[Our culture is saturated with media representations of young
black men. Rarely do we see their lives unfold as they do in Hale
County This Morning, This Evening—as full inhabitants of their own
prosaic and grand humanity.] [[link removed]]

FILMING THE BLACK BELT: AN INTERVIEW WITH RAMELL ROSS  
[[link removed]]

 

Max Fraser / RaMell Ross
October 7, 2019
Dissent
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Our culture is saturated with media representations of young black
men. Rarely do we see their lives unfold as they do in Hale County
This Morning, This Evening—as full inhabitants of their own prosaic
and grand humanity. _

RaMell Ross,

 

Still from _Hale County This Morning, This Evening_ (Copyright IDIOM
Film, Courtesy RaMell Ross)

In a year when two major studio films—_BlacKkKlansman_ and _Green
Book_—dominated debates about race and the movies, RaMell Ross’s
extraordinary 2018 debut, _Hale County This Morning, This Evening_,
can sometimes feel like it was made on another planet. Elusive, while
those other movies played like blunt instruments; unsettling,
while _BlacKkKlansman_ and _Green Book_ gave their respective
audiences exactly what they paid for; Ross’s documentary about two
young black men and the Southern county where they live moves to a
different rhythm altogether. A photographer by training, Ross brings
to his work an imagist’s appreciation for color, composition, and
the “luminous detail,” producing a tone poem to a rural black
experience we have grown accustomed to never seeing on screen. The
result is an achingly beautiful portrait of everyday life—and one of
the more compelling statements about race to come out of the movies in
quite some time.

The film loosely follows two young men, Daniel Collins and Quincy
Bryant, as they move through the final years of adolescence and into
full adulthood. The lives they lead are utterly ordinary: Collins and
Bryant go to school, hang out with friends, start families, go to
work, watch television, endure tragedies large and small, dream of
bigger things. But with time—and _Hale County_ is constantly
drawing our attention to the passage of time; Ross lets the camera
keep running on a scene long after another director might have cut
away, or suddenly speeds up or slows down the film in the middle of a
shot—a more remarkable story begins to present itself. We live in a
culture that is saturated with media representations of young black
men like Collins and Bryant. And yet rarely are we granted the
privilege of seeing their lives unfold as they do here—not as
ciphers for all the dark fantasies of a racist social order, but as
full inhabitants of their own prosaic and yet grand humanity.

_Hale County This Morning, This Evening_ received a special jury
prize at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, was named Best Documentary
at last year’s Gotham Independent Film Awards, and was nominated for
the Academy Award for Best Documentary as well. Here, director RaMell
Ross talks with Max Fraser about how and why he made _Hale County_,
its unexpected success, and why the rural setting was ideal for a film
about the “embeddedness of black folks in the American imaginary.”

MAX FRASER: Films about African-American characters and
communities—especially those that take place in the present rather
than the historical past—rarely seem to adopt a rural framing. Why
was that such an important story for you to tell with _Hale County
This Morning, This Evening_?

RAMELL ROSS: Actually, I think about the film less as a story I set
out to tell, and more as an experience of a place that I offer to an
audience. It emerges directly from my own life experience: I moved to
the “Black Belt”—Hale County, Alabama, specifically—to teach
in 2009. As I recall, the impetus for picking up the camera and
beginning to film the two main protagonists, Daniel and Quincy, came
about from what I felt almost as a sadness—a sadness about the
generalized inability to see communities like this one from the
inside. And in the same way: where do these communities see themselves
represented and celebrated in the world?

The film set out to just participate in the ebbs and flows of the
place and its life, and reproduce that cinematically—which sounds
wonderful, but was actually quite difficult to do, as slowness
doesn’t translate readily to cinema. But slowness, to some degree,
is a uniting element of rural life. People generally associate these
kinds of places with simplicity, an impression that affects the way we
think about all manner of life there, from the desires of the people
to the daily activities that compose the communities. And then there
is the specific historical baggage of slavery, which comes with the
rural landscape—which the landscape itself forces us to contend
with.

A lot of films about the black experience, at least superficially,
want to avoid the connection between African Americans and this
simplicity, and strive for settings that imply and overtly display a
social dynamism. And that’s one reason why I wanted to engage. The
Black Belt is the home of our social construction—it is from here
that we are everything America has permitted us to be. There was no
better place for innuendo, for subtlety, for inference; no better
setting for presenting black folks in ways that are simultaneously
basic and complex, historic and contemporary.

FRASER: Were you surprised by the critical reception the film
received? I mean, I’m sure you were not counting on a jury prize at
Sundance or an Oscar nomination—but did you expect the film’s
relatively unusual representation of the black experience to resonate
as strongly as it did with viewers?

ROSS: It’s fascinating, right, that the “black banal” is unusual
in popular, commercial representation? What a clear indication of a
problem! Of course, the banal is naturally in opposition to the notion
of entertainment, and it is through the representative strategies of
the entertainment media that we’ve partly come to know what it means
to be black or an African American.

I know the film is more than the black banal—but it does make a big
break from the expected by avoiding the clarity and organization that
narrative demands, by opting out of its built-in tyranny. No one on my
team thought the film would do what it has. There are so many factors
that go into a film being embraced. The timing for the type of
inquiry _Hale County_ is must have been perfect.

FRASER: So, why Hale County itself? What drew you initially to that
location, and how did it provide the right setting for the film you
were setting out to make?

ROSS: The setting of the film, the people I met, my experience living
there, _was_ the inspiration for the film. I don’t believe I would
have made this film—perhaps I would not have made a film at all—if
not for the aleatory elements. I went by chance, tagging along with a
friend, and my life circumstances encouraged me to stay and work in
the community and live without rush and think and make.

Once there, something particular emerged through my photography
practice—a way of looking that only the moving image could properly
translate. I was obsessing over black representation and my casting
within that paradigm, and at the same time building a relationship
with Daniel and Quincy and with the community at large. All of this
came together in a project in which I felt less like I was shooting a
subject in a film, and more like I had found a new family in which I
was a member.

FRASER: Can you talk a bit about your work process? I have heard you
say, for instance, that you gathered something like 1,300 hours of
film, and yet what we end up seeing on screen is just seventy-six
minutes long. The editing challenge alone must have been immense.

ROSS: One of the project’s aims was to be there—to film, to
live—in the lives of those shown longer than anyone else making a
film would. When we consider the relationship between time and film,
in terms of budgets and production schedules, it becomes obvious that
meaning-making can become dependent on available resources; on how
much time someone is willing and able to look and be present.

I think it’s especially true that, in the context of filming
African-American communities, no one looks long enough for new meaning
to emerge. Or to put it another way, with the necessary and urgent
task of depicting and expressing the black community’s traumas, what
is lost is everything else. So my process was simple: use time. And
once the collection of unexpected events and images grew large enough,
they began to speak to each other, in their form, their shapes and
colors and sounds; and placing them beside each other began to create
new meanings—meanings the isolated image couldn’t conjure on its
own.

But isn’t this also how the mind works? It edits out most and then
connects what is kept, to produce a narrative and determine what is
reasonable and meaningful. We wanted to recreate that feeling, that
dream logic—the whimsy of associative thinking in the context of
fresh moments oozing with intimacy and the sensory.

FRASER: Given how much material you had to work with, how did you make
decisions about what images to use? I can’t help but think of a line
of text that appears early on in the film—“How do we not frame
someone?”—which reads a bit like a tongue-in-cheek photography
joke, and a bit like a meta-textual reflection on the editorial
process itself. Why was “not framing” the characters you follow
in _Hale County_ so important to you?

ROSS: From outside the brain trust of Maya Krinsky, Joslyn Barnes,
and Robb Moss [all of whom contributed to editing _Hale County_], it
might seem daunting or ultimately arbitrary which images and moments
made the cut. But there was one stipulation for every image included
in the film, before the final edit process: it had to lean heavily
toward exceptional or unexpected beauty. Which we defined in many
ways—conceptually, compositionally, and so on.

The entire endeavor of the film might be thought of as an attempt to
not-frame a community and a people: to reflect a history of sinister
framing while offering something else that still somehow touches the
interiority of the viewer. The question is a bit quippish, an obvious
legal pun, but I also meant it in earnest. Is there a mode of
representation that allows for infinite possibility?

Maybe it doesn’t exist, and the act of representation itself
necessarily denies infinity. But no one wants to be placed in the
proverbial box. And in dealing with the images that have been applied
to what it means to be black, the nearer the box built by decades of
evolving iterations of racism, the closer to danger black folks find
themselves.

FRASER: Is that what you mean by “sinister framing”?

ROSS: The African-American community’s image (while acknowledging
the challenge of summing up such a wiggly thing) is a construction. An
unavoidable one at this point. Racist and unknowing others in the past
created and employed images to prove their beliefs of our inferiority,
positioning us visually to confirm their fantasies of our
hypersexuality. In many ways, photography and film have always been
the technology of racism. They offered material proof of the racial
lie.

FRASER: At the same time, there are visual cues interspersed
throughout _Hale County_—of Daniel playing basketball, of endless
fields of cotton, of flashing police lights—that immediately invoked
for me the more familiar ways that black characters and especially
black men have been framed in film or on television. Was that also an
intentional move on your part?

ROSS: Yeah, this idea, that Daniel’s and Quincy’s lives are
ultimately composites of the big restless symbols of black life, is
about the tension in our relationship to said symbols. Cotton is a
mainstay fact and visual when trying to communicate African
Americans’ ties to the South—but, is there a way to deploy that
symbol that intensifies or contributes to its placement in the
consciousness of contemporary culture? How do you illustrate honestly
the role basketball plays in Daniel’s life, without resorting to the
trope of the sport’s relationship to struggling individuals?
Similarly, this abstract connection and stereotype pushed through news
outlets and films—the connection between black people and
guns—exists in tandem with the gun’s deep integration in American
culture and the fact that black people, like all demographic groups,
do own and brandish these weapons.

The power of the stereotype is its use. We wanted to stay on the
periphery of these tropes, employ them wisely and in good faith, with
the idea that reality grows in clarity when the symbols and other
markers of meaning that determine how we imagine the world are made
less obvious.

FRASER: What were your touchstones—cinematic or otherwise—in
setting out to make a film like this? I feel like I can see the
influence of a film essayist like Chris Marker; and I’ve heard you
talk about James Agee’s weird, brilliant, exhaustive text for _Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men_, the New Deal–era photojournalism project
he collaborated on with the photographer Walker Evans (which, not
incidentally, was also set in Hale County, Alabama). How did these or
other figures or works of art shape your thinking about what you
wanted to say with _Hale County_?

ROSS: The film is a bit of Charles Burnett’s _Killer of Sheep_; a
bit of Allen Ginsberg, Maya Deren, and Arthur Russell; a bit of Toni
Morrison’s centralizing-the-black-gaze philosophy, Chris Marker’s
gesturing of time, James Agee’s hyper-attentiveness—it’s drawing
from a wide range of sources. There is even some Glenn Ligon in there.
But, in fact, the film is pursuing the ineffable and uniting event of
experience, human experience in the world, as a form of connection.
Something more akin to music in its atmosphere, while channeling the
bits that made the previously mentioned artists’ work alluring.

FRASER: Your film offers a perspective on everyday African-American
life that will be unfamiliar to most viewers, but it also offers a
portrayal of contemporary rural America that in a whole host of ways
departs from stereotypical representations of who lives in these kinds
of communities. Was that equally important to you as you were in the
process of making this film—to refigure our thinking about rurality,
just as you refigure our understanding of blackness?

ROSS: Challenging notions of who lives in these communities was not a
goal of mine from the outset of the film, though as I gathered footage
it became clear that what was unfolding was in many respects an
alternative depiction of this part of the country. The tight curation
of the film contributed to this too, I think; you can see cuts where
ideas about contemporary rural America and its inhabitants are
reinforced.

A lot of it harks back to what I was saying about our awareness of how
we deployed stereotypes in the film—that staying away from certain
modes of representation in the context of black life by default
brought forth alternative representations in other contexts. It was
almost a domino effect of refiguring.

FRASER: So once you started self-consciously disrupting the familiar
symbols that code the way we view and interpret the black experience,
other, seemingly unrelated codes started breaking down almost as a
matter of course. That suggests something pretty powerful about the
centrality of blackness to the collective American symbolic
vocabulary.

ROSS: Yeah, it’s fascinating to consider. We don’t often truly
consider the embeddedness of black folks in the American imaginary.
America would not exist in its current form without the long history
of the black experience, of course; and what that means, very
viscerally, on the visual level, is almost impossible to consider. You
can think hypothetically or romantically about living in another town
or going to another school. But to consider how the symbolic
associations tied to whiteness in America have meaning only because of
the symbolic associations tied to blackness; how one set of cultural
aesthetics are often created, consciously or not, in opposition to
others; how the whole complex stew ultimately boils down to a single
essential ingredient—well, it is a real down-the-rabbit-hole thought
experiment.

FRASER: Do you think of _Hale County_ as an explicitly, immediately
political movie?

ROSS: You know the footnote to Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”? Replace
“holy” with “political”: _The world is political! The soul is
political! The skin is political! The nose is political!_

And so on.

FRASER: All right, fair enough. Let me try it a different way: is
there a way in which we could think about _Hale County_ as a movie
about Trump’s America?

ROSS: Perhaps. I’m not sure if it’s a leap. In what way do you
think the film is about Trump’s America?

FRASER: Well, if the black banal is the tonal counterpoint to the
entertainment industries’ idealizations of black life, it’s also
the mirror image of the banalities latent in the injunction to “Make
America Great Again.” To see _Hale County_—to follow its dream
logic—is to be reminded that the dominant representative mode of a
conservative rural America only holds if you don’t watch long enough
for new meanings to emerge.

ROSS: Well said, well said. And so, that representative mode continues
to tell a story about a mythic America that has never been collective
and inclusive. I hope it helps us see, however overwhelmingly, that
these organizing principles of thought—these stereotypes—are where
reality is invented and legislated from. And if not revealed for what
they are, they will continue to produce new versions of the same old
injustices.

_RAMELL ROSS is a visual artist, photographer, and writer. He is an
assistant professor in Brown University’s visual arts department._

_MAX FRASER is an assistant professor of American history at the
University of Miami. He is currently a fellow at the Society of
Fellows at Dartmouth College and is co-editor of “Left Paths in
Rural America.”_

_MOVEMENTS NEED IDEAS. AND DISSENT NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT._

_For sixty-five years and counting, readers like you have
helped Dissent provide a vital, independent public forum for some of
the most important voices on the left. Thank you for standing with us
again in this critical year._

_DONATE NOW
[[link removed]],
or BECOME A SOLIDARITY SUBSCRIBER FOR $10 A MONTH
[[link removed]]._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]