It’s incredibly rare — in fact, I don’t think it’s ever happened before this year — for a filmmaker to get an Oscar-nomination for a documentary and then land a best picture nomination for their next feature film. (A few have come close, though, and Ava DuVernay pulled it off, but in the opposite order.) Part of the blame lies with the Academy, which has somehow never nominated a documentary for Best Picture. It’s also just difficult, though by no means impossible, to excel in both fiction and nonfiction in a way that captures voter attention.
Yet with “Nickel Boys,” nominated this year for both best picture and best adapted screenplay, the photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross has done just that. His previous film, the groundbreaking, lyrical documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” was nominated for best documentary in 2019. “Hale County” may be less well-known than its fictional sibling, but it’s a vital companion piece. In fact, revisiting it now in the light of “Nickel Boys” illuminates Ross’s bigger project, and what makes his work so disruptive and his images so indelible.
Much has been written — including here in The New York Times — about “Nickel Boys,” which topped my own list of 2024’s best movies. In reimagining Colson Whitehead’s novel, Ross and Joslyn Barnes shifted the book’s third-person narration to first person perspective, so we spend nearly the entire film looking through the eyes of two teenage boys, Elwood and Turner.
That kind of perspective isn’t alien to storytelling. Movies have used it (including Steven Soderbergh’s recent thriller “Presence”), and it’s common in video games. But in “Nickel Boys” it feels fresh and radical. Ross, along with the cinematographer Jomo Fray and the camera operator Sam Ellison, positioned themselves and their equipment incredibly close to the actors so that their perspectives would follow their performances. The effect is remarkable: While Whitehead’s novel is about how we remember history, individually and collectively, Ross’s film is about how we see history.
That “we” includes the audience — in fact, it might be more accurate to say it implicates the audience. “Nickel Boys” insistently shakes the viewer out of the habits audiences have developed when watching fiction films. The action sometimes cuts away to documentary footage, historical images of Black Americans, without a narratively obvious motivation to do so. The camera acts like a person with their own subjective view in the scene, not the ostensibly impartial eye watching drama unfold that fiction films traditionally employ. Characters look straight into the lens, seemingly directly into our eyes, dragging us into the story.
All of this means there’s less a fourth wall in “Nickel Boys” than a filmy curtain that blows aside periodically. It reminds us we’re not just observing a story unfolding; we’re looking at images on a screen, and the way we’ve been conditioned to look at those images has a long, often difficult history.
This kind of confrontational address made directly to the audience is not uncommon in cinema. But it’s usually the purview of documentarians, particularly those who think deeply about the ethics of looking and being looked at. Some of this century’s boldest and most vital documentaries — Kirsten Johnson’s “Cameraperson,” Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Look of Silence” — aren’t about “topics,” exactly, but about how meaning is created in the mind of the beholder. There are no neutral images, no objective eyes.
“Hale County This Morning, This Evening” was Ross’s attempt to break apart the ways the movies have accustomed us to watching Black stories onscreen, particularly those about Black life in the American South — often through the lens of a trauma plot. He wanted to see something different. Ross moved to Hale County, Ala., in 2009 to teach basketball and photography, and he started filming life there with his friends. Over years, he collected all of kinds of footage that feels almost like it’s taken from home movies: a baby running in the living room, some young athletes horsing around in a locker room, friends laughing together, women singing and praying in church, basketball games. There’s no specific narrative. It’s just life unfolding — what Ross has called the “epic banal.”
Watching that film, you can spot techniques that made their way into “Nickel Boys.” In one sequence, a camera apparently mounted on the back of one subject follows him through a basketball game — something Ross brought back for scenes involving a former Nickel student in the newer movie. Several times in “Hale County,” time-lapse footage creates the impression of time-space compression, which also returns in “Nickel Boys.” Archival footage appears and the wistful score sounds similar (the films share the composers Alex Somers and Scott Alario). In both, Ross employs very close-up shots of skin and parts of faces and objects.
Mostly, though, each film evinces Ross’s overwhelming impulse to rebut the way that we look at, and interpret, the people at whom he pointed his camera. Periodically in “Hale County,” text appears onscreen, elliptical phrases that don’t give context so much as prompt questioning. At one point, the text reads, “How do we not frame someone?” In interviews around the time of the film’s release, Ross said that he set up rules for the film in editing, one of which was that there would be no scenes, only shots or moments. So we get glimpses of life, divorced from framing that tells us what to think or feel about these lives. Some bad things happen in “Hale County,” but it is not a trauma narrative. And that sensibility spills over into “Nickel Boys,” which dares you to look at its characters the way they look at each other.
But what I didn’t think about until I rewatched recently is that “Hale County” is also, effectively, employing a first-person point of view, the way “Nickel Boys” does for its characters. In this case, the sentient eye behind the camera is Ross’s, which follows his interest and sight the way it follows Elwood and Turner’s in “Nickel Boys.”
And of course, that makes sense: This is documentary. Perhaps the only thing that separates nonfiction and fiction filmmaking is the impression the audience gets about who is behind the camera. In most fiction, it’s the self-conscious construct of an omniscient and all-seeing narrator that we all agree to pretend exists for the duration of the movie. Occasionally (as in the case of “Presence” or “Nickel Boys”) it’s an invented character with a restricted point of view. In fiction films, we know, objectively, that the camera is actually pointed at whatever the director finds interesting, but we make believe otherwise so the movie can work.
In documentary, though, the eye behind the camera is always the filmmaker’s, and often they want us to know it — to the point that even in a very conventional talking-head shot, we often hear the director talking to the subject. In “Hale County,” the people Ross sees — the way he sees them, the way he sees them — dictates how we see. He isn’t thinking of his friends and neighbors through traditional cinematic tropes about Black Southerners. Watching through his eyes, we can’t either.
Ross himself never appears in the film, and we rarely hear him speak, but there’s a notable exception. About midway through “Hale County,” he, or maybe we, are in a car, driving down the main road in a small town. Then we abruptly swing left onto a dirt road and head toward a plantation-style house, which we can glimpse through the trees.
All of a sudden, the film cuts to black-and-white archival footage of a Black actor in blackface, wearing a straw hat and a checked suit, peering at something through some bushes. This footage is from the unfinished 1913 film “Lime Kiln Club Field Day,” and the actor is Bert Williams, seemingly captured in a moment where he is not performing the minstrelsy he was known for. He’s just looking at something. The way the scene is constructed, it feels like he’s watching Ross pull up to the plantation home in the present day. The scene cuts back and forth between the car driving up to the house and the actor peering through the bushes, creating a relationship between them.
In the yard, a man throws a tire on a fire, which generates black smoke. Ross’s camera turns upward, watching the light filter through the trees and the smoke, a beguiling if weird sight. As we watch that light, we can hear a male voice emerge from the background, asking Ross what he’s doing. He explains that he’s filming the light — “it’s just really beautiful” — and expresses pleasure when the man says something about another person getting a camera. “We need more Black folk making photos in the area, and taking pictures and stuff,” Ross says.
The scene cuts back to Bert Williams, who is still peering out from the past. He leans back a little. And he smiles, satisfied by what he sees, then walks forward, out of the bushes. Perhaps a little bit of the history of this house — only suggested obliquely by the film itself — has been reclaimed by Ross’s focus.
I think Ross quotes this sequence from “Hale County” in “Nickel Boys.” Early in the film, the teenage protagonist, Elwood, is being driven in a police car to Nickel Academy, the notorious reform institution where he will be living. We’re behind his eyes, so we see, from the back seat of the car, the road ahead, flanked by lushly green trees — a recurring motif throughout “Hale County,” too, minus the police officers. The scene is intercut with a short sequence from the 1958 film “The Defiant Ones,” which is also mentioned in Whitehead’s novel, in which Sidney Poitier, playing a convict, is surrounded by white prisoners in the back of a truck. He sings “Long Gone (From Bowlin’ Green),” a song of resistance, while everyone else listens.
The movie then returns to Elwood’s point of view as the car takes a left onto a dirt road. There, we and Elwood see the buildings of Nickel Academy: unremarkable, except for the weight of history they bear. Not unlike the plantation house.
Later, unmarked graves will be found on the grounds of Nickel Academy. But the scene from “The Defiant Ones” tells us something about what will also happen here, too — it’s tragedy, but there’s more to these boys and their families’ stories than their tragedies. As Ross suggests in this movie, and did in “Hale County,” too, they deserve to be seen without the commonly imposed frame. To be seen the way they see themselves.
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