Hale County This Morning, This Evening

 

Director RaMell Ross

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING                  B                                          USA  (76 mi)  2018  d: RaMell Ross          

If we weren’t stuck in our first-person points of view, I would argue that most problems in the world that have to do with inequality would be solved, because we wouldn’t be stuck in our single points of views.                                                                                                                   —Director RaMell Ross                

Much has been written about this boldly impressionistic, kaleidoscopic film, which is largely a photographic exercise, basically confronting viewers to question what they see, documenting small-town life in rural Alabama, where the intent appears to be to break the mold and defy age-old stereotypical perceptions of black life by creating something new, where the filmmaker literally establishes his own uncompromising vision, which is more challenging for viewers.  Told in a non-linear fashion, for the most part, unbound by preconceived ideas on filmmaking, where a stereotypical myth of blackness is entangled at the root of the American South’s depiction, a mythology upheld in textbooks, institutions, media, film, and literature, evolving into fact and growing into laws, so the director treads new ground using a process that evolved organically through his personal engagement with the people and spaces of Hale County, Alabama, honoring its participants by resisting easy consumption, instead challenging our intellect with what has been described as a new aesthetic, offering a fresh and unpretentious take on an often overlooked part of American life, tucked out of sight, away from the distractions of media attention, where life and death exists here much as it did decades ago, with families and neighbors in close contact with one another, where there are literally no secrets, Independent Lens | Hale County This Morning, This Evening ... YouTube (2:09).  With no voice-overs or talking-head interviews, with an unobtrusive electronic musical score by Alex Somers and Scott Alario, the filmmaker utilizes landscape photography to allow nature to occasionally intrude.  What’s not shown and never mentioned is the long history of racial oppression, as this is a place where Martin Luther King sought refuge in a safe house from the Ku Klux Klan just two weeks before his assassination, now a Black History Museum in Greensboro, Safe House Black History Museum: Home, featuring endless acres of cotton fields, where poor white sharecropping families were once the subject of Walker Evans photographs in the 1941 book LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, with a text by James Agee, capturing the lives of impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression, a book that inspired Aaron Copland’s 1954 opera The Tender Land.  But that was then and this is now, with the region currently populated largely by people of color, where dreams of a better life have more available options, but people are still economically stuck in a seemingly endless cycle of poverty, where the county’s median income is around $30,000, so progress is slow in coming, if at all, with many facing the same roadblocks preventing advancement, creating a cyclical Sisyphean feel, like a heavy weight of history being held over their heads.  Graduating with degrees in English and Sociology from Georgetown University, while also playing point guard on the basketball team until he was sidelined by injuries, earning a Master’s in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, currently working as an associate professor in Brown University’s Visual Art Department, Ross is a unique visual artist, awarded an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, a Rhode Island Foundation MacColl Johnson artist Fellowship, Howard Foundation Fellowship, USA Artist Fellowship, Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow, and was a 2022 Solomon Fellow at Harvard University, with this film winning the 2018 Sundance U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, where his work has also been featured in various art museums.  While this film was nominated for an Academy Award in Documentary Film in 2018, the award was given to Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s FREE SOLO (2018), featuring the extraordinary, death-defying rock climbing skills without ropes or other protective equipment by Alex Honnold.   

Stylistically, Ross has developed his own signature experimental style that is not like other black filmmakers, as it doesn’t have the humanist, cinéma vérité aesthetic of Charles Burnett out of the UCLA L.A. Rebellion school of the 60’s and 70’s, perhaps best exemplified by Killer of Sheep (1979), which this film resembles, especially in its depiction of children, or Spike Lee’s tone of provocation in exploring the complexities of black cultural identity in America, like Do the Right Thing (1989), or the sensualized, poetic flair of Barry Jenkins’ 2016 Top Ten List #1 Moonlight, whose films owe a debt of influence to Asian filmmaker Wong Kar-wai.  More than the others, this has the abstract, experimental style of Jean-Luc Godard, as it emphasizes an analytic, intellectual aspect of filmmaking that can feel obtuse and unapproachable, as the style itself is distancing, leaving viewers to reflect as much on the visual aesthetic as the subject matter, where the film is a counterpoint to the politicization of people of color and the entertainment industry’s idealizations of black life.  Ross shows blackness in a way that has rarely been depicted onscreen, with an unsentimentalized focus on emotions and perceptions as opposed to narrative actions, experimenting with form, literally creating a new cinematic language, with creative consultation from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with his blend of naturalism and poetic realism, maker of SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (2006), UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (2010), the somnambulistic Cemetery of Splendor (Rak ti Khon Kaen) (2015), or more recently 2022 Top Ten List #3 Memoria (2021).  The director spent five years shooting, moving to Greensboro, Alabama in 2009 to teach photography and coach high school basketball, where he didn’t initially think of shooting a film, but was simply photographing things of interest before deciding to shoot on a DSLR video camera, accumulating an astonishing 1300 hours of footage, pared down to just 76-minutes by Ross and three others in the editing room, making this a deliberately impressionistic and exploratory film, reminiscent of the quasi-experimental work of Terrence Malick’s later films, 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012),  Knight of Cups (2015), and Song to Song (2017).  What’s perhaps surprising about this documentary is that it appears to be guided by mundane moments, following multiple protagonists over the course of several years, where sometimes they speak directly into the camera, and sometimes they are simply being observed, using a fly on the wall approach, capturing life as it is being lived, offering no sociological or philosophical conclusions, with little that might seem special or out of the ordinary, which viewers may find challenging in holding our attention, as it’s difficult to sell the banal, yet these are simply moments that most blacks will recognize as having lived through, and there is something deeply meaningful in the personalized way that it is shown.  Entertaining it is not, however, and viewers may find themselves easily distracted and confused by the Godardian dialectic, which is simply not for everyone, as many of the characters are difficult to understand, where it seemingly jumps around at random, with no coherent message, immersing viewers into the connected lives of various black individuals and families in the community, perhaps insisting that we view them on their own terms without filters or bias.  Curiously, in the only artificial, non-natural inclusion, the film also includes archival clips from the 1913 silent film, LIME KILN CLUB FIELD DAY, the first feature to star a black actor, in this case black entertainer Bert Williams in blackface, a popular silent era comedian who played the vaudeville circuit, like a ghost of cinema’s past, using intentionally off-putting moments that remind us of the origins of black representation in cinema, probing how blackness has come to be seen by large viewing audiences, introducing historical questions of ethical concerns. 

Hale County is named in honor of Confederate officer Stephen Fowler Hale, established at the end of the Civil War, with whites controlling much of the economic and political power in the county, enforced early by violence and later by decades of disenfranchisement of black voters through a statewide imposition of Jim Crow laws that were not overturned until after 1965, leaving behind a legacy of segregation and economic stagnation, with more than 25% of the population today living below the poverty line, where most everyone seems to end up working in the refrigerated conditions of a catfish processing plant.  Poetically addressing the region’s shift in demographics and the power that lies within the community in purely human terms, Ross, whose presence is occasionally seen or heard, focuses his attention on two young high school students he met while working as a teacher and basketball coach, Quincy Bryant, a struggling young father, along with his wife Latrenda “Boosie” Ash, who is pregnant with twins, and their energetic young child Kyrie, and Daniel Collins, raised by his grandmother until he was 12, as his mother’s boyfriend had “an attitude problem,” who dreams of playing in the NBA, with only one of them making it to college, able to seek out new opportunities at Selma University, a historically black college, while the other finds himself saddled by the responsibilities of a growing family, with each flowing in and out of the frame.  Using onscreen intertitles, like chapter headings, they pose poetic and philosophically thoughtful questions that aren’t immediately answerable, but offer a literary provocation of setting a mood, like “What is the orbit of our dreaming?”  “How do we not frame someone?”  “Where does time reside?” Ross captures ordinary scenes in a series of tableaux shots, exposing brief vignettes in time, like a slow-motion drive down a heavily populated main street awaiting a parade, the camera fixed straight ahead, or a student’s perspective of a classroom discussion, the unbridled enthusiasm of a child gleefully running back and forth between the living room and hallway, the hypnotic singing and bodies swaying at church, basketball and cheerleading practice, storm clouds and rain, kids playing in the streets, a nose piercing, a birthing scene, the joy of shooting off fireworks, a smoke-filled burning of tires, watching the sunlight filtering through the trees, a bee turning in circles in the back of a truck, and even a fast food drive-through, where voices are heard in the background, but rarely seen, keeping viewers off-balance, accentuated by odd camera angles that are equally unexpected.  While a shocking tragedy occurs, it is viewed as part of the everyday moments of the human experience, receiving no extra attention, with Ross respectfully observing in an understated and minimally invasive manner.  A collection of jagged, fleeting moments, the black experience has rarely, if ever, been shown this way, as it never shows important decisions being made, with only a few impactful moments, so it doesn’t allow viewers to cast judgment on what they see, but it does allow them to feel the fragility of the interpersonal relationships, where one glaring observation is just how much this film emphasizes youth, making them an essential component of the community, as they represent the future.  These young protagonists are not yet adults, yet they’re already playing adult roles, growing up too soon, where Daniel’s mother Mary can actually be heard telling her son that he is spending too much time with her, that she’s tired from all her many obligations, and needs her own space.  This is simply not what we’re typically used to hearing, or seeing, but it offers a powerful reflection on what a hard life it is being black, as it wears you out, physically and emotionally, as you’re challenged and tested on a daily basis for your entire lifespan.  It may come as a bit of a shock, with no real success stories to speak of, instead there are shared moments that collectively have a value, where the impact is internalized, with this filmmaker envisioning a new way of seeing a connection to an identifiable black consciousness, providing some of the most intimate glimpses, with viewers slowly coming to the realization why they matter, with the music of Billie Holiday providing the final grace note over the end credits, Billie Holiday: Stars Fell On Alabama (1957) YouTube (3:50).

Bird

 

Director Andrea Arnold

Arnold with Jason Buda and Nykiya Adams

Arnold with her lead cast at Cannes

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BIRD                          B+                                                                                                        Great Britain  USA  France  Germany  (119 mi)  2024  d: Andrea Arnold

This is the next century
Where the universal’s free
You can find it anywhere
Yes, the future has been sold

Every night we’re gone
And to karaoke songs
How we like to sing along
Though the words are wrong

It really, really, really could happen
Yes, it really, really, really could happen
When the days they seem to fall through you
Well, just let them go

No one here is alone
Satellites in every home
Yes, the universal’s here
Here for everyone

Every paper that you read
Says tomorrow is your lucky day
Well, here’s your lucky day

It really, really, really could happen
Yes, it really, really, really could happen
If the days they seem to fall through you
Well, just let them go

—The Universal by English alternative rock band Blur, 1995, inspired by Alex and his Droogs from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Blur - The Universal (Official Video), Full HD (Digitally ... YouTube (3:55)

From the director of social realist films like RED ROAD (2006), FISH TANK (2009), and American Honey (2016), each of which won the Cannes Jury Prize (3rd Place), winning an Academy Award with her short film WASP (2003), converting to an overly abstract, experimental style in both Wuthering Heights (Arnold) (2011) and Cow (2021), this is a return to form for Arnold, an adrenaline-laced, kitchen sink exposé of a British underclass in the north Kent region (the same area where Arnold grew up) that feels like FISH TANK on steroids, where this is an aggressive, in-your-face assault to the senses, almost as if time and the film speed itself was sped up.  The raucous music adds an underlying layer of unbridled punk ferociousness, while the abstract, psychologically fractured style is unique, minimizing narrative form, instead creating a hallucinogenic atmosphere of drug-induced ferocity balanced against the internal world of a coming-of-age 12-year old Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams), who is vulnerable yet resilient, mature beyond her years, navigating her way through a suffocating atmosphere and a seemingly endless series of labyrinthean challenges, an extension of the young female protagonists in both FISH TANK and AMERICAN HONEY, where the creative sound design is phenomenal, making this one of the best edited films of the year, where you never really know where this is going.  As is Arnold’s style, rarely working with established actors, she allows an unknown lead character to literally carry the film, and Adams is electrifying, onscreen for nearly the entire film, yet this film defies expectations, adding surreal elements that simply alter the landscape, creating tonal shifts that are as wildly expressive as the furious post-punk of the Irish rock band Fontaines DC, where a punctuating opening song Too Real asks “Is it too real for ya?,” BIRD | Official Clip | In Theaters Now YouTube (1:36), a theme that permeates through every frame of the film, challenging viewers at every turn, upending any idea of what we’ve seen before, creating something entirely new, a brash expression of the new world order.  Bailey, who is black, straddles two families, one that is white, living with Barry Keoghan playing Bug, a mostly shirtless, perpetually loud and chaotic father to Bailey, literally adorned with insect tattoos, and her equally troubled older half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda), a family marked by dysfunction and hopelessness, and one that is black, as her mother, Peyton (Jasmine Jobson), lives in a decrepit drug house with three younger siblings on the other side of town, where the brazen abuse of her terrifying boyfriend Skate (James Nelson-Joyce, the nastiest piece of work in any Arnold film) and the paralyzing fear he generates, especially towards the children, adds a brutal dimension of extreme psychological harm in a tumultuously exploding world.  Bug, who doesn’t look much older than his kids (a father at 14), is a troublemaking knucklehead and drug dealer who doesn’t really concern himself with parenting in any real sense, as his virtually unemployable, irresponsible life is so out of control in their graffiti-strewn neighborhood that his constant diversions and distractions allow them to pretty much run their own lives, where in this world unsupervised children are the norm.  Featuring an extraordinary selection of music, Bird by Andrea Arnold (Soundtrack), so integral to the enveloping atmosphere, where Bug seems to have a particular affection for singing along with Blur - The Universal (Later... with Jools Holland 1995) - Full ... YouTube (4:01), a dystopian song that oozes a fake optimism, synonymous with an elated sense of Britpop promise in the 90’s that was subsequently crushed under a wave of conservatism, yet when he makes a surprise announcement that he’s going to get married, introducing Kayleigh (Frankie Box), who is a complete stranger, and Kayleigh’s baby daughter into their lives, Bailey is thoroughly disgusted by the idea, as their lives are already complicated enough.  “There’s no place like home” this isn’t.    

In an article for The Guardian in 2021, We are animals. We need to connect to the millions of non- ..., Arnold wrote:

Whenever I have felt troubled or lost or overwhelmed with life I have always sought nature.  It has always grounded me and put me in touch with myself again.  No one taught me this.  It came quite naturally.  Like some innate knowledge.  Partly I think because I had a very free childhood.  My mum had me very young, at 16, and three siblings followed by the time she was 22.  My dad was only a few years older.  I never saw him that much in my early years and he was gone completely by the time I was 10.

So, unsupervised most of the time, I lived a fantastically wild life.  I grew up in north Kent on an estate surrounded by liminal wilderness.  From early, I would spend entire days roaming wherever the fancy took me.  Between estates and chalk pits and deserted old industrial spaces and woods and motorways.  Out of this grew a deep love of insects and birds and animals and plants.  Stray estate dogs, the Traveller ponies chained by the motorway, the fish and frogs in the water-filled bomb site, wild strawberries on the banks of the chalk pits.  I can conjure up these places vividly now.  The smells and sounds and feels and colours.             

At Cannes the film won the Carrosse d’Or, or Golden Coach Award, bestowed by the Society of French Directors showcasing “innovative qualities, courage and independent-mindedness,” joining a distinguished group of past winners including Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Jia Zhangke, Jane Campion, Jim Jarmusch, Kelly Reichardt, and Clint Eastwood, with Arnold tearfully indicating it was the toughest shoot of her career, and the most painful, with many more challenges than usual, making it particularly difficult to find the film she envisioned from the footage she shot, which may explain the kaleidoscopic editing structure that continually keeps viewers on edge.  Yet this also may be the most cinematic film she’s ever made, as Arnold fearlessly refuses to be pigeonholed as a social realist, capturing the extremes of the fantastical with the unending challenges of living in a world that is literally crumbling under your feet.  What’s different about this working class exposé is that nobody is actually working, or even going to school, leaving them precariously vulnerable to the violence that is seemingly everywhere, with no love in sight, where an escape from reality is a necessity, opening up a crack of light in an area otherwise consumed by rampant poverty and social decay.  Bailey is a sensitive and rebellious girl who lives in Gravesend, a Kent neighborhood mentioned in several Charles Dickens novels characterized by apartment blocks covered in graffiti and dysfunctional families, who doesn’t even have a bed, just a sleeping bag that she curls up in, spending much of her time alone, or sometimes with a group of young thugs in the area who view themselves as the “protectors,” targeting domestic abuse offenders with their own extremely violent, vigilante justice style brand of retribution.  But her life changes when she meets Bird (Franz Rogowski), a mysterious wanderer who appears out of nowhere doing a twirl for her camera dressed in a kilt in search of his birth parents he has never known, and while she’s initially wary, keeping her distance, she ultimately decides to help him in his search, as he seems to have a special connection with children, eventually making a deeply profound personal connection, where he takes on the role of her guardian angel.  Her innocence stands in stark contrast to the shadowy underworld dealings of her manic father, who spends a good amount of time attempting to persuade a Colorado River toad to secrete a slimy hallucinogenic substance, something he thinks will make him a fortune, or at least pay for his wedding, but this only seems to happen when he plays “sincere,” old-style “Dad music” that he hates, hilariously turning to Coldplay’s rendition of Coldplay - Yellow (Official Video) YouTube (4:32), which seems to work like a charm.  Bailey has a habit of filming what she sees on her phone, including the flight of birds, butterflies, horses, or disturbing moments of violence, as well as her initial meeting with Bird, all of which comprise a personal journal, like diary entries that document her evolving life, projecting her videos on the walls of her room at night, though sometimes they just run through her mind, showing us the world through her eyes.  Captured through a dizzyingly frenetic handheld camera, reflective of the emotional inner instability of these lives, so fragile against the eruptive violence that surrounds them, yet there is poetry to be found in the wretched ugliness of life on the poorest margins of society, where there are flashes of mysterious and dreamy moments, like the camera pointing upwards to the sky, or seeing Bird continually standing atop a high-rise building, recalling the reckless impulsiveness and daredevil games of the alienated high school youth in Toshiaki Toyoda’s Blue Spring (Aoi haru) (2001) or the angels perched atop the ledges of skyscrapers high above the city in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) (1987).   

With references to Vittorio De Sica’s MIRACLE IN MILAN (1951), where protagonists escape the misery of postwar ruins by broomstick, a neo-realist fable that no one complained about, by the way, ranked 3rd on Cahiers du Cinéma’s Top 10 Films of the Year List in 1951, or more overtly Ken Loach’s KES (1969), as both realistically portray, with poetic elements, the daily lives of teenagers who take refuge from their harsh reality through a friendship with birds, this film depicts a turbulent transition from childhood to womanhood, struggling with everyday problems, where nothing is remotely straightforward, continually taking strange detours along the way, becoming, in essence, a metamorphosis in action, where the ideas just keep coming.  Despite her tender age in a time of transition, Bailey has to deal with much greater conflicts and responsibilities, where we are literally lured into her child’s-eye view of the world, showing the brutality of forgotten environments that children are forced to live in, where there is seemingly no place for them, as the entire system has failed them, suggesting they are able to dream of freedom (“It really, really, really could happen”) beyond the squalor that surrounds them.  Shot on 16mm by Arnold regular Robbie Ryan, who also works with Ken Loach and Yorgos Lanthimos, this rich and layered film is most of all an exhilarating experience, easily her most “out there” film, as the audacity of the “what the fuck” factor screams originality, skillfully told with striking empathy and ingenuity, where some have criticized elements of CGI magical realism mixed in, something never seen before in an Andrea Arnold film, but they feel more like surreal moments, as the transformations are completely in character, initially manifested with relative subtlety until the film explodes with the full force of unleashed creativity, where viewers need to keep an open mind on the power of cinematic suggestion.  Having the courage to make outrageous narrative choices leads the film on unexpected paths, like the perilous side journeys Odysseus takes in The Odyssey, while also grasping a child’s state of grace and wonder that recalls Benh Zeitlin’s 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #1 Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), as otherwise this might be mired in miserablism or poverty porn, yet this feels elevated and empowering, completely grounded in a grim reality, yet it’s so much more rewarding, both bleak and hopeful all at once, literally transcending the material, as there’s a surprise in nearly every shot.  Arnold seems to specialize in stories of neglected and endangered girls on the verge of becoming young women while living in brutal or inhospitable environments, yet this adds another layer, namely Bailey’s fascination with birds, while she also may be queer, or at least leaning in that direction, showing an aversion to girly things, where her self-absorbed father is just too oblivious to notice, or care.  Yet one of the featured aspects of the film is a parallel curiosity about parenting, as Bird is as interested in his journey of discovery about his missing parents as Bailey is with unlocking the buried secrets of hers, leading to a powerfully dynamic and emotionally riveting conclusion, with these revelations beautifully interwoven into the film, where one of the questions this film asks is whether we can ever really be free of the trauma that shaped our lives.  The raw, unforgiving world of Arnold’s movies and the struggles of these young girls to survive are brutally honest observations that are overwhelmingly truthful and sincere, embracing life’s imperfections, accentuating class disparity and familial neglect while offering resilience in the face of adversity, tenderness in the face of chaos, where the poetic excursions are like an epiphany that only add, not detract, from the film’s overall impact, as it simply refuses to end in tragedy, and continues to play out over the end credits.  Difficult, experimental, and ambiguous, yet exquisite.