The Rage to Live: Queer Film Legacies and the Work of David Wojnarowicz and Marlon Riggs
Screening Dates
  • January 31, 2020 7:45
Event

Marlon Riggs’s final film — completed posthumously by friends and collaborators after the filmmaker’s AIDS-related death — stands as a celebration of his legacy and a testament to his vision and socio-political commitment. Bringing together many of the central themes of his career with unprecedented urgency and determination, and revealing an artist engaged in a titanic struggle for equality and respect and against oppression and stigmatization, the film is a compassionate and rigorous examination of both the construction and misrepresentation of Black American identity. Riggs, in deteriorating health, appears to pour his every last breath into the effort. Mixing, in typical fashion, diverse styles and genres, he blends music, performance, reportage, and poetry to create an artful visual essay that ultimately aims at dismantling the pillars of racism, sexism, and homophobia, while highlighting the multiple shades and varied self determined identities that Blackness addresses and encompasses.

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