THE ASHES ACTION   (Eyedrum Screening)

   "The Ashes Action" (shown at  Eyedrum) makes the personal highly public, as it follows a group of protesters on their way to the White House to fling their loved ones' ashes on the lawn. This protest, equal parts poignancy and rage, is mirrored by this complexly structured, emotionally involving video which uses multiple views of the event to directly involve the viewer in the intensity of the action.

ACT UP Fight Back: Art and Activism in the Time of AIDS
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Eyedrum, Atlanta, GA
Friday, April 1, 2005    
Emory University

REVIEW  (excerpt) 

James Wentzy is one of the most prolific of AIDS activist videomakers, having produced over 150 half-hour programs in his series AIDS Community Television. The Ashes Action documents an ACT UP protest in Washington DC in October of 1992. Motivated by the expressed desire of several activists for “their bodies to be used in some sort of political way” after their deaths, ACT UP staged a march to the White House lawn, where they outflanked a group of guards and police and achieved their objective of dumping their loved ones’ ashes directly on the lawn as a protest of White House inaction on AIDS. The event was also motivated by the display that same week of the AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National Mall. In the video, march organizer David Robinson points out that the quilt is “very useful, it’s very important - but it’s very beautiful.” Hence the need for a reminder of everything that was not being done to combat AIDS, and the result of this inaction.

By the time of The Ashes Action, many half-hour, TV-formatted activist documentaries had been made by enterprising collectives and individuals, including such classics as Testing the Limits, Doctors, Liars, and Women, and Stop the Church. The Ashes Action stands as one of the very best. The pacing and editing are superb. The video channels the anger that motivated all of ACT UP’s actions, but is also suffused with an elegiac, even autumnal mood. (The election of Bill Clinton soon after this event was to signal the beginning of a decline in street activism.) Most remarkable of all is the repetitive way in which Wentzy shows the climactic moment of the march. This scene appears four different times in the video, and only gains in emotional power each time it is repeated. The footage itself is shot in a way that draws the viewer directly into the action and gets across the full mortality of what we are seeing on screen: when the ACT UP members fling the ashes out of boxes, urns, and plastic bags, through the fence and onto the lawn, we are seeing not only an audacious political protest – we are watching each of them say goodbye to their loved one, and it is devastating. A brief coda which employs agitprop-type on-screen statistics brings this powerful work to a close.