Surface / Depth (Patreon)

The I and S of Lives (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2021)

Everson's films are a lot of things. They constitute an ongoing cinematic prose-poem about contemporary Black life. They could be said to form a documentary mosaic, profiling people and events that would otherwise go unnoticed, by the dominant culture and possibly even by the people who are actually experiencing them. But I'd also suggest that many of Everson's films are 21st century actualités, building from the Lumiere brothers' project of simply recording and preserving small fragments of everyday existence. And since there is ample evidence that Black life in America is a tense affair, beset by adversity and danger on many sides, Everson's films permit all of us, but especially Black viewers, an opportunity to slow down the avalanche of moments and really savor ordinary beauty.

Shot in D.C. in 2019, The I and S of Lives is a brief portrait of Jahleel Gardner. We don't know a lot about him, but we can see that he is very good at inline skating. Everson depicts Gardner spending a day in Black Lives Matter Plaza, moving between the barriers and around the now-iconic stenciled blacktop. As Everson shows us, Gardner particularly likes rolling across the I and the S, because he finds them to be the smoothest, most well-paved surface. So the message -- a tribute to the May-June 2020 protests and to the resiliency of African-Americans in a racist society -- is also a physical plane whose unique properties offer Gardner, and others, a momentary lack of resistance.

Sol de Campinas (Jessica Sarah Rinland, 2021)

In her previous film, Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another, Rinland examined the procedures used by those who work in natural history museums. We saw the meticulous methods by which experts fabricated a display duplicate of an elephant tusk. In her newest film, Rinland closely observes the efforts of archaeologists on a dig, in an area of Brazil known as State of Acre. They are carefully chipping earth away, trying to find ceramic shards and other artifacts from an indigenous people who occupied the land 1000+ years ago. They had actually created a circular clearing in the forest for social and ritual use, and this space was rediscovered while the land was being clear-cut for cattle ranching.

Sol de Campinas begins with a series of statements (drawn from Bruno Latour) about the theoretical complications of the human sciences. We are told that the field is a complex, variegated place of objects and actions. Once physical remains are removed from the field, cleaned, analyzed and classified by the museum's taxonomic systems, those objects become something very different. Yet it is the scientist's job to try and maintain a balance between the remnants of culture and those new objects of knowledge. And as Rinland shows, this process is never more fraught than when those cultures have been erased by the same power structures that led to the human sciences in the first place.