Marlon Riggs: A Voice for Many

Marlon Riggs was a documentary filmmaker, poet, professor and social activist. He used film to engage with different parts of his identity, and through that became the voice for certain marginalized identities such as AIDS victims, gay men, and overall the black community.

When thinking about Riggs, I was very interested in this idea of constructed connections in relation to the process and product of his films. In a postmodern moment when marginal figures both demanded and resisted on-screen representation, Riggs's films' engage with his identity as a marginalized person who had the option of choosing to be seen or not. And in this process of choosing, he also choose to uplift others. 

Riggs's films allowed him to become subject, and the voice of the voiceless, and he still remained humble in these roles because he knew he did not have the answers. Rather, he was simply engaging and re-engaging with identity as performance.