MARLON RIGGS, BLACK IS...BLACK AIN'T, 1995
The final film by filmmaker Marlon Riggs, BLACK IS…BLACK AIN'T, jumps into the middle of explosive debates over Black identity. White Americans have always stereotyped African Americans. But the rigid definitions of "Blackness" that African Americans impose on each other, Riggs claims, have also been devastating…
SARA KATHRYN ARLEDGE, WHAT IS A MAN?, 1958
What Is a Man?, whose bemused shrug at that big question manages to encompass onscreen text, preexisting art, time-lapse and science photography, dance, documentary scenes, advertising satire, rhyme, song, even a game of musical chairs…
LIS RHODES, LIGHT READING, 1978
Lis Rhodes is a filmmaker and founding member of the women’s film and video distribution company Circles, established in 1979. Many of her films employ a primarily abstract language. Rhodes’s film, Light Reading, begins in darkness. A woman’s voice reads extracts of text by the American Modernist writer Gertrude Stein…