Kevin Everson presents his new feature film “Erie”
Official Selection, 2010 Rotterdam International Film Festival
Tuesday, May 25th / 2010. Screening at 8:00 PM

Mathilda Washington and candle

Emerging as only the fourth feature in the extra-prolific filmography of Kevin Everson, the images that unfold in Erie can be clearly linked to his ongoing focus upon the struggles of the African-American working class. Erie, unlike many of Everson’s other films, does not recirculate archival footage in order to draw a line connecting the contemporary and historical conditions of African- Americans. Nonetheless, the images he has recorded and compiled here operate within the realm of the ready-made, with nearly the entire film composed of a series of unedited single- takes with sync sound, presented back to back.

Forsaking montage for the most part, Everson refuses to insert an editorial presence through the tropes of narration or text, and instead favours a linkage which pivots upon the only direct dialogue in the film, spoken by three workers from an undisclosed General Motors factory. While their conversation centres upon the fate of the company, a united demand for leadership doesn’t stop at the corporate offices in Detroit, but instead radiates far beyond to all levels of government and the public who are now implicated in the crisis.

Produced during a residency at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, the film was photographed in the areas surrounding Lake Erie, primarily Northern Ohio and Buffalo, New York. Following the initial Rust Belt decline in these areas during the 1970s, unemployment again rose in 2008 and 2009 to levels exceeding 20 percent of the population in some areas. The form of Erie developed by Everson depends upon foregrounding the viewer’s awareness of real-time passing; both they and the film’s subjects must wait for the present moment to transform.

Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965) is a filmmaker, originally from Mansfield, Ohio, now living and working in Charlottesville, Virgina, USA. Everson’s four feature films and over 50 short films and videos have been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Redcat in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and many other venues worldwide. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two NEH Fellowships, two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, and an American Academy in Rome Prize.

Burton Theatre
3420 Cass Avenue
Detroit, MI 48201
Info: (313) 473-9238 or www.burtontheatre.com
Media City Film Festival: www.houseoftoast.ca
Tickets: $5–$7 (suggested donation)