Marlon Riggs focus: Ethnic Notions (1987) and Tongues Untied (1989)

Wednesday 21st of June, 4pm in the Richard Hoggart Building cinema (Room 104)

Marlon Riggs was an experimental documentary filmmaker, activist and poet, and all three of these at the same time. His films combine archival footage with performance, poetry and dance to express that which was not privileged with a stable position in the archive, from his defiant perspective as a gay Black man. In 1994 he died tragically young, at just 37, amid the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but before he did so he created a vitally important body of work, including a number of feature-length documentaries and short films. His work stands as testament to struggles for sexual liberation, for racial justice, for recognition and survival.

Join us on Wednesday 21st June at 4:15pm (doors open at 4pm) in the Richard Hoggart Building cinema (Room 104) for two of his films: Ethnic Notions (1987) and Tongues Untied (1989). Both films are just under an hour in length, so expect the screening to finish around 6pm.

Ethnic Notions (1987) is Riggs’ first film. It traces Black American history from the antebellum period through to the 1960s. It examines a series of racial stereotypes from this period in turn, reflecting and exposing their reproduction across media, and their cascade into African-American consciousness.

Tongues Untied (1989) was intended, in Riggs’ own words, to “shatter the nation’s brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference”. In the late 1980s, ‘Silence = Death’ became a rallying cry for AIDS activism against the lethal inaction of the US government. But in Riggs’ films it means more than this: the enforced silence of black gay men, jointly oppressed by heterosexual – including black heterosexual – society, but also by white gay society.