30 Days of Queer Cinema - Day 24 | Black Is...Black Ain't

Marlon Riggs' final film was also perhaps his most all-encompassing and definitive statement on race and sexuality. Shot while he was dying of AIDS-related complications, and assembled by his team after his death, Black Is...Black Ain't examines blackness in all its many facets, confronting colorism, homophobia, historical stereotypes, and historical ideas of what it means to be Black in America. Riggs also examines how sexuality intertwines with race, speaking directly to the camera from his hospital bed; still questioning, still probing, still interrogating the complex notions of race and sexuality and the intersections between, in what is essentially a sprawling summation of his life's work. It is an incredible, essential work, one that purposefully leaves more questions than it answers as it seeks a definition to something that means many different things to many different people, all thought the lens of the many ingredients in his mother's gumbo. It's a completely masterful work, a work of avant-garde brilliance whose prismatic lens lends its subject a breathtaking scope.