How You Live Your Story: Selected Works by Kevin Jerome Everson (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Michael Sicinski

Four feature films and seventeen short films, produced between 2005–2020. Produced by Kevin Jerome Everson and Madeleine Molyneaux. All films directed, photographed, and edited by Kevin Jerome Everson. A two-disc Blu-ray including four feature films and seventeen short films, color and B&W, sound and silent. Disc one: total running time of 247 min. Disc two: total running time of 278 min. A Second Run DVD region-free release.

A man works with a coat hanger and a screwdriver, trying to unlock his car. A group of families oohs and ahhs over fireworks in the Detroit night sky. A line of spectators exits the stadium after a football game. Men and women enter a Virginia voting precinct, cast their ballots, and leave. A woman in an audio booth undergoes a hearing test. These are just a few of the unspectacular events one can observe in the films of Kevin Jerome Everson.  

You can discover these snapshots of everyday life, and many others, in his new twenty-one-film Blu-ray set, How You Live Your Story, a selection that spans fifteen years of Everson’s career. Everson selected the films for this two-disc set, and it is a perfect introduction to this major American film artist. As one might expect from the descriptions above, Everson’s films are tone poems of the mundane, fixated on the glancing details and microgestures that most other films studiously ignore. But much like the patient, meditative films of James Benning, or the poetic-realist narratives of Charles Burnett, Everson articulates his creative vision through the gradual accretion of human activity. Whether at feature-length or in his highly accomplished short films, Everson trains his camera on what we could call the “drylongso,” the sometimes grueling, often joyous, and unexpected ordinariness of African-American life. 

It is difficult to summarize Everson’s filmmaking career, and this is undoubtedly by design. Although there are certain commonalities across his work, he has never been dedicated to any single formal approach. One could reasonably refer to him as a documentary filmmaker. But his films avoid narration in favor of close observation, and several of them contain performances that are directed by Everson, even as they might immediately seem “real.” While Everson is an experimental filmmaker, his work is considerably more accessible than a lot of the work that gets classified as experimental or avant-garde. He is interested in the lives of others, particularly the mundane aspects of everyday existence. But at the same time, his films often leave their subjects’ cultural and historical circumstances implicit, something to be gleaned through context.

But in a very real way, Everson’s films generate their own context. Like certain other experimental filmmakers, such as Helga Fanderl, Frield vom Gröller, or the late Luther Price, Everson often explores the miniature or the microform. Even his longer films tend to be structured by the spatial or conceptual concatenation of smaller, almost modular components. Any given Everson film might be difficult to understand at first. One might reasonably wonder, why am I looking at this? There is certainly a long tradition in avant-garde film of training the camera’s penetrating gaze on apparent nonevents, a lineage that includes the cinema of Andy Warhol, Larry Gottheim, Peter Hutton, and Chantal Akerman, among many others. While Everson certainly partakes of this approach, his films are a bit more complicated. He is interested in the sorts of situations and occurrences that, for lack of a better word, we could call “content.”

This aspect of Everson’s films can appear to be their most obvious trait, but it’s actually very unique. For one thing, some of Everson’s films, such as Sound That (2014) and Rams 23 Blue Bears 21 (2017), avoid overt aestheticization. This isn’t by any means to say that they are artless. Sound That exploits the granular qualities of 16mm film, and Rams 23 is clearly an homage to the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving the Factory (1895). But there is also a documentary element of these films. Stylistically they bear connections to the Direct Cinema work of Frederick Wiseman or Allan King. They don’t immediately look like experimental film. And, well, let’s be frank: the American avant-garde has been dominated by white filmmakers who, by and large, have made films involving white bodies. To the uninitiated viewer, the overwhelming prevalence of Black people in Everson’s films may make them look like either fiction or documentary, but not necessarily experimental film.

This focus on Black life, along with the preference of minutiae over more conventional subject matter, can make Everson’s very straightforward cinema seem strange. And one of the great benefits to this Blu-ray set is that it allows viewers to immerse themselves in Everson’s overall artistic project. The best argument for what Everson does in any particular film is, in a sense, what he does in another film. While intensively particular, these films also have a cumulative power. They comprise a potentially endless mosaic of Black life, composed of equal parts work, rest, and play. 

Individual films accomplish this task in a variety of ways. His 2013 feature The Island of St. Matthews, for example, explores the present-day ramifications of a 1973 flood in the small Mississippi town of Westport. Everson alternates between interviews with people who weathered the storm, sequences that seem to allude to periods even further in the past, as well as extended passages that focus on the Tombigbee River itself—its stately but resolutely ordinary presence in the life of Westport. The resulting film manages to explore a particular historical event while at the same time exuding a kind of representational timelessness. Like the river itself, this community is simply there, existing according to its own rhythms.

Likewise, Everson’s film Erie (2010) examines a collection of seemingly random daily activities, all of which are geographically connected. All of the scenes take place in communities abutted by Lake Erie. Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and surrounding cities and towns are represented with filmed events that do not necessarily relate to the body of water as such. In the opening shot, we see men posting a billboard for the Volkswagen that uses a 1960s image of a Black man standing beside a Beetle. It reads “there’s a little bit of the cool in every Beetle,” and so attempts to use stereotypes of African American hipness to sell a German car that his historical connections with the Nazi Party. In another scene, Everson takes us inside a community center. A man plays the piano while a woman sings a midtempo song. Then, across the room, a dance crew begins playing loud rap music while they practice their moves. Everson pans back and forth between these two activities, as if to show that while they are competing on a certain level, they are also linked by a shared history of Black American artistic styles. All of Erie’s shots are composed of single takes, and they all depict various perspectives, pleasures, and endeavors—two men fencing, two young women enjoying a boat ride, and in the only sequence with spoken dialogue, three former GM employees talk about the mismanagement and corporate maneuvering that lead to the closure of the company’s Mansfield, Ohio plant.

In the most experimental of his features, Everson considers the role of Black Americans in the electoral process. Tonsler Park (2017) was shot at different polling places in Virginia in 2016. The poll workers and the voters are mostly African American, and although the disenfranchisement of Black voters is, regrettably, an evergreen topic of concern in America, the 2016 election—you know, the one where angry white men put a white supremacist in the Oval Office—was a moment of acute crisis, one Everson captures for posterity. Everson very patiently shows us poll workers and clerks just doing their jobs, helping people cast their votes and participate in the process. Each part of Tonsler consists of a single take, and Everson sets his camera up and lets it run without interruption, in most cases without movement. Most of the film consists of close-ups of poll workers, their whole faces filling the frame. Like Warhol's Screen Tests, these long shots allow us to observe humor, fatigue, confusion, and other emotions as they register on the subject's microphysiognomy. 

The Second Run DVD Blu-ray set is also notable for its inclusion of certain Everson films that are not shown as often as they should be. I’ve personally seen Everson’s films on numerous occasions, and typically he either presents one of his features or a collection of shorts. But this release offers the chance to catch up with three medium-length entries that are among Everson’s finest works. Of particular interest is BZV (2010), a thirty-minute observational piece made in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo. In it, we see young people enjoying themselves on Pool Malebo, contrasted with more mundane activities such as ordering a bedframe and carrying home a foam mattress. But equally impressive is 2012’s Ten Five in the Grass, a study of Black cowboys and cowgirls taking part in calf roping in rodeos in Lafayette, Louisiana and Natchez, Mississippi. Considering the recent interest in Black cowboy and country-and-western culture exemplified by Solange Knowles and Lil Nas X—the so-called “yeehaw agenda”—Ten Five is a film that certainly demands wider viewership.

Still, it is in the short form that Everson’s work truly sings. Each film seems to define its own form, sometimes presenting an uninterrupted perspective on a particular set of activities, and at other times employing deft, contrapuntal editing to reveal relationships across different places and times. Some of the Everson films included in this set are, in this reviewer’s opinion, among the most significant works of moving image art of the last ten years. Highlights include Sound That (2014), a study of a crew working for the Cleveland Water Department. Everson shows the men’s use of seemingly primitive tools—a metal rod and hammer—to locate water main leaks underground. (This “deep listening” serves as a metaphor for Everson’s own creative practice.) Ears, Nose and Throat (2016), combines disconnected street scenes with a young woman’s visit to an ENT doctor to get her hearing tested. Over time, the larger pattern emerges. The woman, Shadeena Brooks, was witness to a shooting death, and the close-range report of the gun damaged her hearing. And, as we eventually learn, the shooting victim was Everson’s own cousin. In Round Seven (2018), Everson introduces us to former boxer Art McKnight of Dayton, Ohio. This poetic documentary consists of McKnight recounting the details of his 1978 bout against Sugar Ray Leonard, while a woman punctuates the tale with round announcement cards—“Round 1,” “Round 2,” etc.—displayed in the parking lot of the crumbling Ohio arena. And in Sanfield (2020), we observe fragments of activity on the Columbus AFB, as various men and women receive flight training or engage in the various activities that keep the base in action.

What one finds across all of Everson’s film work is an interest in the processes of labor, the way that men and women from disparate walks of life all master the particular skills that afford them success in their chosen field of inquiry. This includes areas that might not typically be considered work, such as birdwatching (Brown Thrasher, 2020), sleight of hand (Three Quarters, 2015), or ripping off sewer covers to sell to metal scrappers (Fe26, 2014). Although this Blu-ray set provides more than enough evidence of Everson’s importance as a contemporary media artist, I must admit that a few of my personal favorites among his films are missing from the set, in particular Brown and Clear (2017), an abstract study of an after-hours barroom, and Black Bus Stop (2019), a performance work centered around a particular location on the University of Virginia campus that has historically been a gathering spot for Black students.

What this means is that, in time, another Everson set will be necessary. For now, however, How You Live Your Story is a magnificent compilation that will undoubtedly be among this year’s most significant Blu-ray releases. If you’re already familiar with Everson’s work, this set certainly includes some key films you’ve missed. And if completely unfamiliar with the films of Kevin Jerome Everson, you should order this Blu-ray set immediately.

Michael Sicinski, a writer and teacher based in Houston, Texas, is a Cineaste Contributing Writer.

Copyright © 2021 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 3

Cineaste readers may also want to check out our Summer 2015 Web Exclusive interview with Everson, available online here.