Black history, as educators and activists remind us, is more than slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. It’s more than Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver and Malcolm X, too. History is more than dates and names: It’s human lives in all of their richness and complexity. Black History Month doesn’t exist solely to honor the past, but to celebrate the beauty and impact of Black lives and Black culture in the present. The point of Black History Month is that Black history is happening right now.
RaMell Ross’ 2018 documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” is an attempt to express Black life and history as dynamic and vital. The film never states this directly: Ross avoids traditional documentary tactics like narration, talking heads and all but the loosest narrative structure. Instead he conveys his purpose through the filmmaking itself, which is impressionistic, nonlinear and daringly idiosyncratic.
With just two features under his belt, Ross has already earned a reputation as an innovative filmmaker. His first narrative feature, last year’s “Nickel Boys,” racked up awards and is a Best Picture contender. While the performances and writing are beautiful, much of the praise has been heaped on the storytelling style: the cinematographer Jomo Fray shoots the film entirely from the first-person perspectives of its two main characters. In her review for America, Grace Lenahan called it “a pioneering feat of storytelling.”
Another word you might apply to Ross’ style is “prophetic.” He’s not interested in exploring new ways of filmmaking simply for the sake of novelty; he wants to make films that give human stories—and specifically Black stories—the dignity and depth that they deserve. This is clear in “Hale County.” The film follows two young men—Daniel and Quincy—and their families, but there is little in the way of an overarching narrative. The story is told through small moments, brief glimpses, mundane details: the ordinary stuff of life. As we observe them through the compassionate eye of Ross’ camera, we realize that this is the story. All of those small moments that make up a life, the tiny joys and heartbreaks, can hold profound significance and beauty.
“People are the real documents of civilization,” Ross wrote in Film Quarterlyin 2019. He goes on to reflect on how the eye of the camera compresses life into a thumbnail version of itself— particularly Black stories, which have so often been characterized and fetishized across film history. In “Hale County,” he seeks to tell Black stories authentically: “If blackness… is unstable and evolving,” he writes in the same essay, “then the ideas of structure and narrative must evolve correspondingly to accommodate.”
The images in his film follow their own internal logic, suggesting each other: drops of sweat on a gym floor cutting to rain drops, the sounds of a basketball game continuing as it is replaced visually by a seemingly endless field of cotton. Ross wants to “find the epic-banal,” the rich significance in ordinary moments, but he is not interested in explaining them. He leaves it to the audience to make connections and draw conclusions.
Watching this film reminded me of the Examen, the Ignatian prayer that invites us to review our day moment by moment, searching for God in the ordinary. Our personal histories, after all, are also more than just dates and vital statistics: They are formed from our relationships, our hopes, our regrets, our small joys and sorrows. In the grand sweep of space and time, those tiny moments might not seem like much—certainly nothing important enough to be the focus of a movie. But when we look at our lives through the eyes of grace, it’s often those small, ordinary moments that most powerfully reveal God’s presence in our lives.
In that same essay, Ross refers to this as “the magnificence of the universe’s encasement in the social”—finding cosmic significance in the commonplace. “Hale County” includes vivid depictions of Southern Black religion, but its holiest moments are also some of its smallest: a matter-of-fact confession of grief in a parked car, or the sunlight passing through tree branches and smoke from a trash fire, forming shapes that might be a cross or an angel. Ross presents Black lives as vivid, complicated, rich and always in progress. In “Hale County,” Black history is very much alive.
“Hale County This Morning, This Evening” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
