The films shown at the Centre Pompidou retrospective are quite recent, made between 2002 and 2009. Everson entitled the first cycle (May 13) of his retrospective Broad Daylight and Other Times. The title captures his principal obsession in these films: to show what Zinn calls "history of the people", focusing on the singular experience, often in its relation to reported news (which is the first attempt at writing "authoritative" history). According to (2007, 8'30'', 16mm, B&W), the longest film in the series, relates a number of events through repeated TV footage juxtaposed with the news anchor's report. While the images remain the same, the narrative changes: a tragic drowning of a "Negro man" in Roanoke county, turns out to have been a murder; an accidental fire caused by the explosion of a kerosene tank in an apartment building, which resulted in the death of a "Negro woman", turns out to have been an arson perpetrated by two white males. The video excerpts from news footage alternate with the quotidian gesture of an old man (perhaps the filmmaker's father) going out onto his porch to pick up his daily. We never see him unfold the paper or read the news, but the repetition of the gesture juxtaposed with the replayed TV newscast eloquently comments on the place of the news in one's life, on the construction of history and on personal memory. . . .
Playing Dead (2008, 1'30", 16mm, color) offers another commentary on the gap between lived experience and reported news. The very title is ironic. There is nothing playful in playing dead: a black family is attacked in their own driveway by a group of whites, beaten with a gun barrel, kicked, and a young boy is shot in the head. His brother "plays dead", bleeding profusely from a knock on the head. For an instant, the camera shows an inert body of the younger brother in the brush. We realize that he is not "playing" dead. An interview with a news reporter follows: standing in the driveway, the survivor, with his girlfriend cowering at his side, is asked to relate the events. Perhaps it is this very act of "reporting"--including the distance between the reporter extending his microphone towards the victims (aren't they also his victims?), asking questions in the same tone of voice, using the same language and grammar, as when gathering materials for any other story--that makes the gap between personal experience and "history" as a construct so salient. The act of reporting, which is filmed and viewed "from the outside", from the perspective of a bystander, comes to be seen as a performance, with a clear structure of gestures and words.
The third-person view at news-making returns in The Reverend E. Randall T. Osborn, First Cousin (2007, 3', 16mm, B&W). The first cousin to Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. E. Randall T. Osborn, is being interviewed outside, at night, in front of a brick wall. The dialogue gives us fragments of a story, fragments of history, perhaps, but those in which we hardly recognize the "grand" historical narrative.
The Wilbur (2008, 1'30", 16mm, color) is the name of a tenant house. Screams. A crowd gathered at the entrance. Ambulance workers wheeling out a bagged body on a gurney and loading it into the van.
Blind Huber (2005, 2', 16mm, B&W) borrows the title from a book of poems by Nick Flynn, and is a series images of beehive keeping with a voice-over recitation of one of Flynn's poems. The poem plays on the inversion of inside and outside, where human body becomes a honeycomb to be explored in search of the queen bee, "a fortune of honey"; a labyrinth where to get lost, and which is to be rebuilt within the confines of a house. "They had to burn the house down to rid us."
Everson's love for such everyday events--things that, for all their banality from some greater historical point of view, are milestones in our lives--can be seen in Twenty Minutes (2005, 3', 35mm, color). This short film documents a home car repair: men building a frame over the car's hood, in order to mount a pulley that will hoist the car engine. A major car repair is the sort of thing that gets woven into family stories--these narratives told in the margins of any official history constructed by the news or the academia...
The film, however, that I found the most moving as well as visually poignant, was Ninety three (2008, 3', 16mm, B&W). Made on Everson's father's (??) birthday, it shows the old man seated in front of a cake lit up with 93 candles. Played in slow motion, the film exaggerates the effort of taking a deep breath, and blowing out the candles. At first unsuccessfully: the candles won't go out. Another breath, and another. The field of birthday candles slowly grows darker and darker, until one last candle remains lit, and then it, too, goes out. Darkness falls.
That I find Ninety three to be the most powerful among the films screened last Wednesday may be a question of personal taste. Yet this three-minute film seems to accomplish the intention underlying all the others. Through the use of image alone, it stages the dialog between history and individual memory, between news footage and home video. One cannot but reflect upon the weight of the ninety-three years of the man's life, and start to enumerate in one's mind the historical events he must have witnessed. His effort to put out the flames rises to the level of an allegory of life struggle, and allows us to reinterpret historical events through the prism of personal experience and, by the same token, to set important historical dates alongside dates marking a human lifetime. While the film has little to do with news reports--birthday is rarely considered news--it also sets itself apart from family videos. Paradoxically, it breaks away from both with the same gesture: by reducing the subject to the minimum, by foregoing sound (background noise, commentary) and action (not only is there no news "event" and no "family" event, this non-event is dilated, slowed down). And if there is a sense of passing, passing away, in the gradual going out of candles and the final darkness, this death--the anticipated death of the old man, the dying of the film itself as that which makes it possible--light--is being taken away--paradoxically brings Ninety three closer to "news"--since death is always worthy of reporting, even if only marginally--yet, at the same time, makes reporting impossible. Between reporting (news) and recording (memories), there emerges a possibility of witnessing.
RELATED LINKS:
For a full listing of screened films, see the Centre Pompidou website.
Kevin Everson's website.
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