Film’s Silent Erasure of the Gay Black Man
By Claire Ernandes, Edited by Matthew Chan
Social change has come a long way in regards to race, sexuality and gender. Despite this, the gay black man is still erased in history, media and film: “rendered invisible” (Tongues Untied). This taboo is what Marlon Riggs exposes and deconstructs in his short documentary Tongues Untied (1989), that testifies the gay black man’s experience in the bustling environment of New York City during the AIDS crisis. On top of its empowering subject matter, the film distinguishes itself by repurposing techniques that are not usually associated with documentaries and therefore, revolutionizes and experiments with the genre as a whole. Another rare example of this occurrence is Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016), that uses narrative fiction as a way to immerse the viewer in the realistic experience of a black gay man’s journey from childhood to adulthood in the vibrant atmosphere of Liberty City in Miami. Though these two pieces take place and are produced in vastly different locations, times and climates, both illustrate how film can use intricate cinematic techniques to explore an identity severely underlooked before. One, an experimental documentary, and the other, a truthful work of fiction, these two films are binded in a fascinating way, through their impact on making the black gay male experience universal.
The analysis of sound showcases how both films delve into the intersectionality of gay black men. Firstly, Marlon Riggs utilizes intermittent silence as an ambivalent embodiment of entrapment and protection. As Essex Hemphill proclaims in his poetry, “silence is a way to grin and bear it, a way not to acknowledge how much my life is discounted each day” (Tongues
2 Untied). Riggs amplifies this by placing the asynchronous sound of a constant repeating heartbeat throughout his film, which carries multiple layers. It undeniably expresses the ominous presence of the AIDS crisis, with a strong and steady rhythm that reminds the viewer how precious health is. On another note, this sound illustrates the basic human need for survival and the pressure gay black men in America face from merely existing. The combination of this binary rhythm with the absence of any other sound, creates an artificial silence that establishes an unsettling atmosphere in what is most normal: a heartbeat. The viewer is plunged into Marlon Riggs’ body and experience and there is an eeriness to this silence that is hostile: “silence is my shield, it crushes, silence is my cloak, it smothers, silence is my sword, it cuts both ways, silence is the deadliest weapon” (Essex Hemphill, Tongues Untied).
Moreover, Riggs builds a push and pull effect with the audience in a teasing, almost demeaning way. This is what Leah Anderst explores in her article Calling to witness: complicating autobiography and narrative empathy in Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied, that highlights the ambiguous perspective of the director on the authorship of his film, “swinging between revelation and concealment.” Paradoxically, this prolonged silence is used to initiate conversation. The absence of audio is positioned suitably for dramatic moments, triggered by dark questions in which a black gay man considers his own erasure from society: “What future lies in our silence?” (Essex Hemphill, Tongues Untied). Along with making the screen cut to black in these sustained periods of time, Marlon Riggs gives the audience time to pause and think about the content he is presenting. This attributes an interpretative property to his documentary, experimenting with the self-referential aspects of the genre for the viewer, producing a cut-off from an almost inhumane reality. Additionally, it ingeniously ties racial aspects of the subjects’ identity: the black color of their skin, to these brutal moments. Hemphill utters “the beat was my salvation..led me past broken dreams, solitude, fragments of identity, to a new place, a home not of peace [...] but truth, simple, shameless, brazen truth” (Tongues Untied). Thus, this simple heartbeat is an example of how the film uses sound and the absence thereof to remain impactful, being truthful to the gay, black and male experience. The equivalence in Barry Jenkins’ work of this profound silence is the recurring presence of a breeze: “It comes through the hood and everything just stops for a second, cause everyone wanna feel it. Everything just gets quiet […] it’s like all you can hear is your own heartbeat” (Kevin, Moonlight). Presented with the low hum of white noise in the film, the breeze transfigures into a universal pause, even in the obscure environment of the hood. Both sounds are indicative of a temporary freedom, but, in their mysticality they appear sinister.
Undoubtedly, Moonlight uses sound and the lack thereof as well, to link performance and corporeality to the visualization of the alienation that black gay men face. Indeed, Chiron, the main character in Jenkins’s narrative, is mainly characterized by an expressive silence throughout the course of his life. An example of this is in the first chapter, where Little is pushed to find a hiding place from his bullies. On top of this physical encasement and entrapment, growing synchronous sounds of the other kids throwing debris at his window surge in the audience’s ears while Little covers his own ears as a form of isolation within a confining space. This instance of forced disconnection is illustrated sonically and shows how sound can contribute to the effect of visual performance. When Chiron is brought to the principal in chapter two after breaking his silence through violence, the volume of the principal’s speech gradually reduces until it becomes fully mute, manifesting Chiron’s dissociation from reality.
Understanding the multiple functions that the film’s sound design carries pushes this observation further. Firstly, sound has the role of immersing the viewer in the environment of Liberty City. This is where, in contrast to Riggs’ piece that mainly uses asynchronous sounds to contribute to the stylization of his film, diegetic sounds are used to make the story as credible as possible, such as the blaring sound of the horn of a train in the scene where boys are playing football in the grass. Inserted discontinuously, this blow overlaps with the end of a panning shot of other boys glaring at Little, triggering the next tracking handheld shot of Little running that carries abrupt movement and disrupts the scene.
This is where sound’s second functionality can also be perceived since, on top of accomplishing a more realistic atmosphere, sound interplays with cinematographic techniques to capture the subjectivity of its performance in its fabricated reality. Similarly to Tongues Untied, this creates a sort of push and pull effect, but here between objective reality and subjective truth and in looser terms, realism and formalism. Yet, the accentuation of Chiron’s reality is associated with a certain dissonance, partially due to the diametric relation between sound and editing. Along with synchronous sounds, underscoring is presented in the scene to almost contradict its visual elements. A harmonious, ballet-like symphony can be heard during that same shot of boys glaring at Little in a threatening way. It seems misplaced here within the context of the scene, a masculine game of football, and shows how out of place Chiron feels, with the overwhelming sonic quality of dissonance to translate his bitter experience.
Contrary to its preconceived notions of genre and to the melo declamation in Tongues Untied, Moonlight is not driven by dialogue but by its stylization. An example of this is the fact that Jenkins always incorporates a sort of blurriness one way or another in most of his shots. Whether it be through the rack focus of the lens or actual camera movement, the pacing is shaken up through either handheld or stationary quality. Though this is also partially intended to sophisticate Jenkins’s otherwise long shots, all of these moments amount to Chiron’s distancing from the audience and his unclear perception. With a similar function to Riggs’s heartbeat, the longevity of each shot creates this ambiguous hesitance, but differentiates itself from the fast intervallic pacing in Tongues Untied that consists of overlapping voices and shots. For instance, the first shot of the film takes place for the span of a whole two and a half minutes Though featuring a dialogue between Juan and his drug worker, Jenkins reorients the viewer’s expected way of seeing a conversation take place in a shot-reverse-shot fashion and instead uses a disorienting panning shot that contributes to the realist desire of wanting one’s work to appear untouched, uncut and thus uncomfortable, putting the audience on edge. As a performative documentary, performance is one of the primordial elements in Tongues Untied and appears in a way that diverges from Moonlight. It has the qualities of experimental and personal filmmaking but with a strong emphasis on its impact on the audience. Compared to Jenkins’ film, that fabricates movement in almost every shot by tracking the subject to make its content appear more seamless, Riggs creates movement corporeally. He uses his own body, looking directly into the lens, which emphasizes the relation between the creator and viewer in his film. In other words, Riggs uses performance contrastingly to create space for the abstract in his non-fiction work. Indeed, the body is used as a vessel for identity mainly through dance, such as in the first scene that shows glimpses of him naked in the frame of a medium shot. This can be interpreted in many ways. Riggs uses an expressive medium of art to combat masculinity and change what the word “masculine” denotes, similarly to the football scene in Moonlight. But instead of taking the lens of the subject’s perception, Marlon Riggs’ bare body serves as a canvas for the viewer’s observations. At the same time, dance is also identified ironically as a “ticket to dissimilation” (Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied) and linked to the exotification of black men. Reduced to his craft, Marlon Riggs conflictingly appears dehumanized and lifted free. The film goes through multiple stages to illustrate these multidimensions of intersectionality.
Early on, in Tongues Untied, homosexuality is evoked through the focus of the drag queen and the performative element of snapping, that is simultaneously used as an episode of collective experience and a rhythmic sequence to enable movement. The other three layers of the film: race, masculinity and religion, are also exteriorized with the use of pervasive speech through persistent poetic prose as a form of inner-verse: “anger unvented becomes pain, unspoken becomes rage, released becomes violence cha cha cha” (Tongues Untied). Even these words have a corporality to them in their rhythmic pace that embodies this repetitive dance of destructive behavior. This phonetic use of speech and language shows that this film is dominated by sound. The passage from Joseph Beam’s “Brother to Brother: Words From the Heart” is a crucial dialogue that expresses anger, hurt, pain, love and seduction while commenting on the black church and Christianity with its choral chants that, just like the overwhelming use of close-ups of mouths and overlapping voices in the film, ties the intersectional wave of deception towards black gay men.
Both works deliberately go against what their respective genres insinuate, whether it be a documentary that does not content itself to chronicle statements and B-roll or a work of fiction and drama that is so stylized to the point where it immerses you fully into the reality of its content. Through the complex use of sound and its relation to editing, both amplify visual components to capture the viewer’s attention, though Tongues Untied carries pervasive speech through a persistent poetic monologue and inner verse, whereas Moonlight is characterized by a reduced dialogue that leaves room for its cinematographic stylization. Silence is applied to embody the conflict gay black men face regularly: Should they stay silent and therefore complicit in their erasure to society, or break the silence, untie their tongues and risk the cost of getting cut?
Works Cited
Anderst, Leah Routledge. 'Calling to witness: complicating autobiography and narrative empathy in Marlon Riggs's Tongues Untied', Studies in documentary film, 2019, Vol.13 (1), p.73-89. PDF.
LeBlanc, Robert. ‘Representing Postmodern Marginality in Three Documentary Films’, CLCWeb : Comparative literature and culture, 2009, Vol.11 (2), p1-10. PDF.
Moonlight. Directed by Barry Jenkins, distributed by A24, Camera Film. 2016. English; United States; 1h51min.
Pincheon, Bill Stanford. ‘Invisible Men Made Visible: Review of Tongues Untied’, Black camera: the newsletter of the Black Film Center/Archives, 1991, Vol.6 (1), p.5-6. PDF. p.73-89. PDF.
Tongues Untied. Directed by Marlon Riggs, distributed by Frameline, California Newsreel, 1989. English; United States; 55 min.