What I'm Watching #202

"Black Is... Black Ain't" is the last film that Marlon T. Riggs directed and produced. In fact, he died from complications due to AIDS during the project, and it was completed by his assistant, Nicole Atkinson. Billed as a frank look at the contradictions in African American culture, at 87 minutes, it's barely a Table of Contents. It whirls you through a montage of topics from AIDS, education, skin tonality, and religion, to suburbanization, language and definitions of cultural terms, music, manhood, and ritual. It's so all over the place it really leaves one wondering what he could have done with this topic, had he lived.

Helping him to tell the story is an army of African Americans from across the socio-economic spectrum from California to Louisiana, from South Carolina to Maryland. He takes you to jazz clubs and ghetto neighbors, to Cajun kitchens and upper middle-class suburbia in search of answers to what black is and black ain't. And mixed amongst the witnesses are cultural icons like Angela Davis and Cornell West, the poet Essex Hemphill and the dancer Bill T. Jones. He uses quotes from people like Zora Neal Hurston and clips from Louis Farrakhan speeches. It's a tour de force of a documentary in serious need of an expanded notation. And most poignant of all is the way in which he weaves into the narrative the story of his own decline in the last months of his life, while co-producer Nicole interviews him through one hospitalization to the next to the last.

Completed only in 1994, there are portions of this film that feel very distant from today. Not many, but some that seem to say, we're not a stagnant nation, and "Black" is not a fixed point, but a movable force within and without its cultural place in the greater fabric of America. Students of cultures, aficionados of history, and those who long to learn to know to grow will find this film a necessary step in their journey.