Film’s Silent Erasure of the Gay Black Man
The absence of audio is positioned suitably for dramatic moments, triggered by dark questions in which a black gay man considers his own erasure from society: “What future lies in our silence?” (Essex Hemphill, Tongues Untied). Along with making the screen cut to black in these sustained periods of time, Marlon Riggs gives the audience time to pause and think about the content he is presenting. This attributes an interpretative property to his documentary, experimenting with the self-referential aspects of the genre for the viewer, producing a cut-off from an almost inhumane reality.
Dead Air, Dead Space: Culpability and Collapse in Landscape Suicide (1986), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023)
Dead air hangs over once-occupied scenes, landscapes that have caused their own death. A unique kind of rot is represented here: one that is not structural but spiritual, a para-natural abandonment that may one day lead to a collapse that has yet to occur. Perhaps refracted off of the condition of the film’s subjects—prison does not allow for itself nor its subjects to decay—Landscape Suicide sees collapse as a perpetually imminent consequence of the ruin we cause each other.