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II. Fabrications

Telling Stories and Practicing Tricks
By Yasmina Price

Charlie Smith doesn’t have time for this mess.

He thought they were going to talk about something. The first shot of Charlie’s Proof (2013) is a tight close-up, leaving visible the seventy-three-year-old’s checkered shirt and striped jacket. Forget being in the middle of a story—he’s in the middle of a sentence. Less than a minute into a meandering anecdote about some time after high school graduation involving the vexation of pushing a malfunctioning, raggedy old car, Charlie looks squarely into the camera and cheerfully berates the filmmaker.

This short is a fractal of Kevin Jerome Everson’s filmography, indexing many of the recurring touchstones that make up his cinematic signature: self-referentiality, a connection to familial roots, midstream narrative and deferring to the knowledge of his subjects. A commanding presence with a hook for a right hand, Charlie sits at a kitchen table before venturing outdoors on the property bought by his grandmother and great grandmother in 1929. He elaborates a historical knowledge which casts itself from slavery into the present. Even as Charlie complains about the premise of the short film—his reproach that they were going to “talk about something” implies a conventionally meaningful subject matter or orthodox narrative blueprint—he is rather Everson’s accomplice in an inherited and continually recreated spiral of storytelling.

Everson likely learned that art from a Charlie, which is to say an uncle or a cousin or a grandmother or some other relation. As familiar to a West African as to a Black Midwesterner, that fabular form somehow always begins in the chaotic middle, involves infinitely intricate and unfailingly scattered bonds of kinship, and is subject to such exponential digressions that you could no more retell it the same way than remember it in the first place. Everson’s edit is a reconstruction that routes the oral through the audiovisual. His films both replicate and manipulate the loose-jointed everyday performance of familial storytelling, tightening them into his abstracted protocols of form. As evidenced by Charlie’s Proof, he is most interested in the backstory.1  Not necessarily talking about “something” so much as talking about anything, so long as you do it well. Charlie details his impressive resume in construction before his retirement (he built barns, houses, churches), but darts and dodges Everson’s questions about moonshining. Flipping the assumed balance of power, he suggests the filmmaker might do better inquiring about his own family’s activities. Paired with a disarming grin, Charlie’s evasiveness plays off like a confession. He was no doubt good at that job, too.


Reorganizing expected narrative scales of importance, Everson makes a distinction of looking at his subjects with respect for their ordinary dignity and beauty without mythologizing them into exceptional heroes. As fellow filmmaker and teacher Kathleen Collins asserted during a 1984 lecture at Howard University, Black people will not be kept within reductively categorical mythification nor barred from claiming the supple plurality of ordinariness.2  Formally strengthened by the way they begin in the midst of things and at a diagonal, Everson’s films avoid grandiose entry points while reveling in the act of fabrication. Charlie’s Proof exemplifies an artistic method of paying close attention, taking from chitchat, gossip, and mundane tall tales as the best sources. All delivered to entertain rather than fact check. His narrative economy and creative elasticity take inspiration from Richard Pryor, whose blue comedy inducted the filmmaker into a certain understanding of art from childhood.3  From there, Everson’s artmaking has been invested in craftsmanship which sidesteps barriers of rarefied appreciation and cuts through the currencies of taste that maintain class hierarchies.4  Things done well are a vernacular available to everyone. Everson’s aesthetic intervention into a common capacity for good storytelling and good craft is not meant to impose an arbitration of value. Rather than suggesting they are the mechanism for making their subjects matter, his films show the ways they already did matter: on their own terms, lived and invented.



[restaging and reenactment]

Ambivalence is enmeshed with the ethics of Everson’s cunning orchestrations of uncertainty between the “real” and the “fabricated.” His films operate in defiance of the founding relationship between Black people and the colonial instrument of the camera, which primitivized before it mythologized (two sides of the same coin), masking itself as an ostensibly neutral, transparent transcript and artless collection of data. What Everson’s films do is more purposeful and agile than observation, more reciprocal and ethical than ethnography. They are not attempts to catch people unawares. Instead, these cinematic works strive towards an even-keeled transaction in the sense of a mutual exchange of awareness and knowledge. The subjects look back and are implicated in the artifice. Everson’s films are purposeful productions of restaging and reenactment—and their subjects are in on it.

Everson’s audiovisual artworks operate through subtle denaturalization. He applies the same process to his work with found footage and archival material as to what he himself films: The Reverend E. Randall T. Osborn, First Cousin (2007) starts with what should be discarded preliminaries, as the reporter offscreen identifies the clergyman as a first cousin to Martin Luther King, and another voice, perhaps the cameraman, interjects “Are you really?” Offering a peek behind the curtain, that exchange creates a tension around verification and fact, which becomes ever more unsteady through Everson’s stylistic manipulations. The reporter continues to speak over the title card, enunciating the subject’s name after explaining that he is only doing so “for editing purposes.” The film ends with “Cut!” and a comment about a plan to “shoot some cutaways.” While Everson preserves the original function of the footage as news media, that too is a pretext to incorporate what would have been left out of the final cut, artfully revealing the genre’s underlying construction while orchestrating its reconstruction. Folding a perceptible trace of his procedures and materials into the film is central to Everson’s artmaking.

Addressing another kind of perceptibility, The Reverend E. Randall T. Osborn, First Cousin considers the question of what does and does not become public record. The Reverend relates a series of incidents that have yet to receive merited attention. As he describes a case of police “misconduct”—the norm of antiblack harassment—the reporter is shown nodding. The tempo and angle of his nods remain, peculiarly, precisely the same. A close first or second viewing reveals the gestural recurrence as a tell of Everson’s manufacturing. Acting both on history and its filmic record, the synthetic repetition alters the terms of dialogic exchange. The “backstory” of how the news segment was composed and the relationality it creates between the Reverend and the reporter takes center stage, jostling with the testimony on racialized violence, which can itself be seen as a more sinister sort of “backstory” to the U.S. state’s self-narration.


Something Else (2007) is culled from an interview segment with the teenage winner of a 1971 beauty pageant for Miss Black Roanoke. Asked by a white reporter if she will use the same talent in the next pageant, her response is that she’d prefer “to do something else, something different.” Just as he did with the reporter’s nod in The Reverend E. Randall T. Osborn, First Cousin, Everson replays the winner saying she feels “privileged” to have won, resulting in a muted but pointed reframing. Her response is followed by a cut to another question about whether she would prefer a segregated or integrated pageant. With the additional emphasis of making her answer with the film’s title—she wants to do “something else”—Everson draws out the deceptive simplicity of those words into a larger field of significance. She might wish, for example, to have a meaningful choice to make, for Black girls to not work around but exit a rigged system of racist standards of value, beauty, and merit. Everson sequences the archival footage of Something Else with an elegant coda that follows the winner’s final words about Black girls having a chance to “feel up”: a contemporary, low angle shot of another beauty queen gliding high on a sparkling float. Similarly to Charlie’s anecdotes, the abstractions and decompositions of Everson’s storytelling bear historiographic weight with a light hand.


Second and Lee (2008), a third archival film, parallels The Reverend E. Randall T. Osborn, First Cousin in form and theme, as it too takes a critical look at policing and the legal maintenance of power. Everson slows down the source footage, making the ugly display of a perp walk and other enforced movements seem slightly hallucinatory. A sequence of heads turning appears more deliberate than automatic. Playing into his unveiled manipulations and accentuating their formal protocols, Second and Lee reflects Everson’s frequent aversion to synchronized sound. He prefers to borrow and replace. The footage is silent and accompanied by a voiceover, raspy and unsteady with age, telling of a narrow brush with what could easily have been a police murder, had the speaker’s reaction to incumbent arrest been to run rather than stay: “At that time always looking for an excuse to shoot you.”

“That time” is still the present. Allusively, Second and Lee chronicles how criminality has been written into Blackness from the foundations of the U.S. national consciousness, “built on a bedrock of fictions.”5 Everson’s abstracted oppositional historiography fights fiction with fiction. The subject of Playing Dead (2008) also escapes death by staying still, pretending to have already been felled by the five men who shot his brother. He is interviewed by a white reporter, whose line of inquiry sounds suspiciously like he’s calling into question what responsibility the victim could have had in the violence inflicted on him and his brother. As in Second and Lee, the restaging and reenactment of the archival material interrogate the presumed criminality of Blackness. Through his interpretative intervention, Everson at once troubles the assumed line between fact and fiction as well as the singular authority of an “authentic” document and the systems securing it.




[remix]

Everson’s aesthetic procedure is a remix. His films feign a documentary-like vocabulary, only to reject it with a detectable artifice. A sleight of hand, his theatricality mirrors that of two Philadelphia magicians, Donald E. Camp and Ran’D Shine, who demonstrate their skill in Three Quarters (2015). Even where their faces are visible in the crisp black-and-white images, manual gestures are the focus: flipping cards, pulling strings, deftly conjuring, hiding, and multiplying coins. Hands (including his own) are all over Everson’s filmic syntax. Whatever the skill or task, it foregrounds materiality and physicality as complementary to his abstractions. An earlier short, Blue Caps (2013), homes in on the speed and agility of a magician-hustler moving around three bottle tops. Both Three Quarters and Blue Caps are silent films, further sharpening their gestural fixation. Stone (2013), which features the same subject again with his blue caps, is a longer and more animated take, with a soundtrack jostling, betting, and yelling. The camera vies for its place, floating behind a child’s head for much of the film. Here, the trickster is heard quickly talking through his movements, his performance at once haptic and verbal. While Everson’s films are opposed to manufactured mystification, they will never betray the tricks of another’s trade. As the trio of magicians demonstrates, the artist transmits the intricacies and intelligence of his subject’s acts of doing and making, without translating them to accommodate the spectator. The common source of Blue Caps and Stone is another insight into Everson’s method, as what was meant to be one film often spins out into many.6




[repetition and rehearsal]

Everson’s filmography is dexterously iterative, conditioned by his photographic training of creating a yearly body of work.7  Quasi-serialization makes clusters of films a moving image sketchbook: composed, contemplative, and temporarily organized around a delimited set of formal issues. His repetitions and rehearsals are a reflexive thematic compass. The beauty contestant in Something Else (2007) voices the necessity of practice, which is embodied by the magicians in Three Quarters practicing their tricks. A related drill, the audition, structures Rita Larson’s Boy (2012). Ten actors read from a script for the role of Rollo from Sanford and Son, the 1970s sitcom, most of them thumbing through pages which peek out from the bottom of the shot. The audition scene is itself a fabrication, modeling the abstracted formalism of Everson’s filmmaking, reiterating variations on a theme. It was Everson’s inability to locate the tapes of the original audition footage that spurred this film,8  using absence as a precondition for creation—the same way archival material offers the pretext for restaging. Both lay a claim on making multiples as a vehicle for imaginative flexibility. A good storyteller isn’t fazed by forgetting some part or detail. You just make up something in its place, approaching gaps, pauses, and intervals as a springboard rather than an endpoint. For Everson, confabulation as a vernacular aesthetic practice colludes with the abstractions of repetitions and rehearsals. 



Everson’s process valorizes consistent efforts, making his cinematic studies and exercises counterparts to their subjects. On both sides of the camera is what could be called discipline, or Practice, Practice, Practice (2024), which centers on the three-time removal of a confederate flag outside the San Francisco City Hall by Richard Bradley in 1984. Where the symbolic war against icons and monuments of white supremacy during the 2020 global Black and anti-colonial rebellion may have been mistaken for a new phenomenon, this short is an important record of a lineage of such actions, and their documentation in various media. Bradley modestly notes he had been “hanging around” a socialist organization at the time of the direct action. In fact, by his second successful flag takedown, Bradley was not merely involved in the Spartacist League (a communist organization), he was their “candidate for Supervisor, and a hero in black and working-class neighborhoods” for his flag operations.9  He learned how to climb from a friend who worked for a phone company. Bradley’s oral testimony is preceded and then intercut with that of Jerry Berritt, who talks about his own job with a phone company, working out in the field for installations and repairs that required climbing poles, and how he became good at it. Both men are initially filmed in a close-up, looking up as their gaze directs the spectator to imagine the action. Throughout Everson’s aesthetic inscriptions of labor, he draws attention to the socialization of acquiring knowledge and the multifunctionality of a learned skill.


Everson’s cinematic exercises highlight the art of process and the value of practice. Discipline and rehearsal are the real magic. James A. Snead’s essay “On Repetition in Black Culture” (1981) suggests how the artist might be plotted in a wide frame of African and Afro-diasporic expressive practices. As Snead writes, where for European culture “repetition must be seen to be not just circulation and flow but accumulation and growth,” in Black culture it “means that the thing circulates (exactly in the manner of any flow, including capital flows) there in an equilibrium.”10 Everson’s circulation between formal templates and protocols is an apt audiovisual corollary. Showing Black people in rituals of repetition—practicing, rehearsing, reenacting, auditioning, and storytelling—carves out a transformative potential in conflict with the demands of capital.

As a formal abstraction and insurgent challenge, the iterative character of Everson’s filmmaking sculpts his narrative artifice into studies of process and labor. His films deflate expectations that a Black filmmaker will deliver some absolute truth of Black being or assume the spectator should know more about the subject on screen. Reenacting, remixing, and rehearsing—much like the magicians’ tricks, scrambling the categories of fact and fiction—engage in a play of withholding and sharing, flattening the differentiation between the epic and the everyday. If there is a documentary quality to his work, it is most significantly the documentation of fabrication, of how things are made and made up. As one of Everson’s cousins says in Erie (2010), “Everybody’s got a story.” It doesn’t matter if it’s true—it just has to be good.


Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer. She is devoted to visual culture from the African continent and diaspora, anticolonial cinema, and the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her work pays particular attention to the materiality of image-making and the politics of memory. She has programmed at Anthology Film Archives, Maysles Documentary Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, the National Gallery of Art, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes, museum catalogues, and journals, such as The Nation, Film Quarterly, The Baffler, MUBI’s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, World Records Journal and Criterion’s Current. She holds a Ph.D. in Black Studies and Film & Media Studies from Yale University.


Endnotes

1. Terri Francis, “Of the Ludic, the Blues, and the Counterfeit: An Interview with Kevin Jerome Everson, Experimental Filmmaker,” Black Camera, vol. 5, no. 1, 2013, 191.
2. Kathleen Collins, “Kathleen Collins Master Class,” April 10, 1984, Howard University.
3. Kevin Jerome Everson, “Weitzman Fall 2023 Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Kevin Jerome Everson,” October 5, 2023, ICA Philadelphia.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979.
5. Simon Balto, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power, The University of North Carolina Press, 2019, 45.
6. Everson, “Weitzman Lecture.”
7. Kevin Jerome Everson, “Keys to the City: An Evening with Kevin Jerome Everson,” Q&A, Newlab at Michigan Central, Detroit MI, November 15, 2025.
8. Michael Boyce Gillespie, “B.A.D. (Black Abstraction Dreaming): A Conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson,” Black Camera 8, no. 1, 2016, 162.
9. “Vindictive Harassment of Spartacist Candidate: Hands Off Richard Bradley!” Workers Vanguard, no. 363, September 28, 1984, 3.
10. James A. Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Black American Literature Forum 15, no. 4, 1981, 149.


Fig. 1, Practice, Practice, Practice, Kevin Jerome Everson, 10 min, 16mm > digital, 2024, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 2, Charlie’s Proof, Kevin Jerome Everson, 13 min, 16mm > digital, 2013, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 3, The Reverend E. Randall T. Osborn, First Cousin, Kevin Jerome Everson, 3.5 min, 16mm > digital, 2007, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 4, Something Else, Kevin Jerome Everson, 2 min, 16mm > digital, 2007, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 5–6, Second and Lee, Kevin Jerome Everson, 3 min, 16mm > digital, 2008, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 7–8, Playing Dead, Kevin Jerome Everson, 1.5 min, 16mm > digital, 2008, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 9, Three Quarters, Kevin Jerome Everson, 4 min, 16mm > digital, 2015, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 10, Blue Caps, Kevin Jerome Everson, 1 min, 16mm > digital, 2013, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 11, Sanford and Son, 1972-77 © Tandem Productions
Fig. 12, Rita Larson’s Boy, Kevin Jerome Everson, 11 min, 16mm > digital, 2012, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.
Fig. 13, Practice, Practice, Practice, Kevin Jerome Everson, 10 min, 16mm > digital, 2024, © Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist / trilobite-arts DAC / Picture Palace Pictures.