Event

The Golden Age of Fish

In his three features and over 50 shorts, Kevin Jerome Everson inspects the daily conditions of the lives of African Americans as a way to get at the more oblique historical realities that unavoidably affect the day-to- day.

In The Golden Age of Fish, as well as in some of his recent shorts, Everson contrasts crimes in history with found footage of news reports which represent them to the public and for posterity. The films protagonist is a geologist whose work mirrors this disparity; she seeks to collect and reassemble skeletons whose anatomical details will always be somewhat guessed, but whose general workings are considered known.

"The Golden Age of Fish is an experimental feature film that interweaves various fragmentary narratives concerning Cleveland, Ohio's landscape from its prehistoric past to late twentieth century visual representation. Through a series of motifs, an African American female geologist is the catalyst that narrates Cleveland's past. The collage of scripted scenes, shot in a variety of formats, and old 16mm film news footage create traces of a narrative structure. The title references the geologist's specimens, Devonian age Cleveland Shale. The Devonian period (417 to 354 million years ago) is when many new kinds of fish appeared." K.J.E.