Review: The Inheritance Slyly Contemplates the Legacy of Black Activism

Writer-director Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance feels like a relic, composed as it is of representational strategies that can be traced back to the heyday of cinematic modernism. Indeed, the film owes an obvious debt to the classics of Jean Luc Godard’s most politically engaged period: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Tout Va Bien, and, most prominently, La Chinoise. Julian (Eric Lockley), a young black Philadelphian who starts a leftist collective after he inherits a house from his grandmother, puts up an oversized poster for Godard’s 1967 fragmented political film about Parisian Maoist activists in the group’s kitchen, and his fastidiousness about keeping it from curling off the wall at one point indicates the importance of Godard’s didactic quasi-fictions both to Julian and, by extension, Asili.

The references don’t stop there, as Asili stages much of his film’s action, such as it is, against the same kind of spare, monochromatic backdrops that Godard often utilized, especially in La Chinoise. These shots, which present minimally blocked discussions between the members of the collective, as well as excerpts from lectures from civil rights activists and poets that they organize, turn Julian’s grandmother’s house into an eye-catching non-place, for barely evincing an atmosphere of domesticity or conveying a sense of people in contiguity with one another. Sure, there are bookshelves and couches, but most evident against the bright red, green, and yellow walls are the posters of historical black leaders and thinkers, or the Audre Lorde quotes and Swahili proverbs written on chalkboard paint. Throughout, scenes tend to play out in one space, framed to make such background imagery more evident.

There’s an aesthetics of clarity to the way that the flatly lit segments that make up most of The Inheritance are shot and arranged. When Julian and his girlfriend, Gwen (Nozipho Mclean), are formulating the plan for the commune, they pace back and forth in front of the camera reading from former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere’s Afro-socialist program Ujamaa; when real-life veterans of the anarchist MOVE collective, which was notoriously bombed by the Philadelphia police in 1985, address the assembled members of the collective, they speak plainly in frontal long shots, in almost direct address to the camera. While, in art-film fashion, bucking the kind of cause-and-effect-driven plot mechanics of mainstream cinema, Asili’s loose narrative distinguishes itself by being exceedingly apparent rather than obscure. This aesthetic principle is also an ethic, undermining the dissimulations of even its own somewhat stiffly acted, purposefully anemic fiction about activists learning to live together.

Given this deconstructive approach, it makes sense that The Inheritance’s attitude toward the line between fiction and documentary is best described as one of casual disregard. Indoor scenes are intercut with documentary footage of MOVE’s conflicts with the police, black-and-white interviews with the fictional house residents, and anomalous shots of empty street corners and dilapidated businesses, ostensibly in the same West Philadelphia neighborhood where Julian’s home is located. Augmenting our awareness of The Inheritance’s constructedness, as well as its reference to earlier forms of filmmaking, Asili (who also served as his own cinematographer) shot the film in 16mm, brought to our attention by the occasional miniscule scratches that mar the clarity of the image, and by movement of the grain of the emulsion readily visible against the house’s monochromatic walls.

The Inheritance’s throwback elements, like a psychedelic montage during a jazz concert in the collective’s “Revolutionary People’s Reading Room,” are in sync with Asili’s interest in wanting to keep the legacy of black activism alive. The non-place quality of the collective’s home corresponds to a sense that we’re displaced in time. From the prominence of ’70s cultural touchstones like the works of Amiri Baraka and Angela Davis, to the use of 16mm, to the collective dubbing themselves “Ubuntu” without remarking that it’s the name of a computer operating system, there’s not much to indicate that the film is set in the present. Early on, when Julian’s friend, Rich (Chris Jarell), offhandedly mentions that the date is 2019, you may do a double take. The sense of an alternate present created within the collective forms a part of Asili’s estranging technique, not only making us reflect on the different coordinates of the world on screen, but suggesting the dream of a society built on a different basis.

The Inheritance’s channeling of the radical cinematic modernism of the ’60s might be seen as a kind of back-to-basics approach, a simplification of a media landscape that’s grown noisier since La Chinoise’s release. Asili’s go at the classic leftist goal of uniting theory and praxis in art harkens back to an era when the cinema seemed to be on the cutting edge of political art, when a jump cut or a close-up on a non-professional actor seemed to hold revolutionary promise. The attempt here to return to this moment can sometimes feel more like looking backward than pushing forward. Nonetheless, Asili’s examination of the legacy of black activism and culture in Philadelphia proves that didactic staging and unexpected cuts retain some of their power to challenge our habits of watching—and thinking.