowing that people were waiting for it to be completed helped us to finish it." Now, a year and a month since Riggs' death, his family and friends experience a bittersweet pleasure at seeing Marlon up on the screen. "Its good to see him again," said Jack Vincent, Marlon's partner of 15 years. In 1992, the two became legally recognized as domestic partners in Berkeley. His mother, who resides in Virginia, expressed that "at times its very difficult for me to watch the film, it just epitomizes so much the essence of Marlon in his struggle." According to Vincent, the film was Riggs' effort "to meld all the different pieces of Marlon into one." At The Black Filmmakers awards ceremony last month in Oakland, Riggs was recognized posthumously for the project. Earlier in the year, the documentary received the Filmmakers Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival. The film garnered a Golden Gate award at San Francisco International Film Festival this year. The film raises the questions, "Are you black enough?" "Are you too black?" and "Black like who?" "There are a lot of films about racism but nobody's ever talked about the internal conflict that goes on within the community," said Atkinson. "The oppression doesn't necessary have to come from outside of the community, its also within," she said. "There are certain issues that we might talk about amongst ourselves in the black community but we don't want the whole world to know about. To our detriment we never really talk about it in a public setting." In "Black Is...Black Ain't writers and theorists from Angela Davis to Cornel West give their two cents, as do performers like Bill T. Jones and poet Wayne Corbitt. "I cannot go home as who I am," pronounces Corbitt. Vincent explained that this was how Marlon had felt much of his life. "And which home would he go to? It wasn't often that he got a sense that all of him would be welcomed," said Vincent of Riggs' recognition that, as a black, gay and eventually HIV+ man in an interracial relationship, he was never fully included in any one community. "He didn't find a place where all of his parts belonged." Vincent (who is white) suggests that this was exacerbated by his and Riggs' inter-racial relationship. The complication, said Vincent, "is squared. It's double the trouble." Ironically, Vincent feels that the final film itself does not reflect the spirit of inclusion since he himself appears nowhere in the completed project. Vincent said that while he is now "beyond resentment" he was initially "stunned" that he was not included in the film. "People were not always sure how to take Marlon as a whole person." "I think interracial dating is a valid issue and it is a sore point in the black community," responded Atkinson. "But Marlon never talked to me about Jack's inclusion. We were just working with what Marlon left us with. Throughout all of Riggs' very personal projects, he has never commented on his own inter-racial relationship. And still, some of the most absorbing moments in this film come from the complex analysis of homophobia and sexism in black culture. A clip from Eddie Murphy's live comedy film Raw illustrates a stunning example of black machismo and misogyny. Still later we see Louis Farrakhan's blatantly sexist defense of convicted rapist Mike Tyson who, "like a rooster in a hen house," was compelled to exhibit `naughty' behavior. Such behavior, theorizes Michele Wallace, author of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwomen, results from a history of black men's emasculation, first by slavery then by institutionalized oppression and the Hollywood image of the shuffling, comical sambo. Cultural critic bell hooks, speaks with comic colloquialisms of black culture's "worship of the phallus" as a reclamation of black male dignity. Thus, the notion of male vulnerability, let alone effeminacy or homosexuality is tantamount to a travesty and betrayal of black prestige. "One of the things I've always admired about Marlon's work," said Atkinson, "is the way he puts things in context . Even though this film focuses on the internal discriminatory practices in the black community, there's also some discussion of how this may have come about." Riggs' historic consciousness is revealed in Vincent's perception that "Marlon didn't see himself as an isolated individual but a person with a past whose life was given a certain context by individuals who had made a difference. And he called them by name. He talked about James Baldwin and Audrey Lorde, the poet and Harriet Tubman, as people who mattered in terms of making history and changing lives. As audiences watch this movie, Riggs himself becomes a key ingredient to this collective history. Gene Riggs, Marlon's' mother, who appears in the film with her own mother, finds gumbo an apt metaphor. "All the ingredients are there, they don't loose their flavor, they complement one another. The things that make the flavor very unique are all the things that sometimes we think divide us."