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Black Is… Black Ain’t, an excerpt

In this 90-second sequence from BLACK IS… BLACK AIN’T, Director Marlon Riggs mixes multiple formats to show various viewpoints. As viewers, we are forced to engage as the sequence moves from inflammatory archival footage of Louis Farrakhan cross-cut with archival footage of Mike Tyson judging a beauty pageant, to interview footage from bell hooks (which anchors the clip), to an interpretive dance piece performed by Bill T. Jones. Riggs uses sound to further layer our experience with the repetition of bell hooks’ voice wanting to “witness” what was happening to her mother (hooks begins this clip after finishing a story of her father kicking her mother out of the house) and the selection of Queen Latifah’s U.N.I.T.Y. as the soundtrack of a community coming apart. The clip ends with Riggs’ voice telling us that manhood, in his eyes, incorporates femininity as well.

BLACK IS… BLACK AIN’T is blunt and unabashedly brave, a scathing yet loving examination of racism, sexism and homophobia within the black community. Directed by Riggs, it was completed posthumously by his co-producer Nicole Atkinson and co-director/editor Christiane Badgley after Riggs died of complications from HIV in 1994. His entire body of work, including ETHNIC NATIONS and TONGUES UNTIED, consistently pushed the comfort level for Americans of all colors forcing us to examine the images we hold of one another.

~ Angela Tucker

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Thanks for posting this clip. It reminds me how powerful his work is. Marlon Riggs attended the 1988 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar as a young filmmaker where he was inspired to make “Tongues Untied” and wrote: “It was, looking back, an unprecedented, seminal experience! Every idea I’d previously held dear about the media was assaulted, and began to crumble… Nearly all that has been heralded as virtuous in [my films] can be attributed to Flaherty.”

Posted on Feb 3, 2010 by Mary Kerr

This is well constructed and edited I really like the enigma created with the representation of the half naked man and the repetitive visual cut back to him who at the beginning he has his arms crossed as if handcuffed (which I think alludes to the enslaving of blacks) but gradually his naturality is revealed and at the end this is emphasised by the juxtaposition of the narration “when you can be both comfortably then you have achieved what ever it is i think it is to be a man which is human” I like the message here and I will use this for my A2 media studies. :D

Posted on Feb 5, 2010 by Samangua kitondo

about 90SC

Each month MediaRights.org will select a video clip from a social-issue piece of media and present it to its visitors to watch, comment-on and forward to their peers. Clips will be no longer than ninety seconds. As social-issue media increases on television, in theaters and on-line, we want to highlight the art of this important content. Stay tuned each month to see which film and what scene we are highlighting!