THE FREE SCREEN: KEVIN JEROME EVERSON at TIFF Bell Lightbox tonight and Friday (October 3 and 4) at 6:30 pm. See listings. tiff.net. Rating: NNNN
TIFF Cinematheque’s Free Screen kicks off its fall season with a two-night salute to American filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson, whose work considers the contemporary African-American experience in a manner that can be playful and mournful in the same moment.
Consider The Pritchard, Undefeated and Century, which screen as part of All Down The Line: Films By Kevin Jerome Everson tonight (Thursday, October 3) at 6:30 pm all three shorts deal with men and their cars, in the process illuminating much more than that.
The Pritchard is a single silent take of a man pushing a car along a rural road. (Someone’s in the driver’s seat, steering, but we never get a clear look at him or her.) As one car passes him in the opposite direction, then another and another, we wonder why no one’s stopping to help: is it a racial thing? A class issue? Something else entirely? We’re allowed the time to think about it, and to wonder what our conclusions say about our expectations. Undefeated features another car that refuses to function – it may even be the same one – while Century finds inventive humour in a long take of an old Buick being flattened at a junkyard.
Everson gets more serious in Company Line – a half-hour documentary about snowplow drivers in Mansfield, Ohio – and Emergency Needs, which recreates a televised press conference in Cleveland following a shooting in the summer of 1968 through a cracked lens. And in Rita Larson’s Boy, actors read dialogue from the 70s sitcom Sanford & Son to show us how black characters were portrayed four decades ago.
Friday night’s program showcases Everson’s new feature documentary, The Island Of St. Matthews, an impressionistic 16mm travelogue about his hometown of Columbus, Mississippi, which became an island after a massive flood in 1973.
It feels like a thoughtful, intelligent corrective to the grotesque posturing of Beasts Of The Southern Wild – the artful response of someone who chooses to understand the people who refuse to leave a devastated area rather than exploit them for cheap drama.
