Jessie Gray
Documentary Practices
The Power of Representation Re-Claimed in Marlon Riggs’s “Color Adjustment” and “Tongues Untied”
In both documentaries “Color Adjustment” and “Tongues Untied,” the director Marlon Riggs explores the power that exists in representations of race. The film “Color Adjustment” exposes the ways African Americans have been mis-represented on television from 1948 to 1988. “Tongues Untied” uses different mediums such as poetry, dance, and personal testimony to present the cultural and political situation of gay black men. Through their use of different documentary styles, both films re-claim the power of representation for African Americans. In this paper, I will compare the different modes both films use, and how these modes contribute to the films’ overall theme. I will also explain how “Color Adjustment” relies on its indexical whammies as well as knowledge from academic sources for validation of its argument, while “Tongues Untied” is more dependent on its subject matter’s personal testimony.
“Tongues
Untied,” made in 1989, is a performative documentary because it uses theatrical
elements such as dance and poetry in the process of representing its subject
matter. The personal narratives are
presented as monologues – the individual sits alone in the middle of the
“stage” telling his story. The
subjective elements of the film make “Tongues Untied” an intimate documentary. In the film, Marlon Riggs, as well as other
black gay men, describe their own personal experiences as members of an
oppressed community. The creator of the
film is present in the documentary as he participates in describing to the
audience his personal gay history. He
tells the story of how when he was a young boy, he practiced kissing with
another boy until he got caught. He
describes how his friendship with his crush, a young white man, helped him
better accept his homosexuality. He also
describes the racism that existed in the gay community in the Castro in
In “Color Adjustment,” neither the director nor personal monologues are present in the film. Instead, the authenticity of the subject matter relies on the intellectual prestige of scholars, as well as the actors’ and producers’ personal opinions and relationships with the television shows in which they were involved. The film shows clips of television shows that are then explicated by sociologists and “cultural critics” that are assumed to be experts on racism in the media. These scholars present an intellectual command of the themes in the film, which are in the process constructed to be universal ideas. This type of knowledge is therefore disembodied because it relies on the distance the experts have from the subject matter, as well as the presumed universality of the film’s discourse. It is not explicitly made known that the themes of “Color Adjustment” rely on academic perspective; instead, it perpetuates the idea that this knowledge is Truth. Despite this drawback, however, the film does exhibit some embodied knowledge by presenting personal testimony from individuals who were involved in the television shows.
In order to better take an objective stance, “Color Adjustment” uses expository mode. Having a narrator is a major characteristic of expository documentary, and in “Color Adjustment” Ruby Dee serves as narrator. The documentary is also expository because it uses both rhetoric and images to purport an objective stance. In Introduction to Documentary, Bill Nichols makes the point that in expository documentaries, “the commentary is typically presented as distinct from the images of the historical world that accompany it. It serves to organize these images and make sense of them just as a written caption guides our attention and emphasizes some of the many meanings and interpretations of a still image” (107). The use of television clips from such television shows as “Amos and Andy,” “The Beulah Show,” “Julia,” and “The Cosby Show” serves as indexical whammy, which ultimately support the dialogue in the film. Indexical whammies are signs that bear a physical trace of what they refer to (Nichols 39-40). These clips are indexical because their authenticity relies on the audience’s assumption that they are actual clips from these television shows.
Marlon
Riggs uses different modes for these two films because he made them with
different intentions. “Color Adjustment”
was made in 1991 for Public Broadcasting Station (“Black Is…Black Ain’t”
“Tongues
Untied” was aired on P.B.S., but out of fifty stations polled, seventeen
stations opted not to play the film. Reasons
given were the frequent use of the word "fuck," a drawing of a penis,
and a scene showing two men kissing (Robertiello
3/1/05). While the film is
accessible to all types of audience members, (except for, apparently,
conservative television station directors), Riggs produced “Tongues Untied”
with the aim of empowering gay African American males, and he does so by
creating both African American and gay male gazes. For example, in the film, there is a scene of
an African American drag queen seductively leaning against a post. In order to read this scene the way it is
intended to be read, the audience member must take on a gay male gaze. “Riggs chooses not to represent the white,
dominant class in his film. This in
turn, reinforces and empowers the gay/black viewership” (Rucas
While “Color Adjustment” does not speak directly to an African American or gay male audience, the documentary does recognize its audience. Throughout the course of the film, several clips of television shows are framed by a television screen. This technique of the film reminds the audience that they too are watching television, thereby making it more difficult to be “fooled” by the film. The film also shows images of families sitting around the television, with other television clips superimposed onto the TV screen. For example, there is one scene of a stereotypical 1960s family in black and white watching superimposed images of African Americans being beaten during the Civil Rights Movement. Another example of how the film addresses the audience is how at one point, narrator Ruby Dee refers to the audience and herself as “we,” implying that there are African Americans in the audience. The film also addresses how African American audience members responded to offensive images on the television screen. One scholar describes how in response to the images of successful African Americans who’ve achieved middle class status, African American audience members wondered why these shows weren’t representing “the street.”
Not only do both of these Marlon Riggs films use techniques that address their audience, but they are both examples of how the media can re-claim the image of the African American. In “Color Adjustment,” the majority of scholars speaking on the subject are African American, thereby giving African Americans the authority to reflect on their own position in race relations. The film exposes how the media has the power to contribute to dominant thinking about racial identity, and at the same time, it embodies one way in which the media can contribute to ending racism in American society. “Color Adjustment” shows how documentary as a type of film can educate its audience about racist thinking. “Tongues Untied” achieves the same goal through a nontraditional form of documentary. Riggs experiments with performative documentary to redefine the image of the homosexual African American male. Through performance, the men in “Tongues Untied” exhibit the construction of identity. The use of theatrical elements such as rapping, poetry, dramatic posing, and dance shows how one can channel her own anger about her oppression into more positive outlets. Finally, through the use of performative documentary, Marlon Riggs is given more space to depict gay African American male bodies loving and bonding.
In conclusion, “Tongues Untied” and “Color Adjustment” are two progressive documentaries that both expose the dominant racist hegemony in American society. Riggs exemplifies how different documentary modes can be used to fulfill this task. He demonstrates the power documentary has to re-claim oppressed identity and to educate its audience members. “Tongues Untied” does this through the embodied personal testimony of gay African American males. “Color Adjustment” relies on the audience’s ability to recognize the racism in clips from television shows, as well their faith in academia. It also presents testimony from individuals directly involved in the creation of these racist programs. Ultimately, Riggs wanted his audience members to comprehend the struggle African Americans and African American gay men have faced and continue to face today. Riggs himself died of AIDS in April of 1994, leaving behind a legacy of powerful documentaries that remain imperative to the re-structuring of racial ideology.
Works Cited
“Black is…Black Ain’t.” Independent Television Source. 1 May 2005 <http://www.itvs.org/external/BIBA/bios.html>
Nichols, Bill. Blurred
Boundaries.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction
to Documentary.
Robertiello, James. “Many Stations Nix or Delay Film about Black
Gay Men.” Current.