Hale County This Morning, This Evening

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING   ***

RaMell Ross

2018

IDEA:  A documentary about a small town in Hale County, Alabama, and the lives and dreams of some of its inhabitants.

BLURB:  In its modest way, Hale County This Morning, This Evening seeks to liberate cinematic images of the black American South from the cultural codes that have historically figured them. This is not to say that Ross ignores sociopolitical context or signification – after all, he is in the realm of representation – but that, in his impressionistic montage, he bypasses the institutional language of “racial” cinema to access something both more ineffable and elemental. The moments he seizes on transcend whatever symbolic value they may hold, placing us in a material regime of texture and affect where sense perceptions – of water on skin, of heavy breathing during basketball drills, of sunlight filtering through smoke – attune us to a phenomenological now irreducible to any discourse. Ross’s edits further deny a traditional narrative telos, his images driven not by chains of causal logic but by poetic concatenations: sweat falling on concrete becoming raindrops; a moon appearing over a toddler’s palm; time lapse footage linking family rooms and gymnasiums with the cosmic movement of a starry night sky. While the impulse here can occasionally feel universalizing, positing an experiential immediacy outside of social constraints, the film earns itself an aesthetic latitude in order to dismantle so many sedimented views of black America. Rather than making any lofty claims of a radical or monolithic vision, it offers its loose, improvisational form as a sample of what alternative perspectives can look like.