The I and S of Lives

The “I” and “S” of “Lives” are the smoothest area of resistance. A rollerblader (Jahleel Gardner) navigates the letters on the pavement of Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington D.C. on  a summer afternoon, 2020.

©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Kevin Jerome Everson, a guest at Cinéma du réel two years ago, continues the remarkable work of a painter, film after film (already over a hundred). The I and S of Lives presents a new scene of genre painting: a young and wonderfully graceful black man on roller skates traces arabesques on Washington’s 16th Street. His yellow shorts echo the yellow painted bands that demarcate his comings and goings on the tarmac. Close by, drums resonate and finally tip the film into a trance. To realise that the performance takes place only a stone’s throw from the White House, on the “Black Lives Matter Plaza” inaugurated in 2020, you need to recognise that these wide yellow bands are letters and form the name of the movement born after the death of George Floyd. The skater, Jalheel Gardner, only skates on the “I” and “S” of “Lives” because these two letters oppose the least resistance to his rubber wheels: so much for the title – and the context and the symbol, barely visible in the background of the image, which remains focussed above all on the performance. Because The I and S of Lives is no more of a pamphlet than Everson’s previous films. Only the imprint left by the duration of several bouts of skating, a sculpture hewn in the kinetic energy of a dance that finally carries away the film itself – starting off motionless to mark out the dancer’s stage, then finishing as a dervish, totally in keeping with the method that Everson defends: trust the character, and no one else.

Jérôme Momcilovic