Blu-ray Review: The Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Riggs on the Criterion Collection

It’s very much plausible, and in fact probable, that Criterion had The Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Riggs slated for release long before the New York Times issued their damning article on the dearth of black filmmakers in the venerable collection, which, when the piece was published last August, featured the works of only four African-American directors from the nearly 500 represented overall. For perspective, that accounted for roughly half of the number of Criterion-collected films by Wes Anderson alone. But the release of this career-spanning set in the aftermath of that public shaming against an institution that still, for many cinephiles, represents the ultimate in gatekeeper credibility…well, the irony is not lost. It took way too long to get to this moment.

As a whole, Riggs’s Signifyin’ Works (the moniker is the name of the nonprofit he launched to get his projects off the ground) are to this day vibrant, inquisitive, confrontational, empathetic, pedagogic landmarks in representation. They’re fearless pushbacks against the borders of documentary, essay film, and historical traditions. They’re marked by their proud otherness, even as Riggs pushed his own position within his films to increasingly intimate prominence. And, especially in the case of his touchstone work Tongues Untied, and its more ephemeral follow-ups, Affirmation and Anthem, they’re fiercely sapiosexual. And if you’re not up for the ride, Riggs seems to be saying, feel free to catch the next one.

Except that a number of bad actors did climb aboard and had plenty to say back when Tongues Untied was presented on public television, fully intact. Riggs’s legacy was, at least at the time, sucked up into the culture wars that sprang forth from the vacuum of cult personality between the twilight of Reaganomics and the still-nascent decade of Clinton, to say nothing of the still-cresting hysteria over the AIDS epidemic. Despite Riggs’s clearly cerebral intentions, he was cravenly made synonymous with artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, or later Ron Athey, an HIV-positive artist whose live performance at the Walker Art Center involving blood prints provoked performatively enraged responses from congressmen bent on hoisting up the National Endowments of the Arts as the crucible for artistic freedom. To view Tongues Untied today and reconcile it against its contemporary political context is to see just how pitilessly far back into the stone ages gargoyles like Jesse Helms intended to draw the line. As noted by film critic Michael Koresky in Film Comment, Riggs’s 1989 experimental documentary is only as “obscene” as one finds the image of one black man embracing and kissing another one.

Which isn’t all to say there’s absolutely nothing going on below the belt. Anthem, in its eight house-pulsing minutes, features poet Essex Hemphill vowing to an unseen lover, “Place your ring on my cock, where it belongs,” juxtaposed against images of a studded leather strap superimposed against the American flag and a portrait of Africa embedded within the pink triangle then most immediately recognizable as the “Silence = Death” insignia.

Riggs was scholarly above all else, but not entirely. Among the interwoven narrators layering their subjective experiences throughout Tongues Untied is a “45-year-old black gay man who enjoys, enjoys, taking dick in his rectum!” His reminiscence of a catty bus-ride encounter is usually quoted by fans right up through the kiss-off, “I’m not your bitch, your bitch is at home with your kids!” But rarely does anyone bother to also quote his immediate next observation: “We are now entering the fifth dimension of our sexual consciousness.”

Still, and dovetailing from that soundbite, it’s impossible not to imagine what Riggs might have accomplished had he not died at such a young age, or what he might have tweeted back at Lil Nas X’s profoundly note-perfect perversion of the Beyoncé-sampled Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quote, in response to the backlash that his BET Awards same-sex snog kicked up: “We teach our bottoms to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to bottoms, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the top.” Don’t mess with the snap diva, indeed!

Riggs, a Harvard graduate with a masters in journalism, was also a Berkeley professor of documentary filmmaking, and it’s almost astonishing that with that pedigree his body of work achieves the level of subjectivity that it does. This holds true even throughout the more wide-angle concerns of 1986’s Ethnic Notions and 1992’s Color Adjustment, two clear-eyed overviews of how stereotypical representations of black people have served the dominant American narrative of white supremacy. The latter is especially pointed as it moves through chronologically to the likes of such revered ’70s television shows as All in the Family, Roots, and Good Times (over a montage of Esther Rolle and John Amos arguing about making the rent, Riggs superimposes the question, “Is this positive?”).

Riggs’s career was cut short by AIDS. It wasn’t defined by it, and it’s impossible to do more than speculate as to whether its intensity was fueled by it, but it’s hard to come away from the particularly all-encompassing muchness of his final film (completed upon his death), 1994’s Black Is…Black Ain’t, and not feel the urgency that he imbued on his examination of the titular question of what embodies black identity—and, at the same time, the recognition of his passing of the torch. “I think we have such an obsession with naming ourselves because, during most of our history, we’ve been named by someone else,” muses one of his subjects, political activist Angela Davis, as Riggs stirs his catalog of interviews, historical imagery, and confessional into a symbolic and representational gumbo. Thank God there was a moment in time when he gave so many the opportunity to quite simply say their names.

Image/Sound

Marlon Riggs’s filmography was video, and it was produced in the 1980s and early ’90s, so hopefully anyone interested in this set has already adjusted their expectations on the A/V accordingly. Despite that, though, this is a remarkably handsome set. There are very few egregious limitations on display, especially with regard to the newer titles, but the video is surprisingly rich in detail, if unavoidably crushed when it comes to the range in contrast. The only moments among the seven featured titles that truly feel dog-eared are the clips from older media peppered throughout, but even in those cases their age and imperfection register as stylistic choices as much as a function of the medium. The soundtracks are presented without compression, and the worst you can say about them is that you hardly notice them.

Extras

No audio commentary tracks to be heard, but there’s more than enough to make up the difference. Criterion really pulled out the stops for this two-disc set (three on DVD). The two biggest headliners are the inclusion of an eighth title, Riggs’s 1981 thesis project Long Train Running: The Story of the Oakland Blues—which, again, shows just how much command he had of the medium right off the bat—and Karen Everett’s hour-long documentary portrait of Riggs’s life and times, I Shall Not Be Removed: The Life of Marlon Riggs, in which he explicitly says that he always knew he was destined to be great in the medium.

Beyond that, there’s a one-two introductory punch from critic K. Austin Collins, whose booklet essay goes above and beyond serving up its subject as an incontestable talent in cinema, and a 25-minute Zoom roundtable on Riggs from Criterion curatorial director Ashley Clark, speaking with filmmakers Vivian Kleiman and Shikeith (whose #Blackmendream feels like the spiritual descendent of Riggs’s work). I personally had a Proustian moment when I happened upon the included 1992 clip from PBS’s weekly LGBT newsmagazine In the Life (which I used to furtively watch back in my closeted high school days). And Riggs himself is given some extra time with his taped introductions to Tongues Untied and Color Adjustment. As if that weren’t enough, there’s a full slate of newly produced featurettes covering Riggs’s editing style, his influence on culture, and personal memories from former collaborators.

Overall

This comprehensive, vital tribute to Marlon Riggs is as essential as it is tardy, and to dive into it is to come out on the other side with a degree from the Institute of Snap!thology.