You up to anything the next couple of days? You up for anything? Let me put it another way: Are you up for a little of everything — a cannon blast of ideas about blackness and gayness and representation, sure, but also about how to devastate and illuminate and deviate, with a camera, a soundtrack and editing, With finger snaps? I’m asking because the Brooklyn Academy of Music has got this weeklong Marlon Riggs retrospective, and it’s so good you’ll weep — and crack up and take notes (even if that’s not a thing you’ve ever done in a movie theater). If you’ve never heard of Marlon Riggs, you’ll wonder why the hell not.

How could an artist this smart, this prescient, this frank, transparent, curious, ruminative and courageous — this funny — escape your notice? Why haven’t these trenchant, masterful video essays, with insinuatingly tangy names like “Color Adjustment,” “Ethnic Notions” and “Black Is… Black Ain’t,” been a part of not just your movie diet but also your sense of self-understanding? How come nobody told me?!

For one thing, Riggs made them in the late 1980s and early 1990s, on video. And they’re short. The most famous — and notorious — of them, “Tongues Untied,” isn’t even an hour long. For another, this is 30-year-old work, and what it portends and breaks down and unpacks, what it depicts and imagines and celebrates, has largely been absorbed by the culture and by our politics. “Ethnic Notions” uses on-camera interviews with academics and an army of racist clips and old footage to explain, rigorously, how black has only recently been considered beautiful.