Slideshow
Haile Gerima’s
ASHES AND EMBERS
Co-presented by Alfreda’s Cinema
Tuesday, January 17
8:20
The screening will be followed by a conversation between Alfreda's Cinemas's Melissa Lyde and film scholar Yasmina Price.
Directed by Haile Gerima
U.S., 1982
Starring John Anderson, Evelyn A. Blackwell, Norman Blalock
Approx. 120 min. DCP Restoration.
ASHES AND EMBERS is a revolution, fundamentally a revolution within. It reverberates the conflicting inner life and unraveling of a man, Nay Charles (John Anderson), and the bonds he's urgently holding onto despite being haunted by his memories of the Vietnam war, 8 years removed although viscerally fresh. Haile Gerima sculpts Charles's complex readjustment through non-linear sensorial cinematography and with an unflinching language didactic of the history and nature of Black life in a brutal America, now grappling with gentrification, political divestment, and disenfranchisement. Ashes and Embers first opened at Film Forum in 1983.
Alfreda's Cinema's first program of 2023 and at Film Forum is an insistence on introspective self-care before healing can begin. We all we got.
Program notes by Melissa Lyde.
Melissa Lyde is the founder of Alfreda's Cinema, a long-running Black video art series, lifestyle and immersive, currently working towards opening its own space in Brooklyn. She's written for Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media in the Fall issues of 2019 and 2020, and was recently featured in the Journal of Film and Media Studies -- In Focus: Curators Speak: Film Programming in the wake of Covid 19 (Fall 2022). Alfreda's Cinema screens films that express the depth and love and richness of our culture.
Yasmina Price is a writer, programmer, and PhD candidate at Yale University. She focuses on anticolonial cinema from the Global South and the work of visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. Yasmina's series 'In the Images, Behind the Camera: Women’s Political Cinema 1959-1992' played at the BAMCinematek in May 2022 and recent writing has appeared in The Baffler, Lux Magazine, Criterion and Film Quarterly.
Reviews
"Gerima makes independent films about African-American life that provide an alternative to Hollywood depictions of race. For him, the fragmentary, non-linear style of Ashes and Embers is a revolutionary act, a deliberate affront to the narrative expectations of conventional Hollywood cinema."
— TCM
"A challenging non-linear endeavor; half experimental, half narrative, and above all a call to arms.”
— Shadow and Act