The Sounds of War in <em>Ashes and Embers</em>: Race, Trauma, and Dislocation

Abstract

In Haile Gerima’s Ashes and Embers (1982), cinematic sound and musical narrativity labor to tell the story of a traumatized black Vietnam War veteran. As a pioneer of contemporary black independent filmmaking, Gerima also uses elements of art cinema to seize the world of sound and express his authorial perspective on the connectivity of sound, race and war. The filmic world created presents us with a protagonist, Ned Charles, whose disillusion unravels and decays simultaneously, illustrating multiple layers of humanity in the black experience. Gerima uses music and sound to capture Ned’s psychological state, his struggle to (dis)connect and the external tensions of being a black veteran barely a decade after the Civil Rights Movement. Ashes and Embers is the 1983 winner of the FIPRESCI Prize, however, it was never actually seen in U.S. theaters until 2016 and apparently, Gerima’s “Journey with the Big Screen Tour” has been taking the independent film sector by storm with sold out screenings in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Gerima’s work is scarcely written about within the academic arena; it is important to use the film’s cinematic resurgence as an opportunity to revisit the multiplicity of trauma and identity at this juncture in American history of perpetual imperialism, war and racial divide.