Moving Pictures

THE BLACK GAY CINEMA OF MARLON RIGGS IS COMING OUT ON STREAMING

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

Pioneering Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs was an undergrad at Harvard when he had two realizations: He was gay, and he wanted to use film to communicate the ideas that were forming in his growing social conscience.

This month the OVID platform is bringing Riggs’ still provocative and forever beautiful filmography to a streaming service for the very first time. OVID is an online collaboration between some of the most prestigious independent film distributors in the world, and the platform’s strictly-indie slate of docs, films and international selections makes OVID feel like The Criterion Channel’s edgier, less mainstream little sister.

Riggs’ movies vary from brief shorts to short features, and their content is as experimental as their forms. Riggs’ multimedia aesthetics combine poetry, dance, still photography, text, dramatic monologues, singing and interview footage to create experimental documentaries that capture not only actual people and their real stories, but also the sensual experiences of love and activism in the American gay communities that struggled for liberation in the middle of the deadly AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

Riggs focused his lens on the experience of the Black gay men like himself. One of the Riggs’ primary themes is the persistent homophobia found in many Black communities. But he was also quick to skewer that part of the gay community that ostracized HIV positive men before learning how to care for and champion them.

All people of color can be “othered,” but what if you’re also a gay man? What if you’re a person of color, who is also a gay

man, who is also HIV positive? Riggs’ cinema is intersectional in the smartest way: his subjects aren’t allowed to be cyphers standing-in for some suppos edly-monolithic social or racial group. The people in Riggs’ films are specific individuals that any viewer can recognize as unique people relating unique experiences. Riggs understood that he had to push past clumsy labels so that viewers could recognize the humanity they shared with him and the people he filmed. The results are movies that can be simultaneously novel and familiar, shocking and reassuring. Tongues Untied is Riggs’ masterpiece: a feast of multi media cinema that investigates the complicated intersection of romance and activism for people whose relationships took place between the twin brutalities of police and plague. Tongues Untied demonstrates that activism and being sexually active were practically inseparable for Black gay men in the 1980s.

The film opens with the poetic chant of “brother to brother” repeating over slow motion black-and-white images of black men shooting hoops on a blacktop basketball court.

The poetry recited on the soundtrack contrasts with title card texts of words like “murder” and “crack” and footage of riots and looting. Tongues Untied is a film about speaking truth to power when it comes to race and sexual orientation. And an instructional video that gives viewers lessons on how to snap their fingers like a true diva is the most iconic sequence in Riggs’ catalog.

A lot of Riggs’ work was made for television and many of the works on OVID this month were shot on video and first aired on PBS. The look of the medium dates these movies, but not in a bad way — it’s a concrete reminder that these are genuine documents from the front lines of both the gay liberation movement and the AIDS crisis in America in the 1980s. More importantly, they’re the Black version of those revolutions.

And most importantly they’re Marlon Riggs’ version. Riggs and the men confessing, caressing, dancing, singing and declaring in the frames of these films won’t soon be forgotten. Riggs died of complications from AIDS in 1994. He was 37.

'Marlon Riggs: 7 Films' is currently streaming on OVID. Go to ovid. tv to start a free 14-day trial

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.