As disturbing as the content discussed in a film like this is, the discussion of said content is extremely important, and Marlon Riggs executes his discussion and dissection of this topic expertly. Throughout this documentary, Riggs looks into what drove the depictions & stereotypes of Black people in America, from the 1800s even extending to the years many people would assume these ideas were long gone. These images were meant to be taken a certain way, typically as entertainment, carefully constructed and encoded so as to communicate a certain message to their audiences. This process of encoding and Riggs’ subsequent decoding is an idea discussed at length by the writer Stuart Hall, who introduced 3 different ways of receiving a given message: dominant/hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional. Through this documentary, Riggs doesn’t take anything at face value in this film. Rather, he takes the more oppositional approach: he sees the given message, sees both its meaning and how it was meant to be received, and dissects every contextual detail behind that message, its creation and continuation. It was kind of crazy to see just how calculated the different ways Black people were depicted was, how quickly it could change based on what had changed socially, and how easily that change was taken.
A lot of people get really uncomfortable talking about this type of history, but I feel like it’s not supposed to be comfortable. You can’t really look at these types of images and not feel disturbed. And that’s sort of the point I feel? Like, these ideas and depictions are horrifying, hearing what they were and how they were used is awful, but it’s still really really important. So many people would rather avoid talking about it, just acknowledge that it happened and it was bad but now it’s over, but if we brush over the deeper issues and specifics within these cartoons and dolls and performances, we can’t fully understand just how deep and engrained these ideas are into American society and truly try to uproot them from our own work or circles if it starts to resemble work like those. Even good-intentioned art can often draw upon past caricatures simply because of how crazy deep it goes in our culture. I think that’s sort of the point Riggs was trying to make in the final shot panning over all the different art and depictions of Black people in (then) modern times, even extending past this movies’ production and release. If we don’t learn from the past we might end up recreating it.
As disturbing as the content discussed in a film like this is, the discussion of said content is extremely important, and Marlon Riggs executes his discussion and dissection of this topic expertly. Throughout this documentary, Riggs looks into what drove the depictions & stereotypes of Black people in America, from the 1800s even extending to the years many people would assume these ideas were long gone. These images were meant to be taken a certain way, typically as entertainment, carefully constructed and encoded so as to communicate a certain message to their audiences. This process of encoding and Riggs’ subsequent decoding is an idea discussed at length by the writer Stuart Hall, who introduced 3 different ways of receiving a given message: dominant/hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional. Through this documentary, Riggs doesn’t take anything at face value in this film. Rather, he takes the more oppositional approach: he sees the given message, sees both its meaning and how it was meant to be received, and dissects every contextual detail behind that message, its creation and continuation. It was kind of crazy to see just how calculated the different ways Black people were depicted was, how quickly it could change based on what had changed socially, and how easily that change was taken.
A lot of people get really uncomfortable talking about this type of history, but I feel like it’s not supposed to be comfortable. You can’t really look at these types of images and not feel disturbed. And that’s sort of the point I feel? Like, these ideas and depictions are horrifying, hearing what they were and how they were used is awful, but it’s still really really important. So many people would rather avoid talking about it, just acknowledge that it happened and it was bad but now it’s over, but if we brush over the deeper issues and specifics within these cartoons and dolls and performances, we can’t fully understand just how deep and engrained these ideas are into American society and truly try to uproot them from our own work or circles if it starts to resemble work like those. Even good-intentioned art can often draw upon past caricatures simply because of how crazy deep it goes in our culture. I think that’s sort of the point Riggs was trying to make in the final shot panning over all the different art and depictions of Black people in (then) modern times, even extending past this movies’ production and release. If we don’t learn from the past we might end up recreating it.
