Abstract
Abstract Premiering in 2013, Jason Osder’s documentary film Let The Fire Burn chronicles the Philadelphia Police Department’s 1985 bombing of the Black revolutionary organization, MOVE. The bombing and subsequent fire – which the police commissioner let burn through 61 homes – resulted in the deaths of six adults and five children as well as the displacement of 250 people. Composed entirely of archival footage, Osder’s representation invokes a historicization and delimitation of an un-ended story about anti-Black state violence that, this essay argues, results in the obscuring of both MOVE’s continued struggle for freedom and the social conditions that make such actions possible. By thinking through collective memories of Black suffering and the ways in which they are mediated amidst a continued global assault on Black people, Hunter-Young explores what the temporal and spatial properties of smoke, and its relationship to fire, may signal about the sociocultural work of Osder’s film.
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