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).

Stormy Weather

 

Director Andrew L. Stone

Lena Horne

Horne with Bill Robinson and Cab Calloway

Katherine Dunham

STORMY WEATHER           A                                                                                                      USA  (78 mi)  1943  d: Andrew L. Stone

Don’t know why                                                                                                                          There’s no sun up in the sky                                                                                                           Stormy Weather                                                                                                                                Since my man and I ain’t together                                                                                                 Keeps raining all the time...                                                                                                  —Stormy Weather, by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, 1933

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.  It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear.              —James Baldwin extract from Notes of a Native Son, 1955

Following Vincente Minnelli’s earlier all-black MGM musical release in the same year, CABIN IN THE SKY (1943), these are probably the two most successful and best-remembered examples of race films in America, starring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in his first and only starring role of his career at age 65, who more than holds his own against a young 26-year old Lena Horne, with her polished image of beauty, sophistication, and refinement, yet any hint of desire for her has been stripped of all sexuality, remaining PG safe and non-threatening, bringing elegance and stature to the picture. Aesthetically complex and historically significant, conveying a repertoire of black performance that simply couldn’t be framed in words, this backstage musical from Hollywood’s Golden Age is a rarity, featuring some of the best black entertainers in the business, with highlights including Ada Brown with Fats Waller on the piano singing “That Ain’t Right,” Ada Brown and Fats Waller - That Ain't Right from Stormy Weather (Upscaled to 4k) YouTube (3:01), Cab Calloway in a zoot suit singing and leading the band in a number entitled “Geechy Joe,” Stormy Weather (1943) YouTube (3:24), the matchless elegance of the Nicholas Brothers jumping on tabletops before doing gravity defying and anatomically challenging splits down the stairs, described by Fred Astaire as “the greatest movie musical number [I] had ever seen,” Cab Calloway & Nicholas Brothers - Jumpin' Jive YouTube (4:47), and Lena Horne singing the jazzy “Diga Diga Doo,” Lena Horne - Diga Diga Doo (1943) YouTube (2:14), featuring unbelievably wild chorus-line costumes.  She sings a more restrained duet with Bill, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby,” Lena Horne - I Can't Give You Anything But Love (1943) YouTube (2:55), a song initially introduced by Adelaide Hall in 1928, which was also featured in Cassavetes’ films Shadows (1959) and Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), before Horne’s distinctive rendition of “Stormy Weather” is performed in a lengthy sequence, Lena Horne - Stormy Weather (1943) YouTube (4:11), as Katherine Dunham and her dancers improvise a modern ballet under the storm clouds.  Some of the dialogue is a bit hokey, as are the scenes with Uncle Bill telling stories to children around his knees, reminiscent of Uncle Remus in Disney’s long-censored SONG OF THE SOUTH (1946), with overt references to Southern plantations and the legacy of slavery, where the pigeon-holing or typecasting of blacks into musical and dance roles can be traced back to minstrel and Antebellum-era stereotypes, including “pickaninny,” Little Black Sambo imagery from a dance sequence, The Cakewalk 1943 YouTube (2:48), showcasing an array of crude blackface masks, leading into the pre-Civil War minstrel song “Camptown Races,” with Antebellum plantation motifs in the décor, including costume allusions to Southern Belles.  A little known aspect of the Cakewalk is that it originated on plantations to mock whites, where the winner would receive a cake, becoming a staple in minstrel shows and black communities since slavery days.  The American black experience has been shoved to the side or used as the butt of jokes since BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), which was not only a massive blockbuster but it was the benchmark for how blackness would be portrayed in mainstream films.  Despite an all-black cast, there is a blackfaced Stepin Fetchit-style comedy act by Flournoy Miller and Johnny Lee that reeks of racist derision, rarely seen outside of black variety shows, the only non-musical number in the film, where it’s hard to miss, taking a nostalgic backward glance at the vanishing era of black performance, recreating the vaudeville and minstrel-inspired performances of the black stage, showing the evolution from the 1910’s to the early 1940’s.  Mostly these are musical sketches in a manner typical of 1930’s musicals, with stereotype scenes of tap dancing, shuffling, and blackface in settings like a Mississippi riverboat, a Beale Street blues and jazz joint, and a variety theater, yet it is the always optimistic, unfailing enthusiasm of Bill Robinson and Dooley Wilson, the piano player from CASABLANCA (1942), that keeps the spirit of the film uplifting.  With non-stop musical numbers, this film provides the kind of energy and pizzazz that Broadway shows hope to match.  Made under the $5,000 target, the maximum allowed during the war years, the otherwise unnoteworthy director and entire crew were white, where run-ins with the director (Horne described his style on the set as cold) may have cost Horne future roles, yet they translated the Cotton Club nightclub revue to the screen more successfully than any other cinematic attempt.  Andrew Stone’s earliest directing efforts were extravagant musical productions, turning down a contract with MGM and declaring himself independent from the Hollywood system, later going on to make the forgettable SONG OF NORWAY (1970).

Starting her career as a singer and dancer in nightclubs during the 30’s, Lena Horne moved into films in the late 30’s with her first appearance in The Duke Is Tops (1938), but it was Walter White, director of the NAACP, who helped Lena Horne get a Hollywood contract with MGM in 1942, quickly becoming one of the top black performers in America, on loan from MGM for this picture with 20th Century Fox, which was a hit at the box office, despite the fact less than half of Fox’s theaters booked the movie, generating a press release that reads “Celebrating the magnificent contribution of the colored race to the world of entertainment during the past twenty-five years.”  While the story is purely secondary, organized around a series of disconnected musical numbers, the character of tap performer Bill Robinson is loosely based on Robinson’s own life, told in flashbacks with Bill reminiscing about his career and storied romance with singer Selina Rogers (Lena Horne), running into obstacles along the way, but it’s the incredible musical numbers that stand the test of time, featuring artists playing themselves who were diminished or excluded altogether from Hollywood pictures.  What’s truly remarkable is the seemingly unlimited range of artistic talent on display, liberated from the straightjacket of playing stereotypes in smaller roles that Hollywood films confined them to, where this is one of the few mainstream films at the time where blacks were portrayed as real people.  Unfortunately, this was the final film of Fats Waller, who died from pneumonia just 5 months after the opening, and also the final film of Bill Robinson, who tragically died penniless despite being the highest paid black entertainer during the first half of the 20th century.  The film blindly ignores the reality of segregation in America during the 1940’s, though the same could be said for all musicals of the era, where white vaudeville performers like Fred Astaire could expand on their vaudeville acts and play more noteworthy characters in films, while black performers like Bill Robinson and the Nicholas Brothers were not afforded the same opportunities, as films would showcase their talent, but only in small increments, having little overall impact on the storyline.  In that vein, black musical director and composer William Grant Still quit the film over the studio’s perpetuation of exploitive aspects of the all-black revue, having been led to believe this would be an opportunity to showcase black cultural achievement, but his original compositions were increasingly discarded for more stereotypical musical numbers reflective of the Jim Crow era, while Clarence Robinson, the first black choreographer employed by the Cotton Club, famous for their plantation motifs, designed several of the film’s dance sequences.  While an argument could also be made that Lena Horne might have been a major screen star like Judy Garland, but she was denied similar opportunities.  Even though she had just signed a studio contract, this was the pinnacle of her Hollywood movie career, as she was sparsely used afterwards outside of small support roles and cameos in musicals, with studios refusing to allow her to play opposite a white leading man, relegated to specialty numbers in more opulent musicals built around somebody else, typically cutting her songs out of the picture for screenings in the South (CABIN IN THE SKY deleted a scene at the initial release as it was sung while taking a bubble bath), so she was left in limbo, severely underutilized, as the studios simply didn’t know what to do with her, viewed as a “liability,” or a poor investment, yet like Garland, the studios mismanaged their careers with disastrous results, both left embittered by the experience.  Horne was not only encouraged to “pass” as Spanish by nightclub owners but also mistaken for a “Latin-American” by film audiences.  She appeared in only one non-musical picture throughout her entire career, coming at the age of 51, playing a Hispanic brothel madam in DEATH OF A GUNFIGHTER (1969).  However simplistic the film’s storyline may seem, its very existence, mirroring the times in which it was made, brings to light some complex social issues that remain relevant today, with the film added to the Library of Congress Film Registry in 2001, Complete National Film Registry Listing. 

Looking terrific in a 4k restoration, comprised almost entirely of set pieces, Bill Robinson and Army buddy Gabe Tucker (Dooley Wilson) are returning soldiers from France after WWI, celebrating in a New York City nightclub.  Paris was an ambassador of jazz in Europe, offering a freer, more accepting environment to black soldiers, where we hear the first song from Lena Horne, accompanied on piano by her manager Chick Bailey (Emmett “Babe” Wallace), always seen as a foil standing between Bill and Lena, Stormy Weather (1943) -- (Movie Clip) No Two Ways About Love YouTube (3:51).  Heading to Memphis afterwards on a riverboat, Bill, now dressed in rags, seen laying on a bale of cotton, gets the dancing itch when he hears music from a group calling themselves “minstrel boys,” complete with crude racial caricature, and ends up doing a tap “sand dance,” Stormy Weather (1943) -- (Movie Clip) Linda Brown - TCM  YouTube (3:20).  The presence of Fats Waller is a time capsule infusing life into an American jazz standard, capturing the essence of Beale Street in his signature song, Ain't Misbehavin' (Stormy Weather, 1943) [Digitally Enhanced] YouTube (2:46).  What connects this film to audiences is the authenticity of the music and dance, which even caught the attention of Malcolm X, “I loved the tough guys, the action, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, and I loved all that dancing and carrying on in such films as Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky.”  The song “Stormy Weather” was initially written for a musical revue at the Cotton Club in 1933, starring Ethel Waters accompanied by Duke Ellington, quickly emerging as a nightclub standard, yet in the hands of different singers like Waters or Lena Horne, the song takes on an entirely new meaning, as it does here, an example of how modernism can transport movie audiences to new heights, as the song is accompanied by a fantasy ballet sequence from the Katherine Dunham dance troupe.  The abstract ballet has a dreamlike quality following Horne’s vocal, which is sung in front of a window showing a rainy street scene outside, with the camera following her gaze out the window, segueing into a symphonic jazz orchestration, as it predates contemporary ballet dance movement and was an early test of mixing various genres of dance, yet anticipates the centerpiece ballet sequence in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES (1948), The Red Shoes (1948) - Ballet Sequence - YouTube (15:25), along with the unprecedented 17-minute dream sequence ballet from Vincente Minnelli’s AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951), "An American In Paris" Ballet with George Gershwin's ... - Vimeo (23:05).  In the 1930’s, Dunham traveled to the Caribbean to do anthropological studies on various cultures for two years, including Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, and most importantly Haiti, which would become one of her main sources of inspiration, using what she learned to revolutionize white European dance movements, instead incorporating African and Caribbean elements of traditional folk and ethnic dances, as well as rituals, into modern dance and beyond, believing it was important to know the “life surrounding the dances.”  The breathtaking originality that Dunham provides, an articulation of innovative black modernism, literally transcends the suffocating minstrel dance aesthetics that confines the rest of the picture, where her stated goal was to “take our dance out of the burlesque,” which is precisely what the film does, showcasing a more cultured sophistication as it reaches the finale, yet she suffered the same Jim Crow indignities of not having a place to sleep or a restaurant to visit while on tour.  In a departure from the norm, exhibiting astonishing range, the film was considered revolutionary for its time, interspersing traditional tap dance between Dunham’s experimental reverie and the high-flying acrobatics of the Nicholas Brothers, where the final sequence becomes a 17-minute-long revue featuring different performances without any driving narrative or plot, yet the jaw-dropping artistry onscreen is unparalleled, Stormy Weather (1943) YouTube (7:58).

[FULL MOVIE] Stormy Weather (1943) | Classic Musical in 4K  digitally restored to 4k, YouTube (1:17:40)