DN:FILM Hale County This Morning, This Evening

Oscar-nominated HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING, provokes: thought, debate, conversation. Among the questions it begs, a significant one is: What is this?

Surely, yes, it's a documentary film, one with moving images that indeed document a specific, challenged, primarily African American community in Alabama (no less than the one James Agee and Walker Evans documented in the groundbreaking Let Us Now Praise Famous Men nearly 80 years earlier). But too it’s an experimental movie, one that ties together disparate events through unexpected commonalities, and that repeatedly agitates a mesmerizing effect by refusing to look away from the mundane for so long that the mundane transforms. And it’s even at times a primarily aural experience, a radio show with bonus images, the soundscape carrying the weight of information while the visuals serve as a meditator’s om.

We are talking now of sounds and pictures, one after another, that linger on the quotidian, boys doing basketball drills, girls practicing cheers, an infant running to and fro nearly ad infinitum, landscape rolling by interminably out a car window, the camera left running so it captures the kinds of fascinations that happen by accident. Creator RaMell Ross employs, subverts and recharges both expected documentary techniques and stereotypes of race and culture to create this dreamscape, gritty and ethereal, ruminative and both harrowing and hopeful. His work has justifiably wowed critics and festival audiences, and now the film is getting deserved exposure as part of PBS’s acclaimed Independent Lens series.