Named for the educator who bucked Jim Crow laws by teaching advanced texts to his black students, Benjamin Tonsler Park is among the only Charlottesville landmarks to commemorate an African American¹. Mr. Tonsler is not the subject of Kevin Everson’s new film, shot at polling stations around the city on 8 November 2016, but his name and legacy provide a localised historical framework for its present-tense portraiture.
From Quality Control (2011) to Park Lanes (2015), the culture and conditions of African American labour have pivoted Everson’s auteurism, and Tonsler Park also returns the director to his signature style: close-up, gravelly-textured 16mm. In his 2016 short Ears, Nose and Throat, Everson started to experiment with colour, deepening the darkest register of monochrome to emphasise blackness as both a textural and textual theme. For Tonsler Park he graded blotchy 16mm in a cool tone that locates blackness at the centre of democratic practice.
Privacy laws prevented Everson from recording synchronised sound, but the resulting shape of his film - close-ups on volunteers locked in regulated procedure, their speech muffled - provides a bald microcosm for how the American political system deploys black bodies to the workforce while participating in the disposal of their voices. Everson has been obsessing over this theme recently – the subplot of Ears, Nose and Throat follows a woman's discovery that damaged arytenoid cartilage will finally erase her witness account of a fatal shooting.
But I admit some pessimism in this reading, which runs the risk of retrofitting Everson’s democracy-bound form with future politics. It’s easy to look back on the last year of civil unrest in Charlottesville – multiple rallies by the KKK, and a Unite The Right march on 11-12 August 2017 that claimed the life of resident Heather Heyer – and feel that the democratic process he bore witness to has failed.
Despite its split image-sound reception, Everson’s structure does not create distance. He allows each 16mm roll to run its length, meaning that we become intimately familiar with the volunteers at each desk, and the legible words that escape this sound bubble offer friendly guidance (“I can give you a brochure that explains the constitutional amendments”) and warm invitation (“good morning!” is heard so often as to become a kind of mantra). The community is engaged and attentive, even if they fear the result of the day (80% of the final turnout voted for Hillary). When I first saw Tonsler Park, shortly after its February premiere at the IFFR, I understood it as a film made in the hope of a 'before' but destined to be evaluated in the context of 'after'. Viewed again at the LFF, only a few months after Unite The Right's rally, I was appalled by how quickly that 'after' had accelerated to organised and operational violence, and how the evolving context of Trump's presidency will continue to reflect off of Everson's film.
The final image of Tonsler Park is an American flag being packed away. It folds easily, clinging to the creases made by multiple rollouts at past elections. It's an important, if hardly reassuring reminder: we've been here before.
¹A comprehensive list, including libraries and cemeteries, can be found here.
From Quality Control (2011) to Park Lanes (2015), the culture and conditions of African American labour have pivoted Everson’s auteurism, and Tonsler Park also returns the director to his signature style: close-up, gravelly-textured 16mm. In his 2016 short Ears, Nose and Throat, Everson started to experiment with colour, deepening the darkest register of monochrome to emphasise blackness as both a textural and textual theme. For Tonsler Park he graded blotchy 16mm in a cool tone that locates blackness at the centre of democratic practice.
Privacy laws prevented Everson from recording synchronised sound, but the resulting shape of his film - close-ups on volunteers locked in regulated procedure, their speech muffled - provides a bald microcosm for how the American political system deploys black bodies to the workforce while participating in the disposal of their voices. Everson has been obsessing over this theme recently – the subplot of Ears, Nose and Throat follows a woman's discovery that damaged arytenoid cartilage will finally erase her witness account of a fatal shooting.
But I admit some pessimism in this reading, which runs the risk of retrofitting Everson’s democracy-bound form with future politics. It’s easy to look back on the last year of civil unrest in Charlottesville – multiple rallies by the KKK, and a Unite The Right march on 11-12 August 2017 that claimed the life of resident Heather Heyer – and feel that the democratic process he bore witness to has failed.
Despite its split image-sound reception, Everson’s structure does not create distance. He allows each 16mm roll to run its length, meaning that we become intimately familiar with the volunteers at each desk, and the legible words that escape this sound bubble offer friendly guidance (“I can give you a brochure that explains the constitutional amendments”) and warm invitation (“good morning!” is heard so often as to become a kind of mantra). The community is engaged and attentive, even if they fear the result of the day (80% of the final turnout voted for Hillary). When I first saw Tonsler Park, shortly after its February premiere at the IFFR, I understood it as a film made in the hope of a 'before' but destined to be evaluated in the context of 'after'. Viewed again at the LFF, only a few months after Unite The Right's rally, I was appalled by how quickly that 'after' had accelerated to organised and operational violence, and how the evolving context of Trump's presidency will continue to reflect off of Everson's film.
The final image of Tonsler Park is an American flag being packed away. It folds easily, clinging to the creases made by multiple rollouts at past elections. It's an important, if hardly reassuring reminder: we've been here before.
¹A comprehensive list, including libraries and cemeteries, can be found here.
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