Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill in Riggs’s short film Anthem. Image provided by Signifyin Works and Frameline Distribution.
Posted by Ben Walters, 5 April 2019, 11:43am
“Brother to brother, brother to brother,” runs the opening narration of Tongues Untied, Marlon Riggs’s 1989 film poem-documentary-essay about Black gay American life. “Brother to brother, brother to brother.” It’s an intonation or incantation rather than a locator or contextualiser, intended not to orient an outside audience to an unfamiliar subject but to recognise and catalyse membership of a marginalised community, to establish peer-to-peer connection – it could almost be a radio call signal – and to insist on the value of speaking one to another to acknowledge the reality of experiences that are so comprehensively framed out of mainstream culture as to feel unreal even to those who live them. How, under such conditions, to make a viable personal identity? And how to connect with others, near and far, similar and different, living and dead, and work together toward better worlds?
That so little has changed, in terms of the supremacist structures undergirding society, in the decades since Riggs made his film powerfully supports its inclusion in this year’s BFI Flare London LGBTQ+ Film Festival (complemented by a programme of Riggs’s subsequent shorts). Tongues Untied is intimate and capacious, urgently invested in the health crisis of the moment of its making yet reflective of deeper lineages of belonging and erasure: Riggs himself understood his young life was nearing its end but notes in the film that “while I wait, older, stronger rhythms resonate inside me”. Tongues Untied now beats out one such rhythm itself, of resilience and outrage and criticality and love. “How did you do it?” the poet Dean Atta implored Riggs during the panel following the screening, noting the ongoing need for such work. “Teach us!”
At Flare this year, I found myself coming back to ideas around the challenges and opportunities of selfhood and connection, individual subjectivity and collective action, particularly by drawing on the past, and through the still-dominant lens of US culture. Transatlantic influences were clear, for instance, in Trans Creatives at the Movies, a fun and thoughtful panel event at which five British contributors described the unexpected trans inspiration scavenged from mainstream titles showcasing the power of glamour, such as Gypsy and Mildred Pierce, and the malleable masculinities of Bollywood and empire. And the white-bread magical transformation of Big had never seemed so queer.
The shorts package Making History showcased engagements with more overtly queer aspects of the past. Framing Agnes brought together several noted trans filmmakers (including Angelica Ross, Silas Howard, Zackary Drucker and Max Wolf Valerio) to reanimate disarmingly contemporary-seeming unearthed medical testimony from US trans people in the 1950s, while Meet Me Under the Clock literally animated the stories of a preeminent Toronto gay bar known for its annual drag party. Away from urban institutions, another Canadian title, This Year, Here atmospherically evoked what it called “the other dyke history of country roads and weekends away”.
Both Wicked Women and Pirate Boys, meanwhile, archived with wit and verve the post-punk alt trans and queer scenes of the late twentieth century, revisiting culture wars and DIY cultures that seem at once distant and current. And Nirvana emotively illustrated India’s Koovagam festival of trans pride and its value to some contemporary participants – though I’d have liked to learn more about the deeper history of this generations-old festival.
The lineages and techniques of Ballroom community – referenced in Tongues Untied – were explored in Deep in Vogue, a documentary focused on Manchester’s contemporary Ballroom houses. There was a certain ambivalence here: the power of Ballroom to offer support and self-fashioning to marginalised people shone through but more space could have been given to exploring the implications of its adoption by a largely white UK scene and less to TV-style fly-on-the-wall observation. Still, it credibly foregrounded lived queer experience.
By contrast, the British feature Tucked rang false. Set in Brighton, the film centred on the friendship between two drag performers, a septuagenarian straight transvestite and a non-binary twentysomething person of colour. Such lives are rarely seen on screen, let alone in the context of supportive and affectionate friendships, and such representation might be welcomed per se. The characterisation and dialogue felt unmoored from queer experience, however, and the film’s ethical and dramatic force was conservative, linking meaningful living to straight marriage and family ties and uncritically indulging a range of queasy, even reactionary expressions. It gave the film an uncomfortably regressive and exploitative tinge.
If the above titles focused on community and friendship, others offered intriguing perspectives on the contingency and fluidity of individual identity. I saw several films engaged with that most visible type of queer, the successful gay white American male. Yet the logics of capital and celebrity, they suggested, can wreak havoc even with the most privileged among the marginalised. Making Montgomery Clift was an intriguing documentary about the Hollywood star, directed by his nephew. The film foregrounded the independence of mind that allowed Clift to sidestep the kind of studio contract that constrained many other queer stars and argued that his reputation as a tortured closet case was essentially a homophobic projection – the immune system of a normative culture trying to smother an anomalous organism. Clift’s ability to resist the blandishments of stardom might have been related to his comfortable upbringing.
Another fascinating documentary, Halston, profiled someone of more modest origins. It framed the iconic fashion designer as an ultimately tragic figure whose social and material aspirations were bound up with his need to find mainstream validation through the expression of his extraordinary talent. And what, from such a position, could be more validating – or more Faustian – than literally selling your name to the highest corporate bidder?
The dramatic feature Mapplethorpe, meanwhile, though strangely flat in its overall affect, noted the provocative artist’s jealous sense of his carefully cultivated reputation as a commodity. I was never particularly convinced by Matt Smith’s attempts to portray the photographer’s fears or desires but I did buy his indignation at the idea that Mapplethorpe’s brother’s budding art career might dilute the stock value of the family name.
The festival’s closing film, Jeremiah Terminator Leroy, also based on real life, offered a case study in absurdly extending the logic of the capacities of commodified public identity to act as a vehicle for recognition and success, even when untethered to an actual individual human being. Enthusiastically and lucratively embraced by the culture industry, the invented persona of JT LeRoy was a young author of fiction whose work was written by one person, whose embodied presence was provided by another and whose sexuality and gender identity were themselves radically unfixed. The situation, like Halston’s, exposed fault lines around the construction and exploitation of personal identity in American popular culture – including the implicit value attached to someone who can be framed as sui generis, without peers or precedents – and ended in tears.
Much food for thought at Flare 2019, then, around the uses of the queer past, the challenges facing both queer subjectivity and queer belonging, and the dangers of championing the individual over the collective.
Sight and Sound have also belatedly uploaded as a podcast the conversation I shared with Tara Brown and Keith Jarrett about last year’s BFI Flare 2018, including discussion of Good Manners, Love Simon and Alaska is a Drag, among others. You can listen to it here.
