“Hale County This Morning, This Evening” RaMell Ross Documentary: Exquisite Visual Poetry, Incandescent Portrait Black Life

One of last year’s more powerful and affecting films is the 70-minute documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a pointillist portrait of black life in Alabama in which a series of bright little moments together form a broad and gorgeous tableau.

In his first film, photographer RaMell Ross, who is on the faculty at Brown University, eschews both narrative structure and issues-oriented social commentary in favor of a hypnotic array of images and sounds that leave the viewer to draw his own conclusions, or, better yet, to simply bathe in the feeling being created. Two totems — the cross and the hoop — hang silently over this community, its populace clambering beneath them, around them, seeking to get close to them. “Only Jesus Saves,” says the neon legend on the cross outside a church. “Then why is everyone so fixated on me?” the hoop might as well reply. Ross shoots one scene upward through an outdoor hoop with a frayed net, the hours rushing by via time-lapse photography. A later time-lapse shot, in sardonic counterpoise, is trained on the rim during a college-basketball game. In mad sequence, a succession of eager, disembodied hands appears, each of them carrying a basketball to present like a holy offering. From the perspective of the hoop, the obsession with basketball seems strange and funny.

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

One of last year’s more powerful and affecting films is the 70-minute documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a pointillist portrait of black life in Alabama in which a series of bright little moments together form a broad and gorgeous tableau.

In his first film, photographer RaMell Ross, who is on the faculty at Brown University, eschews both narrative structure and issues-oriented social commentary in favor of a hypnotic array of images and sounds that leave the viewer to draw his own conclusions, or, better yet, to simply bathe in the feeling being created. Two totems — the cross and the hoop — hang silently over this community, its populace clambering beneath them, around them, seeking to get close to them. “Only Jesus Saves,” says the neon legend on the cross outside a church. “Then why is everyone so fixated on me?” the hoop might as well reply. Ross shoots one scene upward through an outdoor hoop with a frayed net, the hours rushing by via time-lapse photography. A later time-lapse shot, in sardonic counterpoise, is trained on the rim during a college-basketball game. In mad sequence, a succession of eager, disembodied hands appears, each of them carrying a basketball to present like a holy offering. From the perspective of the hoop, the obsession with basketball seems strange and funny.