This Week’s Pick: Tongues Untied

Completed in 1989, Tongues Untied is ripe for rediscovery and still seems cutting edge twenty years later.

Innovative, poetic and devastating Marlon Riggs' powerful personal documentary on Black gay identity won numerous film festival awards in 1990 before being scheduled for national public television broadcast in July of 1991 (on the independent documentary series P.O.V.). That summer of 1991 brought virulent attacks from the conservative Right who condemned the film as "pornographic" and attacked both PBS and the NEA for supporting it.  The Atlanta Constitution described Tongues Untied as, "without a doubt the most explicit, profane program ever broadcast by a television network," while Vito Russo, writing in The Advocate, celebrated the film as, "a brilliant, innovative work of art that delivers a knock-out political punch."  In many ways, Marlon Riggs went on to say, the national media attention surrounding the broadcast fulfilled his greater goals of challenging "society's most deeply entrenched myths about what it means to be black, gay, a man, and above all, human."

Marlon Riggs, who died of AIDS in 1994, was a pioneer in the vibrant and innovative movement of queer film and video makers of color who burgeoned in the 1990s.  Tongues Untied is an unparalleled example of personal, experimental documentary filmmaking and is as inspiring today as it was then. 

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