Kevin Jerome Everson's epic, immersive, observational eight-hour documentary Park Lanes follows workers in an American factory over the course of an eight-hour shift, from clock-in to clock-out, experienced and presented in real time.
Rendering the often invisible and unacknowledged routines and rhythms of manufacturing visible, the film also celebrates the craft and skill developed through the repetition of movements and gestures and explores not just the relationship between film and spectator, but of labourers and their machines.
This 2-Disc Blu-ray Special Edition includes the complete film, plus a 40-page booklet with new essays by Matthew Barrington and Elena Gorfinkel, and an interview with Kevin Jerome Everson by Michael Boyce Gillespie.
• Two-disc Special Edition Blu-ray.
• Park Lanes presented complete and uncut from a new HD master, approved by the director.
• 40-page booklet featuring new essays by writer/curator Matthew Barrington, author and programmer Elena Gorfinkel, and an interview with Kevin Jerome Everson by Michael Boyce Gillespie.
• Trailers.
• World premiere on Blu-ray.
• Region Free (A/B/C).
Directed, edited and photographed by Kevin Jerome Everson
Produced by Madeleine Molyneaux, Kevin Jerome Everson
A production of trilobite-arts DAC and Picture Palace Pictures
Additional Camera - Nicole Chakeris, Jack Doerner,
Rachel Lane, Michelle Lee, Kahlil I. Pedizisai
1st AD - Kahlil I. Pedizisai
Sound - Nicole Chakeris, Rachel Lane
More works by Kevin Jerome Everson are also available
in the 2-disc Blu-ray set How You Live Your Story.
This and other gems of international documentary cinema
are also available from Second Run.
“Everson’s beginnings in street photography continue to inform his approach. He catches lost moments, the sort of times that film often ignores or portrays as boring and pointless. He insists on the primacy of crucial but unglamorous labour, on the validity of actions both repetitive and mundane that produce cinematic images that are both thoughtful and tenacious. These are moving pictures in every sense of the word” Megan Ratner, Film Quarterly
“The American artist Kevin Jerome Everson makes films that hover between close observation and abstraction, politics and poetry [...] To watch Everson’s films is to see cinema’s codes and histories recalibrated. Concrete and oneiric, beguiling in their slowness and quietness, in the luminosity of their materiality – his images invite attunement, a disposition of momentary grace”
Elena Gorfinkel, Sight and Sound
“Everson shows both what happens outside the work site and what happens within it... This 480-minute valorisation of labour doubles as mystification, lasting as long as the average factory shift in the States and in total rejection of any 'explanation' of how a [bowling lane] gutter gets built... It’s one of the most fabulous films of unfolding I’ve ever experienced”
Carlos Valladares, Gagosian Quarterly
“By inviting his audience to spend much more time with his subject than the comfortable duration of a fixed film format,
or a furtive visit to an installation, Everson directly solicits our sense of time management. But beyond that, the rhetoric of
his meditation on history, economy and the place of the individual avoids the manipulative. Without any comment or contextualization, and with no clear sense of what type of objects are being produced, the working performance gains a sculputural quality all of its own... It is above all a reflection on the relentlessness, but also the dignity, of everyday working life”
International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)
“[Park Lanes] offers a surplus of visual pleasure and space for contemplation of one’s own role in the workforce. The experience is profound, often beautiful and never tedious” Patrick Dahl, Screenslate
“Park Lanes is a film about labour that transmits that slow, patient, day-in, day-out process of making things directly onto the viewer... The factory employees are involved in making bowling alleys, a recreational product with an industrial basis: work for play. Everson is constructing their individual labours into an overall concept, a film that demands complete commitment on the part of the viewer: play for work. It’s the viewer’s job to negotiate this dynamic, playing it through to
the final frame” Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope