An excerpt from the booklet essay by Elena Gorfinkel
[Park Lanes] is devoted to the unfolding spectacle of process and its cognitive lures: welding, screwing, polishing, painting, joining, parts manufactured and in stages of assembly. The film begins with workers entering the factory, with breaks in the cafeteria placed where they would be during the workday; they clock out at the end of the day, which also marks the end of the film. The spaces of the factory are slowly revealed across the duration of the film, although the shop structure’s magnitude and layout remain indeterminate. What each worker is doing and what the objects are for, where they fit in the larger apparatus of the ‘product’, is mostly opaque, evading the spectators attempts to situate their precise function, even as they are clearly highly specialised, functional articles, bricks in mortar and all equally significant, pieces of a giant industrial puzzle of utility and its properties of enjoinment, linkage, articulation. The eight-hour workday becomes the structuring mechanism of the film’s duration, with the opening observing workers arriving and clocking in, units of work across stations, snack and lunch breaks, and clocking out by the end of the eight hours which ends the film. Between the work, workers, jape joke and hang out, suggesting the provisional communitas of the workplace as domain of collective identification, as well as gathering across differences of race and language.
But Park Lanes formal structure simultaneously avoids strict isomorphism or mimeticism that is often attributed to works of ‘slow’ or durational cinema; the labour seen onscreen is not the same as the labour of looking, and the eight-hour duration is a distinct condensation and feat of editing to create an arc of perceived sequentiality, condensing and reordering a week’s work into a day’s time. The duplication of the eight-hour day operates as a containing unit that has allegorical and functional logics, as much as conceptual examination of film time in relation to workaday time, and as a structuring device. One follows the activities of different workers across the factory, observing each, seemingly sequentially, at their respective work-stations, although some workers are shown multiple times. Radio tunes are heard occasionally, from Whitney Houston’s ‘I Want to Dance with Somebody’ to Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’, but each work station remains mostly separated off from others. Factory sounds occasionally produce scenes of musique concrete, totally immersive aural environments, when heavy drilling, spraying and other mechanical motions saturate perception with industrial noise.
Such structural precision and environmental observation eventually gains an operatic sense of development moving very strategically from part to whole, from small detail and more miniscule units of the built object hinges, wheels, screws, bars and corner plackets, then larger armatures and sheets of metal and larger objects such as giant articulated metal rings and pin holders, as a sense of a whole, and of the bowling alley as a final product and cognizable totality peels into view. The wooden floors of the lanes of the bowling alley as one giant unit bear a considerable a-ha moment, a sigh of recognition. By the time Everson reveals the privileged figures of its iconicity as beloved American past-time, bowling ball and bowling pins, the jig is mostly up, the day over. The appearance of bowling ball and pins are presented in scenes of testing, as the ball gets moved over an over through a metal girder, and the invisible domain of the pins’ capture as they fall into a netherzone, another unseen site of bowling’s production as leisure. These final flourishes secure the evocative magnitude of bowling lanes as objects and serve as suturing agents that provide a much sought for epistemic certitude. The satisfaction of narrative causality is converted into something more elementally evocative of the ‘monstration’ of early cinema, in moments of gradual and occasionally abrupt, unveiling. The orchestration of Park Lanes provides many such surprises and revelations, large and small, across its duration.
Elena Gorfinkel's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the release.
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Connections
i. A Perfect Game: Kevin Jerome Everson’s Park Lanes
ii. Overtime: Carlos Valladares on Kevin Jerome Everson
iii. Abstraction Through Representation: Interview with Kevin Jerome Everson by Megan Ratner
iv. Blackness, labour, place: the radical cinema of Kevin Jerome Everson (Sight and Sound 2020)
v.
Picture Palace Pictures