How You Live Your Story: Selected Works by Kevin Jerome Everson (2005-2020)(Review)

If I had to choose one film from Second Run’s new double-disc Blu-Ray of Kevin Jerome Everson’s work to sum up his appeal to the uninitiated, it would probably be the 2015 short Grand Finale. That’s not to say it’s the best thing on offer, merely that it offers the most precise encapsulation of his worldview. A record of a fireworks display in Detroit, it keeps the spectacle out of focus for most of the run-time in favour of focusing on two people watching the display. And it’s not even focusing on their faces, it’s looking intently at the back of their heads while colourful fountains of bokeh erupt somewhere in the distance.

Faced with this level of minimalism, viewers have two options: either go with it and find yourself hypnotised, or reject it as perverse and tedious. I first learned about Everson’s work from a 2019 retrospective on Mubi (almost all of which, barring Cinnamon and Quality Control, is present on these two discs). Watching films like Three Quarters, quite a lot of my friends on Letterboxd went for the most obvious reaction and said: this is just a film of a magic trick. Just because that reaction is obvious doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Three Quarters is, indeed, a five-minute clip that mostly consists of one magic trick. So what is it that makes Everson’s work worthy of accolades like a Mubi retrospective, a Tate Modern exhibition, a Guggenheim Fellowship – and, since we’re here, a Second Run set selecting highlights from between 2005 and 2020?

My being able to answer this doesn’t necessarily mean I’m a full-throated evangelical convert to Everson’s work. Sometimes his brand of minimalism enchants me: Old Cat, the oldest short here, has an ability to transport you to a tranquil river’s edge that’s particularly precious at the start of a nationwide lockdown. Polly One, a dreamy record of the 2017 eclipse, has a similar immediate, sensual appeal. And Three Quarters, despite the irritation it caused some Letterboxders, is actually one of the easiest films to understand the point of. It’s a record of a well-performed magic trick; who wouldn’t enjoy watching that?

Elsewhere, Emerson’s tics can be frustrating. He often eschews one-to-one interviews in favour of group conversations, which can work very well but not when the sound recording is as murky as it is on several films here. (Sanfield, a short about Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi, is rendered near-unwatchable by the level of background noise) In striving to create poetic statements about his subjects’ work and lives rather than the magazine-article info-dump of most documentaries, Emerson aligns himself with directors like Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes) and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Leviathan). His imagery is less flashy than theirs, which isn’t a problem: Everson’s intimate records of working-class life like Sound That and Company Line require a certain ground-level roughness in their style. The essential problem I have with films like Baichwal and Castaing-Taylor’s remains, though: while I appreciate their ambition to lift documentaries beyond the pedagogical, I struggle to understand the purpose of travelling to the Republic of the Congo (as Everson does in 2010’s BZA) then refusing to supply any context about that country, or the lives of the workers being documented.

Admittedly, in some of Everson’s films, context is exactly what he’s trying to transcend. The feature Tonsler Park is a record of votes being cast and counted in Charlottesville, Virginia, a location which would become infamous less than a year after Everson’s film was shot when a counter-protester was killed at a white supremacist rally. Everson’s aim is to strip back the grand narratives of the 2016 election and the rise of the far-right in favour of celebrating the diligence of the ordinary people who keep democracy working. It’s a fine point, but it’s one that his short films routinely make at a tenth of the run-time. The four features presented across the two discs – Tonsler Park, 2005’s Spicebush, 2010’s Erie and 2013’s The Island of St. Matthews – present Everson at his most visionary and his most frustrating. Rather than being a lesser early work, Spicebush actually struck me as one of the most endearing things in the whole collection; a collage of everyday life, childhood play and pop-culture detritus that bears some traces of Charles Burnett’s influence, but already feels like its own animal. In The Island of St. Matthews the visuals are more confident but the overall point is harder to find. Elements of family history, scenes of water-skiing and baptism and Everson’s usual interest in working life mingle without producing much cumulative effect.

Erie is an intermediate step, containing something of the collage structure of Spicebush but pointing ahead to the monochrome minimalism of Tonsler Park. Out of all of his features it is the most aligned with the slow cinema style that was fashionable in the 2000s, which is saying something considering the others can hardly be mistaken for Fast & Furious sequels. It is shot in big, distinct, long-take chunks which at first don’t appear to fit together: two workers putting up an advertising poster showing an idealised image of a ‘cool’ African-American man, a waterfall, a girl sat by a candle, a piano rehearsal. As they mount up, you realise that the impossibility of reconciling them is the point. Everson is showing us diverse images of a world – America’s Black working-classes – too often written off as a monolith.

Everson’s cinema often makes its clearest statements when it’s describing race and poverty. He’s warm and affectionate as he depicts Black Americans enjoying stereotype-busting hobbies like calf roping (Ten Five in the Grass, 2012) or bird-watching (Brown Thrasher, 2020). He can also be roused to puncture his usual restrained observation with moral anger in shorts like 2016’s Ears, Nose and Throat, which begins with surveillance-style shots of an ordinary street and culminates in devastating testimony of an everyday horror that took place there. Grouping nineteen of Everson’s features and shorts together makes it easier to appreciate these outliers, as well as the general travel of his work from the implicitly political Spicebush to the unavoidably political Sanfield. It also makes room for delightful curios like IFO, which begins by interviewing a UFO witness from Ohio then expands the story in a way that’s both formally adventurous and connects with Everson’s larger political project. Maybe his work really is nothing but a magic trick, after all.

Thank you for reading Graham’s Review of How You Live Your Story: Selected Works by Kevin Jerome Everson

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