Marbled Golden Eyes

The zoologist Maya Perry of the Detroit Zoo waxes poetically about returning the Puerto Rican Crested Toad back to the wild.

Maya Perry had started veterinary school but didn’t like chemistry class, so she became a zoologist instead. She was immediately hired by the Detroit Zoo, where she still works thirty years on. Marbled Golden Eyes is as much a portrait of Maya Perry as it is a portrait of the visitors strolling up to the amphibian house where she has been working for the past twenty years, adding a new piece to the long-running portrait of African-American citizens which Kevin Jerome Everson has been tracing across more than a hundred films, in the manner of genre paintings. Yet he never takes the art of the portrait for granted: working from minute dabs and a smattering of recurring elements, each film offers a new way of thinking the genre. Combined with a very long lens, the starkly contrasted black and white—a signature feature of KJE’s films—creates a maze of dancing figures verging on abstraction, in a vision that remains nevertheless firmly rooted in a documentary approach. For this is undeniably a vision: not many films are as convincing as KJE’s in making us feel that what we are seeing is the seeing itself, as performed by a paradoxical gaze with an idiosyncratic sense of focus, an avidity for detail and a tendency to wander. The eye slips on some remote fragment, on a gleaming surface, not out of distraction but to serve the purpose of the portrait. This portrait of Maya Perry, with its remarkable elegance, ricochetting in every direction, is reflected in a handful of details (tools, structures of the pavilion), the continual whirr of a fan, and a pair of friendly giraffes.

Jérôme Momcilovic