Heile Gerima

HEILE GERIMA: A Lesson for 2019

I have just finished watching Ashes and Embers, an instructive and riveting 1982 film by Heile Gerima. An expert film critic might give the film a low rating.  It is a cinematic sermon;  the cinematography is not eye-shattering; it fails to deliver the aesthetic pleasure of Afrofuturism; it is political. Basically ignorant of the standards and hidden codes used to evaluate contemporary films, I give the film a very high rating.  The sermon is timely, particularly for viewers who may be narcotized by fascism and fantasy. It is David Walker's Appeal rendered in visual and sonic terms of engagement which are necessary for the 21st century.  The veiling of muted colors actually enhances appreciation of the ethics of ambiguity and the vision of masculinity which constitute the film's rind and pulp; it delivers the cognitive pleasure of ancestral wisdom and elevation of consciousness.  Filmmakers and general spectators can indeed profit from watching Ashes and Embers.

I fact-checked my intuition about the film's value by re-reading Gerima's essay "On Independent Black Cinema" in Black Cinema Aesthetics ( Athens, OH: Center for Afro-American Studies, 1982), edited by Gladstone L. Yearwood.  "The stubborn reluctance of traditional cinema to graduate from a post-slavery social perspective has resulted," according to Gerima, "in the production of films in which black are portrayed in roles of obsequious servility" , and as widely-consumed entertainment, "conventional cinema is a romanticized conception of society as opposed to the very harsh and cold realities which characterize black existence" (107).  Despite sweeping change in the arena of independent film, Gerima's warning is still relevant.  The post-post-colonial cultural perspective of 2019 has virtually erased "obsequious servility" and replaced it with "pandering impossibilities" which too often blinds us to what is systemic: the unending production of international or transnational  devices to retard freedom, justice, and human dignity.  Very harsh, cold actualities assault and diminish our humanity, especially in the United States of America each day.  Think about what is happening to you now, at this whatever moment it is.  Think of the domestic license and naked terrorism that characterizes the doings of Trump and his faithful tribe as they strive to make "nothing" great. Ashes and Embers creates space for just such thinking.

In its exacting depiction of a Vietnam veteran's trauma, the film bears witness to Gerima's prophetic wisdom and buttresses  his argument that filmmakers "should have a strong sense of history, because in that history the filmmaker finds his or her freedom.  A sense of history provides a context and a meaning for one's work; and struggle must play a central role in the course of this history" (109).  Those of us who are Vietnam veterans or veterans of all the post-Vietnam wars in which the USA has been or is embroiled may have little trouble understanding Gerima's point of view.  We have the mental blueprints needed to make sense of Hell.

Gerima asserts that "Richard Wright and Langston Hughes must be respected for the high degree of realism they brought to the rich material of black life" and for fusing "content with the dynamics of our cultural heritage as they expressed certain fundamental social and economic issues of the day" (109)in  Likewise, Gerima must respected for the exceptional degree of awareness his work brings to the vexed conditions  and dreadful fictions of international life in 2019.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 11, 2019