Field Report #1, Kevin Everson

“The Golden Age of Fish”, a 70 minute feature by filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson, was a very interesting mixture of imagery, sound, and personal background as well as the background of a specific place, Cleveland. Kevin Everson himself, when asked if he sees his piece as a documentary, responded by calling it a “document”. Everson also explains that a lot of this footage is influenced by events that took place during his childhood in Ohio, giving the film a sense of autobiography. When I heard about this aspect of the film, I instantly started relating this film to “What the Water Said” which we talked about earlier in class. These films are very different, but they are also similar in that they are both seen as autobiographical, and in my eyes, biographical, in their own ways.

Kevin Everson talked about living in a small town between Columbus and Cleveland. The news would always seem to portray Cleveland as a dangerous place, showing images of murders and murder/suicides over and over again. Columbus was never showed having tragedies as such occurring there, it was seen as a safe haven compared to the chaos of Cleveland. With “The Golden Age of Fish” Kevin recreates a story in biographical form, seen through the eyes of a geologist, which re-lives the stories of these murder/suicides. Using found footage as well as his own footage shot in many different mediums, Everson combines his own style of filmmaking to real-life occurrences to bring out a part of his own past. “What the Water Said No. 1-3” by David Gatten was discussed in class as possibly being autobiographical too. We read that Gatten spent a lot of time near water in his childhood which could have been what pushed him to do an experiment such as what he has done in this film, and the upcoming parts 4-6. Both films have this element of autobiography that is sort of hidden if you don’t know the background of the maker. They also seem to me that they both have a strong element of biographical meaning.

The subjects in these two pieces seem to have they their own way of creating a story, even though neither of the works is really a straight-forward narrative. In Everson’s work the woman who basically narrates most of the film and appears throughout is the subject of biography. We see her in many different aspects of life ranging from work, to errands, to play. We gather that she is a geologist who works very hard during the days, seems to walk nearly everywhere, and also does Public Service Announcement commercials. The images of her life are weaved in through the images of Everson’s memories of his childhood. The biographical sense that I gather from Gatten’s work is that this was not, in a sense, made under the pure control of the filmmaker. Film was crumpled up and thrown into the water and cages and the creatures and liquid were able to do as they pleased with it. The final product could be seen as an authentic view on the way that the water its creatures live. They have no idea what the film is, so they were just acting the way that they normally would have, which produced very interesting results.

In conclusion, I would like to state once again that I see both Everson’s work and Gatten’s piece both work in biographical and autobiographical ways to portray their imagery. Though the films are very different in their process and message, they are similar in their backgrounds. The makers are really putting themselves, and their pasts into these pieces, as well as trying to portray different messages to us, the viewers.