Ten Five in the Grass

With the films from the series Ten Five in the Grass, Everson puts the mythology of the cowboy, which in film was mediated by Hollywood and the western genre, in a new perspective. Lasso exercises, roping techniques, rodeos, and horse taming, are presented as a story of the origins but also as exemplary gestures that rebuild a collective history. The Pritchard is the non-story of a boy who pushes his out-of-fuel car forward until the very end of the black and white 16mm film reel. Thus, the car-driver interaction is reversed. In the background, an apparently impassive landscape. What is really changing and how does it affect the people living in it? Old Cat describes the crossing of a river of an immobilised young man on board a fishing boat. Some things work, some don’t. In these two films, the reliance on one’s means of transport becomes an experience of time rarefying and almost coming to a standstill. But it never reaches the point of standing completely still. The film stock runs in the camera, and the viewers’ gaze is always carefully focused on the unfolding of a complex texture of multiple non-stories. Finally, the three films from the series The Tombigbee Chronicles Number Two are presented as a succession of auditions where the speech and voice of the African-American experience are transformed into a theatre, where fragments of memory and of collective imagination are reprocessed and staged again as if it were the dawning of history itself. A dawn in which cinema, as a device and tool, is spooled back to its Lumierèsque roots. The ten auditions for the role of Rollo Larson in the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son to be found in Rita Larson’s Boy, an excerpt from Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes filmed like a forties WB classic noir, and Chicken, from Kingdom of Earth by Tennessee Williams become glimpses of past stories that zoom in on the present as secret sharers of a multitude of lives that fell off the radar of contemporary American society. The three films from the Tombigbee series are actually inspired by real persons and situations in Columbus, Mississippi, the birthplace of Everson’s parents. "Tombigbee" is the name of the river crossing Columbus.

Giona A. Nazzaro