Quality Control

Shot in a dry-cleaner’s in Pritchard, Alabama, Quality Control is made of a set of long takes on the daily toil. The minimal reiteration of the gestures exposes an attention for detail and a concentration on one’s job that are exemplary. At the same time, the author’s gaze dissects and analyses how the factory functions, which is revealed through the very gestures of the factory workers. This way, the nobility that the bodies were denied by the working conditions is restored. Thus, the attention of the gaze shifts from the study of the form of work to the perception of the construction of the image. In Lead, the gaze is focused on the work in a mine and the surrounding world with an evocative and fractured style. The history of industry in the US, therefore, is like a raw material that must be excavated and brought back to light. The act of filming, a substitute for social excavation, is taken to the extreme in Lead. The attention paid to detail and the environmental conditions, in which what remains of the working class still struggles for a wage, is at the heart of Everson’s aesthetic concerns. His social concerns are formulated through a rigorous attention to the reality of the workers that becomes a mirror image of his work. Everson thus creates a bond of solidarity between the jobs: the job of the artist and the job of the factory worker. Intellectuality becomes an interplay based on manuality. The music of gestures becomes a rhythmic pattern that evokes a silent and unheard mournful blues. Factory jobs, the economic backbone of the African-American working class, almost become an archaeological reminder of the reality of entire neighbourhoods. An entire world collapsed or is collapsing. What still lives on (but for how much longer?) are the gestures of the workers.

Giona A. Nazzaro