The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, August 10-16
Black Is… Black Ain’t (1994)
Directed by Marlon Riggs
Riggs played a self-empowering game in his films of trying on and peeling off labels. Throughout this American artist’s brief life (which ended at age 37 due to AIDS in 1994), he aimed to understand what it meant to be both black and queer, and ultimately claimed both words while hoping that they would cancel each other out in favor of his being regarded as human. He sought reconciliation (both internal and external) with an admittedly personal urgency, and the collage films he made from snatches of poetry, music, dance, original interviews, and found footage organized around themes of identity also always included large helpings of autobiography. His grandmother’s Southern gumbo—whose heaps of diverse ingredients were combined to delicious effect—becomes the guiding metaphor for what blackness can (should?) be in Riggs’s last, 90-minute-long video, which was completed posthumously by collaborators following his death during the editing process. He knew that the end was coming, and to this end, filmed himself speaking (and even singing) from his hospital bed. His thoughts and recollections on an ongoing self-enlightenment process intermingle with appearances by Angela Davis, Essex Hemphill, bell hooks, Bill T. Jones, Cornel West, and many others seeking to break down barriers. Together, they emphasize the concept of freedom, and argue that corporeal freedom must necessarily from being free in one’s mind. The IFC Center’s screening of Black Is…Black Ain’t (whose title pays homage to Ralph Ellison) will feature a post-film discussion with the Brooklyn-born poet and prose writer R. Erica Doyle. Aaron Cutler (August 15, 8pm at IFC Center’s “Queer/Art/Film”)
