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).

Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (Jeannette, l'enfance de Jeanne d'Arc)

Director Bruno Dumont on the set

 

Young actress Lise Leplat Prudhomme with the director

 

JEANNETTE:  THE CHILDHOOD OF JOAN OF ARC (Jeannette, l'enfance de Jeanne d'Arc) – made for TV                   D                    

France  (105 mi)  2017 d:  Bruno Dumont

Dumont’s dark parable Hors Satan (2011) took the film about as far as it could go, philosophically speaking, much like Béla Tarr in The Turin Horse (2011), reaching the end of the road.  His resurgence with a provincial crime drama, L'il Quinquin (P'tit Quinquin) – Made for TV (2015), and comic farce, Slack Bay (Ma Loute) (2016), have seemed like an odd detour, basically challenging what was an austere director to work in a more whimsical style, where it would be difficult to call this new direction a success, as these are wildly offbeat efforts that defy audiences to like them.  Dumont is back to using non-professional actors that few have heard of, skimping on production detail, seemingly making a film on the fly, like a stream-of-conscious effort, where the challenge is on Dumont to produce something out of nothing.  The results are mixed.  Some are offering high praise for sheer bonkers originality.  Don’t expect that here.  While clearly he has created something unlike anything else he’s ever done before, this is also absurdly exaggerated, inert filmmaking, an overly staged song and dance production set in a natural world, but completely artificialized, performed entirely for the camera, becoming a style over substance film.  The story of Joan of Arc is one of the most often depicted throughout the annals of cinema, with the most infamous being Dreyer’s silent masterwork, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (1928), Rivette’s six-hour JOAN THE MAID (1994), and Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc) (1962), where the French in particular find this among the most treasured moments in history, as a teenage shepherdess inspired by communions with God and visions of holy saints actually joins the battlefield, turning the tide of history, leading the charge to drive the British out of France, where she was arrested by the enemy, tried and charged with heresy, eventually burned at the stake.  Her sainthood is an inspirational story of the miraculous power of divine faith, as Jeanne was herself a commoner, a farm girl, uneducated and illiterate, yet she was challenged by the most brilliant legal minds and scholars in England, and held her own, remaining defiant until the end, reaffirming her faith in God, not the English.  Dumont has already filmed a Joan of Arc parable taking place in the modern world, 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #5 Hadewijch (2009), which remains one of his best films, but his interest here is with the historical figure herself, not in her most valiant moments, but in what came before, the prequel of what led to her transformation into becoming such an iconic figure.  Turning this into a rock opera, staged outdoors near Domrémy, the birthplace of Jeanne, this is a no frills reproduction, using electronic music largely composed by French musician Gautier Serre, aka Igorrr.     

Set in 1425, we are immediately introduced to an 8-year old Jeanne (Lise Leplat Prudhomme), tending to her small flock of sheep roaming the sandy hillsides of the Meuse River, between the villages of Maxey and Domrémy, where Jeanne is seen wading through a small creek, facing the camera, breaking out into song, praying to God to provide a warlord that will drive the English occupying force out of France.  This pretty much describes the rest of the film, as it is exactly the same.  While there are a few moments of spoken words, mostly everything is sung, with characters standing still, facing the camera, occasionally using arm gestures in rhythm with the music or breaking out into a brief spontaneous dance (choreography by Philippe Decouflé).  The static repetition becomes stifling after a while, presented in tableaux format, mostly in close-up, though the changing camera angles often move to high above, gazing upon the world below.  Inspired by the Charles Péguy play published in 1910, Les Mystères de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc, the film examines the origins of her spiritual conversion, though the words and music are not particularly challenging or inspirational, but are just as repetitive as the static imagery.  So what we’re viewing resembles an animated still-life painting absurdly springing to life, like a choreographed fantasia, fueled by a fairly mediocre musical soundtrack that produces no memorable songs.  If not for the historical importance of the central figure, there would be no interest whatsoever in this work.  Much of it feels amateurish and silly, not always hitting the right notes, with moments of jaw-dropping absurdity at how unaccomplished it is, much like an elementary school production, where the film takes place almost entirely at the same location, using intertitles to announce the passage of time, but the place, somewhat humorously, doesn’t change.  A handful of characters are introduced, mostly relatives, a lone friend, a pair of nuns, and of course the saintly vision, but mostly we are treated to close-ups of this innocent new face.  With the Hundred Years’ War (Hundred Years' War | Britannica.com) weighing heavily upon her shoulders, Jeanne is overwhelmed by a pervasive feeling of sadness, as France has tragically succumbed, with many accepting their fate, lost in the hopelessness of endless perdition, praying to break the English siege of Orléans, for an end to the darkness.  Jeanne is able to speak freely with her same-age friend Hauviette (Lucile Gauthier), who has already entered a convent, so they are on a similar spiritual plane, both strong religious advocates, perhaps even considered extremists.  They are soon joined by Madame Gervaise, an influential nun from the convent, played by two sisters, Elise and Aloine Charles, who add their own unique dance choreography to the mix, all of which figure into Jeanne’s spiritual awakening. 

It must be said that whatever transcendent spiritual aspirations Dumont might have been going for are constantly undermined by the simplicity of the words and the banality of the music, where only the absurdity of the distorted body movements hold any viewer interest at all.  In fact, one could step out of the theater for twenty minutes or so and return later, and you’d have missed nothing important, as it all feels exactly the same, where the overall tone never changes.  The same can’t be said for more compelling films.  Turning Jeanne into a childhood rock star may be a fanciful notion, much like the Broadway hit Jesus Christ Superstar, but cinematically nothing of note actually happens, as the characters simply stand around and sing music that is instantly forgettable.  Despite a fierce Christian devotion, not a hint of it is expressed onscreen.  One might argue this is the Brechtian method, using flat performances where the emotion must be provided by viewers, but Brechtian theater is also accompanied by well-written and powerful language that has the capacity to dramatically move an audience.  Not so here.  Always one of the key moments in her radicalization is Jeanne’s early mystical visions of saints, played here by Saints Margaret and Catherine (the Charles sisters again), both wearing crowns, and Archangel Michael (Anaїs Rivière) with wings, each digitally levitating, hovering over a nearby tree branch, instilling courage in the young girl to break the siege herself, something she finds impossible at her age.  Jumping ahead three years, Jeanne is played by a new actress (Jeanne Voisin), who summons her uncle (Nicolas Leclaire) in a plot to deceive her parents in order to escape her village and finally lead the French resistance.  (There is a Monty Python pratfall when the uncle attempts to mount a horse just behind Jeanne, but instead misses and falls to the ground.)  Plagued by the idea of family betrayal, lying to her family in order to obey God, Jeanne lingers in personal anguish, claiming she didn’t understand the message of the saints until now, but as there is no one else, she believes she is the one called upon by God to reassert France’s rightful sovereignty, leaving town by horseback, ending where other portrayals are just getting started.  Traditionally France has always been a devoutly Catholic nation (more than 80% just a decade ago) with a rich heritage, one of the first countries to adopt Catholicism as its official religion, as evidenced by the multitude of church spires that hold the highest vantage point in nearly every rural village across the nation, or Rohmer’s My Night at Maud's (Ma Nuit Chez Maud) (1969), but the numbers are grim, with more than one-third of France’s population and almost two-thirds of its youth declaring no religion at all, with only about 5% regularly attending Mass anymore (The Church In Decline: France's Vanishing Catholics).  An avowed atheist with an obsession for matters of the spirit and the flesh, perhaps Dumont is attempting to tap into this apathetic youth rebellion by enticing them with an outlandishly bizarre and awkwardly weird made-for TV film that plays in living rooms across the nation, already indicating he wants to make a sequel to the prequel.