The Golden Age of Fish

After a concurrence of coincidences, Maxine, a geologist, becomes the catalyst unearthing some dramatic events of Cleveland, Ohio, a city located on the southern shore of Lake Erie. The most outstanding events evoked in The Golden Age of Fish involve a pair of African-American brothers who are robbed in the street (which also appears in the short Playing Dead) and a woman who was poisoned by her husband. These news items are re-entered in the flux of history by the film and parcelled out in Maxine’s conscience, who also works as an actor in TV commercials about detergents. The film title refers to a fossil from the Devonian Age, the Cleveland Shale, dating back to a period between 417 and 354 million years ago, when several new species of fish appeared. In order to give shape to the weaving of time texture, the author uses diverse materials, including fiction, documentary, and current events. Materials from the past are also used in Memoir, where an elderly person tells his story according to the famous portrait of Saint Jerome by Michelangelo. To know and be aware of one’s position in the natural order of things becomes the story of a mutable being that constantly shifts along the axis that determines the perception of reality. In the film, it is possible to catch a glimpse of Everson’s own filmic and philosophical approach to art and creation. A spoken commentary describing the formation of certain fossils can easily be interpreted as Everson’s own working process.  “The Black Carbonation Shale seems to have had a deep-water origin – where land-derived organic matter and inorganic detritus accumulate under quiet conditions”. Acknowledgments to the film directors Lav Diaz, Raya Martin, John Torres, and Khavn De La Cruz are to be found in the end credits.

Giona A. Nazzaro