VERDICT: Kevin Jerome Everson’s latest short is yet another perfectly calibrated examination of the aspects of African-American labour that packs a powerful punch
An act of defiance sits at the centre of Kevin Jerome Everson’s new short, Practice, Practice, Practice.
Screening this week at Locarno Film Festival, the 10-minute short focuses on a moment of empowering disobedience when, in 1984, activist Richard Bradley climbed a flagpole outside San Francisco City Hall to tear down a confederate flag – not once, not twice, but three times. Each time, the flag was replaced by the then mayor, Dianne Feinstein, though she later relented, and the flag was removed permanently. I his typically thought-provoking fashion, the prolific Kevin Jerome Everson refracts this event through the lens of working-class labour.
Across a career that spans nearly 150 short films, Everson has created a vitally important body of work that often explores the intersections of labour and blackness in American society. What arguably makes his work so important is that despite him being an artist filmmaker in the experimental tradition, the form and radical nature of his films are far from barriers to audiences. He does not obfuscate his ideas and his subjects, he uses his filmmaking skill to lay them bare, making them accessible.
In this photo-documentary film, he combines a conversation with Richard Bradley, now in his 70s, with another man, Jerry Berritt, who works for a telephone company. Berritt explains the processes involved in climbing telegraph masts – the inherent dangers of work, tricks of the trade, and the skills someone like Bradley would require to climb a flagpole over City Hall. In his own interview, Bradley cites learning to climb the pole from a friend who worked at AT&T. It is an apparently simple connection to make, but they all feel like that in Everson’s films, and here it creates a moving reflection both on economic labour and the labour of activism, of progress – in both cases it is work that needs to be done, and to keep being done.
Director: Kevin Jerome Everson
Cast: Richard Bradley, Jerry Berritt Producer: Madeleine Molyneaux Production companies: Picture Palace Pictures, Trilobite-Arts-DAC (USA) Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Pardi di Domani – Concorso Corti d’Autore)
In English
10 minutes
