Kevin Jerome Everson
United States | 2003 | 5 min
Language : English
A little girl and her daily adventures captured like pictures from a home movie. A 35mm film relating to the Wizard of Oz, an organic myth of American culture. Everson focuses on the small events of daily life and puts them under a different light. Life is always the strangest of all happenings.
The works presented in the Master Class by Kevin Jerome Everson are indicative of the filmmaker’s ability to sum up whole existential and political experiences in a very short time span. From the reinvention of the Wizard of Oz myth in Pictures from Dorothy, through the little girl who gives her insight on racial segregation and the beauty contest Miss Black Virginia 1971 in Something Else, up to the use of found footage in The Citizens updating exemplary figures from the African-American community, Everson reveals a tactful perceptiveness in manipulating fragments of images and making them part and parcel of a community discourse. It is no coincidence that films like Telethon and Honorable Mention present the image of representatives of the African-American community as was offered by contemporary media. This allows Everson to reason about time not only as memory but also and especially as a working device. Space, understood as physical manifestation of time, surfaces in Around Oak Grove, where a work that is no longer practised is re-enacted. At the same time, space becomes the site where the presence of those who work is evoked as absence. Fillmore and Cox gets back to the origins of Everson as a street photographer creating a piece of neo-realist surrealism that looks as though it had just been unearthed from some forgotten archive of the Lumière brothers. Last BZV, made in Brazzaville, Congo, on commission by the Rotterdam Film Festival, questions the images that we conventionally associate with Africa. By inventing quite paradoxical situations, like the water-skiing, Everson presents us with a much more authentic image of African reality than many other documentaries by focusing solely on the economic and social datum. With this iconoclastic approach, the distance between the subject and the director stays intact, offering the viewers a sensuous Africa whose mystery cannot be reduced to the dominant political discourse. BZVshows how an unconventional gaze can produce a complete new level and form of reality. This new form is what difference is all about.
Giona A. Nazzaro
