Two gentlemen share the ins and outs of hustling metal in Cleveland.
“The subject matter is the gestures or tasks caused by certain conditions in the lives of working class African Americans and other people of African descent. The conditions are usually physical, social-economic circumstances or weather. Instead of standard realism I favor a strategy that abstracts everyday actions and statements into theatrical gestures, in which archival footage is re-edited or re-staged, real people perform fictional scenarios based on their own lives and historical observations intermesh with contemporary narratives. The films present oblique metaphors for art-making.”
Kevin Jerome Everson1
Jordan Cronk: You’ve mentioned that you like to use reality as a formal device, and also how in Fe26 you utilized props and things to heighten that reality. Can you talk about the fictional elements in your work?
Kevin Jerome Everson: For fiction, it’s easier to control – I have a direction I know the film should go in. But I’ve got films like Stone (2013), where I just showed up and cats were doing what they’re doing. But if I’m going to drive from Virginia to Ohio, then I’m thinking over those eight hours about what the film needs and how I can implement a kind of palette – that’s how films are made. In fact, in Fe26 you can barely see those props. It doesn’t make a difference. It’s like improvising with a blank canvas. I’m trying to fill it up.2
- 1Kevin Jerome Everson, “Kevin Jerome Everson Introduces His Film Fe26,” Notebook, 2016.
- 2Jordan Cronk, “Kevin Jerome Everson by Jordan Cronk,” BOMB Magazine, 2017.