A Week in the Hole (2001) film still [Enlarge in New Window]

Kevin Everson: A Week in the Hole

On his first day of work, a black young man slowly acclimates himself to his surroundings. In the morning, he's tentative and shy, not quite sure about how to work the machinery. He takes his morning break by himself. By afternoon, he's in the swing of things and taking his coffee break with the guys.

This is the progression of Kevin Everson's film A Week in the Hole, a 6 1/2 minute short which charts an employee's first day on the job in a factory that paints wood supplies. "It's just this character getting comfortable with the smells and sounds of the factory. He's doing all these different tasks, which you see him do several times. He's slightly uncomfortable at first, then he becomes more comfortable," says Everson, 37, from his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is an assistant professor of art at the University of Virginia.

A prolific filmmaker, Everson's filmography to date includes 18 shorts made since he got his MFA from Ohio University in 1990. (He notes that he just had to count them for a report.) When his shorts play at film festivals, they're usually in the experimental category -- a place Everson considers appropriate for his nontraditional approach. His aesthetic was born out of his work as a sculptor and as a photographer working in the genre of street photography, and his films draw from both art forms. "I was responding to tasks and gestures that I think are beautiful and, for right now, film and video seem to be best way to represent those," he says.

Everson thinks this latest short is his best effort at putting all of those things together. If an artist is allowed a favorite work, A Week in the Hole is his, for now at least. "Aesthetically, economically, formally, I just learned a lot from it," he says. "I shot it in a factory in Charlottesville, and I even moved the shoot up a month early, so I did a month's work in a week's time, and it all still seemed to work out."

Compared to his earlier work, A Week in the Hole is not as nonlinear as a trio of shorts he made in 1999 -- Merger, Second Shift, and Imported -- which were series of images with narration. But neither is it a story-driven narrative. It's naturalistic, but not realistic. The film is more like a snapshot of a man at work, having conversations with his co-workers and learning his trade. The fact that it's a paint shop functioned for Everson as a gesture of art. "The character is mixing paint, applying it to a surface," he says.

The dialogue is documentary style. You hear people talking, but sometimes the noise of the machines drowns out the exact words. "It's like eavesdropping," Everson offers. "Some of the language is in this thick Southern Black-American dialect, too."

Everson finished A Week in the Hole in 2001, just before leaving for a year in Rome as a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Not surprisingly, when he showed the short in Italy, a lot of non-native English speakers had a hard time following the speech patterns. But the film travelled well nonetheless, because it's so much more about patterns of movement than dialogue; as the artist witnessed, everyone was able to enjoy it.

Now that he's back in America, Everson plans to take A Week in the Hole to film festivals and to showcase it in galleries -- his favorite type of presentation. Though still shaking off jet-lag, he's ready to jump in. "I mourned leaving Italy for a day, but other than that I'm in full throttle," he says. "That's just the pace in America."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | African American Themes | Labor | Northeast | 2001