> buckmr@marcus.its.rpi.edu (Ron Buckmire) writes:
>> dauber@sgi.com (Jeff Dauber) writes:

>>Marlon Riggs's new movie, Color Adjustment, will be on PBS's POV this
>>evening (at 10pm, I believe).  Marlon Riggs's is the person who made
>>Tongues Untied.  This time, he deals with the representation of african
>>americans on television.  It should be rather interesting.

>Interesting that POV accepted another Riggs piece! Anyway, I'm not sure if this
>is exactly his ``new movie'' since he's done a number of pieces and is working
>on another right now, I believe, with Essex Hemphill, on inter-racial gay and
>lesbian couples.

In the SF Bay Area, "Color Adjustment" will indeed show at 10:00 pm
tonight (Monday) on KQED, Channel 9.  There's a splendid piece about
Marlon Riggs in Sunday's (6/14/92) San Francisco Examiner ("Style"
section, natch :-)), by Barry Walters, one of the Examiner's queer
critics.  Walters writes:

    "What makes Riggs' films so significant is that they are
    all about nontraditional family values -- community,
    identity, difference, affirmation, filling silences,
    combatting collective self-hatred and ending denial.  They
    critique social and political morality while pointing to a
    Utopia where reason and love triumph over rhetoric and
    loathing..."

He quotes Riggs:

    "Our culture has reached the point where we can have some
    level of intelligent discourse on the subject of race
    without forcing one to be labeled as an extremist or polemic
    or militant or subversive.  However, anyone who attempts to
    look at our sexualities, and simply doesn't privilege
    heterosexuality as the onlt model to which we should all
    aspire, gets labeled and discredited."

And again:

    "My blackness is often over-shadowed by all the controversies
    around sexuality.  There's a way in which your sexuality
    becomes a marker for everything you do.  Too often we in
    black communities are just as oppressive around issues of
    sexuality and patriarchy as anyone else.

    "Among many prominent black figures, gays are completely
    castigated and seen as a testament to the pernicious ways of
    white racism, the ultimate embodiment of the emasculated
    black man.  We are no longer men, no longer black because of
    our homosexuality.

    "To me, it's more painful because we should know better.  We
    can't pretend innocence and ignorance in the way that people
    who've been privileged and who never had that kind of
    oppression inflicted upon them can.

    "We know the ways in which culture, rhetoric and politics
    serve oppression, and yet we continue to impose those very
    narrow notions of identity in such a way that we only mimic
    what the majority culture has done to us.  It's shameful."

The article mentions that Riggs's latest experimental video, "Non,
je ne regrette rien," which deals with the experiences of black
gay men with HIV, will premiere on June 28 at the Roxie Theatre in
SF, as part of the 16th San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay
Film Fes
-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
rod williams -=- pacific bell -=- san francisco -=- rjwill6@pacbell.com