‘Calling to witness: complicating autobiography and narrative empathy in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied’

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Tongues Untied, Marlon Riggs’s 1989 documentary whose aim is to give voice to the diverse experiences of black gay men in the late 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis. I examine Riggs’s use of autobiographical storytelling and argue that his visual and rhetorical strategies during these moments evince the filmmaker’s hesitation to become his own subject and to allow viewers into his experiences. In other words, the formal strategies adopted during the autobiographical sequences complicate narrative empathy. The authorship of one’s own identity is an important thread in Tongues Untied, and empathetic responses may be in part a desire in viewers to participate in the authoring of or colonizing of Riggs’s represented identity. I argue that the film resists this, and, while it remains a call to witness, it is, then, a critique of viewers’ desire for narrative empathy..

KEYWORDS:

• Marlon Riggs
• Tongues Untied
• queer documentary
• experimental documentary
• autobiography
• narrative empathy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In multiple interviews, Riggs described Tongues Untied as a film primarily intended for a small audience of other black gay men, ‘Since my intended primary audience was really focused on black gay men, I didn’t mind if everybody got it.  … If others understand, fine, but making sure everyone understands was not my prerequisite in making this’ (Kleinhans and Lesage 1991, p. 7 of 12).

2 For example, a New York Times op-ed from 17 March 2012 explains recent research in neuroscience that suggests ‘that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.’ In her extensive study Empathy and the Novel, however, Suzanne Keen (2007) reviews many studies on the connection between narrative empathy and altruism, and she demonstrates that the purported beneficial effects of novels on their readers have not been proven.

3 Sheila Petty’s article, ‘Silence and Its Opposite: Expressions of Race in Tongues Untied,’ published in Documenting the Documentary ( 1989) analyzes the film’s overall structure against the structure of symphonic form.

4 Chuck Kleinhans, in ‘Ethnic Notions, Tongues Untied: Mainstreams and Margins,’ details the differences between the experimental style of Tongues Untied and Riggs’s earlier documentary, Ethnic Notions (1986), which takes a more conventional, PBS style approach to explaining and surveying the negative stereotypes of African Americans that have proliferated in American culture.

5 Phil Kloer in ‘Voices in Tongues’ Echo Filmmaker’s Experience’ published in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution quotes Riggs as saying,

I didn’t envision it for TV, because I didn’t think TV would have the courage to show it,’ he said.  … ‘To sanitize the language would be to eviscerate it--the passion, the rage, all it means to be black and gay in America would be denied. Those words are the reality of the slurs against us. (16 July 1991)

6 P.O.V.

received $250,000 of its $1.1 million budget this year [1991] from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to his regional endowment [NEA] grant [of $5,000], Mr. Riggs received $3,000 from the Film Arts Foundation, a private group in San Francisco. But he said that most of the film’s $40,000 cost came from donated equipment and volunteer help. (Prial 1991)

7 ‘The series producers of P.O.V. estimated in the early 1990s that the program could attract an audience of several million nationwide, mostly in the coveted eighteen-to-forty-five category.’ Bullert (1997), 30. (Quoted in Hallas 2009, 130).

8 In Austin’s book, performative utterances are those words that, when spoken, perform an action. For instance, when a wedding officiate says, ‘I now pronounce you …  ’ those words perform the action of marrying two individuals. For Nichols, on the other hand, a key feature of the performative documentary mode is its lack of doing something specific in favor of producing feelings in viewers (2010, 203).

9 Chris Cagle summarizes some of the reactions to Nichols’s taxonomy of documentary modes in his article, (2012), 46.

10 A number of elements of the film point to its status as a political manifesto and to its goal to call its audience, and especially its primary audience of black gay men, to action. The chant-like ‘brother to brother’ heard on the soundtrack early in the film and again near the end, speaks specifically to black gay men, asking them to work together, to acknowledge one another, and to show greater love for each other.

11 Anderst (2015) describes the ways that autobiographical narratives can engage readers’ empathy much in the same ways as fictional narratives, the more common subject in research on narrative empathy.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by t⁠he Research Foundation of The City University of New York.

Notes on contributors

Leah Anderst

Leah Anderst is Assistant Professor of English at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she is Director of the Writing Program. She also teaches film studies courses within the Master's of Liberal Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research and teaching interests include autobiography; film studies, with a focus on French film and documentary; narrative theory; and writing pedagogy. Her writing has appeared in Narrative, a/b:Auto/biography Studies, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Senses of Cinema, and Orbis Litterarum. She is the editor of an anthology titled The Films of Eric Rohmer: French New Wave to Old Master (Palgrave 2014).