When It Rains. 1995. USA. Written and directed by Charles Burnett. With Ayuko Babu, Florence Bracy, Kenny Merritt. 35mm. 13 min.
Black Is… Black Ain't. 1995. USA. Directed by Marlon Riggs. With Cornel West, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Essex Hemphill, Bill T. Jones, Marlon Riggs. DCP. 87 min.
Charles Burnett’s classic short film When It Rains condenses his usual gift for folkloric parable into a tight, aphoristic story about a jazz musician who helps a local mother facing eviction to stay in her home. The setup becomes an occasion to explore the ties between these people and others—a portrait of a community that doubles as a veritable safety net, precarious and hard-won though it is.
Pioneering Black, queer documentarian Marlon Riggs’s final documentary, Black Is… Black Ain’t is like the summation of all of his work to that point: a counterhistory and interrogation of cultural symbols, the media, language, sex, and Riggs’s own biography as a queer Black man growing up in the Gulf Coast—a childhood that routinely found him being confronted with competing, often incompatible definitions of what Blackness even is.
It all comes back to Riggs’s grandma’s gumbo, a rich, pliant metaphor for Blackness writ large: a distinct, slow-cooked combination of flavors and textures that is always more than the mere sum of its parts. Riggs, who died of AIDS before completing the film, appears on camera dispensing his trademark mix of personal storytelling, vibrant ideas, and sharp critiques. Like much of his earlier work, Black Is… proves an occasion to expound on the differences between the promises America makes and the fates it actually enables. Journeys back to familial territory, in New Orleans, prove just as poignant as interviews from late in the filmmaker’s life, as he neared death.