“How Do I Suspend The Meaning Of Blackness?” Interview With HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING Director RaMell Ross

I haven’t seen any movies this year, or the past few years for that matter, that I have been turning over in my head as much as Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a rare documentary that will be a touchstone for non-fiction filmmakers from here on out. It’s a film that uses its seemingly prosaic subject matter as an entrée to a whole host of topics and discussions that exist well beyond the confines of its setting in rural Alabama. First time director RaMell Ross was kind enough to indulge me in ruminating about his landmark film.

Arlin Golden for Film Inquiry: I’ve already been at a couple of screenings where you’ve been around for Q & As so apologies if I might ask some similar questions, but they’re just such good answers, I need them on the record.

RaMell Ross: No, I mean, I apologize if I give you the same answers.

Not at all! Oh man, speaking of which, how about that Thai food at the Roxie reception, that was so good!

RaMell Ross: I know, right?! So unexpected.

I know, I ate like half my weight in sticky rice.

RaMell Ross: Right? If there wouldn’t have been as many people, I would have put stuff in my pockets, and then by the time everyone was gone it was all gone!

Yeah, no, well sorry. I mean, I definitely had a part in that so…apologies. But yeah! So where are you calling from right now?

RaMell Ross: I’m in Rhode Island. I just got in this morning, actually.

And weren’t you just at DOC NYC?

RaMell Ross: Yeah, I was just at DOC NYC and then I went to Montreal for a couple hours, and then I went to LA, we had a screening out there. You know, they have the AFI round tables as well. So yeah, did that, and then I just got back.

Oh awesome. I look forward to watching that, that should be good. So you’re doing a ton of traveling with this film, which I gotta say, I just love so much. It’s my favorite film I’ve seen this year, I’ve been telling everyone about it.

RaMell Ross: Thanks. It’s so great, like, it’s crazy that we’re in the space that we are now because it’s literally — I guess it’s folks like you that share word of mouth, which is why it continues to stay around because we don’t have…like, all the other films that are at this point, most of them have really big budgets and really big companies behind them.

And so every time we get asked to do, like the AFI round table, I’m just like, “we’re staying afloat!” (laughs) We’re like the small ship by the big ship, but we have people, you know?

Since we’re on the subject of just kind of traveling around with the film and what you’ve done on the circuit this year…I’ve heard you talk about how Hale County is a Rorschach test for people’s relationships to blackness. You know, playing the festival circuit…if I’m generalizing, there’s kind of a broad type of individual that maybe is making up most film festival audiences in big cities. What have you found has been people’s relationship to blackness through watching the film?

Yeah. Well it really varies. Saying that the film is a Rorschach test for your relationship to the black experience can be misleading in that I imagine some people are like, “seems like this film is made for white people”, you know? Which is not necessarily the case. I have a relationship to the black experience that’s also in the same media culture. I have to deal with my own perceptive speed bumps, or ruts. And so, it’s fascinating. The film registers deeply differently within each community. So for the black community, my community, the way in which the film is seen is one in which there’s such a familiar sensitivity with the way in which one looks at family members and each other that they haven’t seen perhaps often on the big screen, and specifically in documentary film.

Having people coming up and being like, just “genuinely thank you. Finally there’s something that relatively represents the way I look at my kid.” And then there’s the sort of relationship that black folks have with a lot of media about people of color and black folks in which there’s just like, a lot of violence and death, you know?

Death because of violence. Sort of a centralized struggle and maybe a little bit of emotion within that. And that’s one thing that’s interesting about the film is that because those ideas are literally embedded in our skin, are embedded in the visualization of us, every visual fundamentally, mentally leads to that. So when it doesn’t happen, it’s surprising. Like, “oh, I thought this was gonna happen” but it doesn’t, because we’re so conditioned to the visualization of us leading down those roads.

Well that kind of relates to…I love your piece Goodbye, Pluto. Something you said at the end there: “status quo imagery handholds our acceptance of the governing structures of power.” I mean if anything can be said about your film, it’s that it definitely reject status quo imagery. How do you see the sort of formal experimentation of the film within the documentary realm operating to deliver some of these reactions that you’re describing?

RaMell Ross: Well, I don’t think he can happen outside of that. I mean, I think that it can. I think that it happens easier in the documentary genre because of the way in which a person’s cognition is predisposed to an encounter with truth. That’s something that doesn’t even happen when you walk outside of your door. You don’t go outside inside the mindset of reality and “truth, truth, truth”. Like something would happen on the street and you’ll be like, “Damn, that shit was unbelievable!” (laughs) you know?

You continue to go about your day. But when you watch a documentary film, we’ve built this sort of transparent, but really sturdy, fortress of a bubble of truth that we enter into. And so to do visuals that are sort of sensitive, and tender, and whatever, it actually allows a person to walk out and then see the person on the street that way because of the way that they encountered it, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean there is that to it, but like when I go outside and I walk around… I mean, sometimes maybe after I smoke a joint, but like, I don’t know that my subjectivity is necessarily as beautiful and artistic as the film that you made is, you know what I mean? Like if I was talking about “documentary” and that sort of lived experience, I might think about Wiseman or something. Something that’s kind of detached but you know, has more reality-centered presentation? Can you kind of elaborate on that?

RaMell Ross: I mean most of our encounters with people are through snapshots. Like it’s not through really long sitting observations, as Wiseman’s are. Like he doesn’t peddle in glimpses. He peddles in something that’s way more time extensive and in the moment. And so I think it’s about adding a certain type of glare, or certain type of gaze, in the image bank. And in the repertoire, in that person’s repertoire, so that can just be part of the broadening process of…I hate boundaries. We need to make visual blacklists more vague, you know? And adding that sort of tenderness, desaturates a bit the crispness with which we know things to be true or not true or something like that.

Yeah, that makes sense, I like that a lot. Since we’re talking about sort of utilizing documentary aesthetics, you’ve talked a lot about how you came to filmmaking from photography. And that, as opposed to wanting to make a film that would screen in kind of an art exhibition space, you were really conscious of wanting to make a “documentary”. So coming into it, what was your personal frame of reference for documentaries?

RaMell Ross: Well, a personal frame of reference was like the Steve James mold. Or like the Michael Moore mold, or one of these really traditional forms. I mean, I was familiar with more experimental films, I was of course familiar with Wiseman, or some of the stuff that’s like the ethnographic, one camera perspective things, or something else.

But to me, like once I saw the –qatsi trilogy I was like, there’s literally no such thing as a “documentary”. There’s  absolutely no form for a documentary aside from the label of documentary.

100 percent. And at what point in your process did you see those movies?

RaMell Ross: That was probably about a year, two years before I started making the film. Like about the time that I was really developing my photographic sense. I was like, “oh, this is the type of images that I like to make and this is who I am as a photographer as of now.” You spend most of your time trying to find your voice, you know? It was about the time that I was finding my voice, and so me applying my voice to that aesthetic was a mindblowing conflation. Where it’s like, “oh shit! What if you strategically dealt with black imagery inside the same anti-narrative framework?” It becomes another way to talk about something.

Yeah. You know, it’s funny that you bring up these films because I’ve been kind of like “elevator pitching” it to people as like, Hoop Dreams meets Koyaanisqatsi.

RaMell Ross: Yeah…(laughs)

The film is in dialogue with Hoop Dreams to some degree. Like if you were trying to summarize the narrative, it might come out sounding something like the narrative of Hoop Dreams. Even though, you know, the films are entirely different. How do you view the relationship between Hale County and Hoop Dreams?

RaMell Ross: Well, I think they’re trying to deal with the same thing. But I think that the difference is that most films that are made about black folks that are not made by black folks have just an obvious limited access point, you know? And they aren’t necessarily working in response to the imaging of black folks. They’re working within the idea of humanizing, or clarifying or…to me, to image a black folk is to almost present their blackness as truth, when there’s a fictional element to it. So that becomes the first problem. How do I build in each frame the reflectiveness to have you question it a little bit, and not just take it as the default? Which then contributes to the need to justify these certain modes of relationships.

So I kind of see the relationship of my film being in response to theirs in that those, while wildly needed and of their time, are…or simply that. They were wildly needed and for that time. And now we need to more acknowledge the relationship between form and narrative and story and the sort of trappings of the trajectory of a narrative.

So, were you sort of consciously rejecting those sort of, for lack of a better word, “conventional” documentary aesthetics? Were you saying, you know, I don’t want this kind of linear progression of narrative and time? That sort of thing?

RaMell Ross: Yeah. I mean it wasn’t like… I mean Steve James‘ film was brilliant. It is brilliant if you watch it. If I watched it now it’s still an impressive piece. It’s those being the only modes of representation, you know? And so I was working in response, as opposed to or against.

Like in some sense, in documentary films, there are so many different types of films, and there’s so many different types of art films that are actually documentaries, but they’re so seemingly esoteric that they just get stolen into the art space. There’s also so many people making avant-garde documentaries that don’t get recognition. So I feel like when I say “documentary film”, I’m making these statements that are really big and sweeping, but you know what I mean, I understand the range.

Documentary films often are almost like the “roses are red, violets are blue” poem, you know? Where it’s like you’re just filling content into the same form that like, gets cute at some point. And the impact is lost because it’s a platitude, or the way in which it’s delivered almost undermines any new relationship to the content.

Yeah, it’s kind of like a plug and play or like paint by numbers. You just take the subject or the topic, put it in this “documentary” mold, and that’s your product?

RaMell Ross: Yeah. Yeah, very, very, very produced in that sense. And you realize through that if you use the same language or something, by the nature of using that language, it loses its power. And how do you return to the power of the actual thing? The experience of being marginalized, experience of being disenfranchised. If you try to put that experience in a “roses are red, violets are blue” poem, it’s going to suck. No one’s going to take it seriously, you know? And so the film’s trying to be responsive to the material, or trying to be the experience.

And I know that that came about kind of organically and maybe when you started shooting it was kind of more of that traditional mold. Are you saying that the content of your subject matter necessitated that you sort of shift gears and create this new documentary language, for lack of a better term?

RaMell Ross: Yeah. It’s like I had all of the language, the language was in the way it was shot, but then it was choosing that language to be the content, or being representative of the place and the experience. And then once you do that, then you shoot towards those types of shots even more. And that, I think, was the biggest breakthrough for me making the film. It’s like, “oh, literally anything is content.” Literally any moment can represent a person. But we use these moments to represent people.

And the longer you’re with someone, the more moments you have, and the more interesting and unprecedented and unplanned the moments become. And then that’s where you’re like, “oh shit, the nature of the game, the nature of the industry, of documentary film, and films, is not spending time to get stuff.” It’s the opposite. It’s as fast as possible.

Right. And so when you talk about subjectivity and sort of the way that you’re using language to try and inhabit a new subjectivity for the viewer, I mean, are we talking RaMell’s subjectivity? Are we talking Quincy and Daniel’s subjectivity? A combination?

RaMell Ross: We’re talking a combination. I’m painfully aware that the only thing we have is our first person point of view. And so to not sort of almost double down on your first person point of view is to deny that truth. And then to sort of move towards the universal truth, that’s misleading because it’s presenting as universal somehow, meaning it’s not first person. And so for me it’s like how do I participate in the first person, and then therefore bring their experience to my first person to someone else’s first person?

How did that work, practically? What was the collaborative nature between you and the people in the film?

RaMell Ross: Well the collaborative nature was me participating in their lives in an authentic way, as authentic as possible, while making the film. As opposed to sort of swooping in to get a shot, or to get a scene, or to shoot for an hour or two. I mean, I was already friends with the guys, I’m just actually going to spend more time and hang out and be better friends. We’re just going to do a lot of stuff together, you know? And so when that happens, the film becomes what it’s like to live as me with them, and not to join their lives in order to show their lives. It’s my life with their life.

Right, wow, that’s beautiful. I mean, do you have any sense…I mean like, that feels startlingly rare for a genre of film that’s so predicated upon this relationship between the filmmaker and “subject”. Do you have any sense of why that is? It feels new, but it also seems like it shouldn’t be new.

RaMell Ross: (laughs) Yeah. That like the whole process of this whole film. It’s like, “oh, that’s great. Why is that great?” It stops at “this is great.” (laughs) It shouldn’t be. But I think literally it’s just time, you know?

Like the second that social media is pulled into the system of likes and unlikes, or whatever, it shifts content. It changes your relationship to posting things. The second that film is pulled into a space in which people are paying you to do it, and they want stuff done at a certain time, your career is built on doing things fast enough to make money, to make more money to do other things. There’s this fundamental reduction and a fundamental sort of…like if you go in to shoot a scene in documentary and you have two hours, you know you don’t have that much time, so you’re searching for things that are recognizable meaning markers for you. And you’re literally…it’s like a snatch and grab of meaning — it’s not a grocery store. It’s supposed to be like the earth and nature where it emerges naturally, and then the process is more organic. And so…yeah, it’s all about time.

Yeah. And speaking of time, I feel like a lot of the moments in the film speak to almost an immense patience on your part. I mean, the way you might capture like a bug dancing on a truck bed, or like kind of these beautiful small moments… I mean, where does that patience come from in your life? How’d you develop that?

RaMell Ross: Gosh, that’s a good question, I have no idea. (laughs)

Patience. I don’t know… you see, I didn’t even realize that I was this patient until people were telling me. Like, my girlfriend is like “you’re so kind and patient.” I’m like, “what do you mean? I don’t understand, I’m just, like, being here.” But I think a lot has to do with sports and like the sort of “10-year plan”. You’re like, “okay, I’m going to work out really hard today, and I’m going to do that tomorrow for four hours, and tomorrow for four hours, and the next day for four hours, and I know that I’ll see results in eight months” you know? And you just go about dedicating that time and hoping that in the process, the natural process will build up that moment of having a breakthrough where you’re like, “oh, I’m better” or “I know something else.” And so same thing with shooting. It’s also like the longer you look, the more interesting things are. Maybe that’s not true. I don’t know.

Yeah, you have to have an investment in time, but you have to kind of not have any preconceptions about what you’re hoping to capture, maybe?

RaMell Ross: Exactly. Yeah.

And so I mean you shot, what was it, five years, like 1300 hours, is that right?

RaMell Ross: Yeah, yeah.

I mean you could’ve made any number of films from that footage. And so how are you able to recognize just like, “okay, these small moments”, these kind of intimate, but not…I mean I’m thinking about Kyrie running right now. Which to me is the scene of 2018.

RaMell Ross: (laughs) The scene of 2018! That’s straight up like the list, because there’re so many lists, the list that hasn’t been made yet. “The scene of 2018”, That’s so good.

Oh man, I’ll make that list and I’ll put it at number one, because I mean…

RaMell Ross: You should make that list! That’s an interesting list, because it conflates all of the genres, you know? Which most lists don’t, they’re really separate. I think that’s a good one.

Yeah, I always try…I mean, I’m pretty doc-focused, but I always try and conflate non-fiction and fiction because it’s all film, right? And documentary filmmakers are making so many conscious decisions. I think it can be such a misrepresentation — which again, something your film does beautifully — to kind of say “these are representations of reality.” But they’re just as constructed as any big budget blockbuster or whatever. The medium is the same, but the material is reality.

RaMell Ross: Yeah. I say that documentary films are fictions with real captured footage — with real life footage. I think so.

Yeah. To that degree, something else you said in the “Goodbye, Pluto” piece: “reality representations are complicit in the generation of our developed reality, the social world, as perception enforces all realities.”

RaMell Ross: Yeah.

So, I mean with Hale County, what’s being sort of contributed or played with about the developed reality? Or is it kind of entirely subjective? How does the collective understanding of “our” reality change?

RaMell Ross: Yeah. Well,  it changes by…you know, it’s a sad thing. I think it gives license to artists or filmmakers to consider the range of potential illustrative or representative moments of character, personality, narrative story, and all of that stuff. Like it kind of shifts what is possible — I hate saying that, it’s so freakin’ grand. It highlights a bit the really narrow way in which we think about how you come to connect with a character. And then it also shows…the moments are so time-based, and anti-industry, like “film industry”, that they are moments that people that don’t have a relationship with people of color, black folks, in intimate relationships, have literally never seen before. Or have literally never imagined. Because why would you imagine that? Or how would you imagine that, you know?

We’ve talked a little bit about the way in which it registers in the black community. The way in which it registers in the white community is literally putting on the map parts of the household, and parts of black life visuality that they would never have encountered.

When you put it like that, I mean, it’s obviously out of fashion to bring him up, but like, you know, you’re almost making me think of what The Cosby Show was doing in the eighties for the mainstream white American perception of black people and black experience. But you’re still wrestling with the exact same representations and perceptions that were being confronted in the eighties and nineties. How…you’re obviously taking a much different approach to that confrontation. But I mean, how much can art do?

RaMell Ross: Yeah! I mean, I think art can do everything. I mean, I see the relationship between — I’ve never thought of it before — the relationship between The Cosby Show and potentially some stuff that Hale County is doing. I think that one marker of difference is that one was a sort using the familiarity and the happiness…it’s using a very guided and simple understanding of family structure, and family dynamics, and the nuclear family, and the way in which it contributes to society. It positions people as neighbors, not as people being more than what we think they are. It familiarizes us with a certain type of person of color. One that is middle class, and a doctor, and has kids that have same social behaviors. But what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t question necessarily the premise, the reason why that’s needed.

And I think what the one thing that Hale County is trying to do is that it’s trying to put together imagery that allows you to figure out your own relationship to it, and not be given a different version of the same. You know? I can write it better, but I think you know what I’m saying. (laughs)

(laughs) Yeah, no, for sure.

RaMell Ross: But I forgot what you asked, I wanted to…(laughs)

Well, kind of, the power of art – in restructuring personal prejudices or preconceptions or schemas, a whole host of real and imagined relationships that mainstream white America has with black America.

RaMell Ross: Well, I personally think that art is literally…it’s really every mechanism of control that we have visually, is art. Like all art theory is built from relationships to aesthetics of power. And so we’re participating in that without even knowing it. Where, when you look at the way in which advertisements work, like these are artists that are participating in a monetary system. And so it completely sort of — I say neuters too much. It like un-powers, makes enfeebled the artistic capacity and enslaves it to a message.

And so we’re getting these really artistic things that are convincing us to do stuff in the sort of really entertaining guise of aesthetics. Even design is like the most utilitarian art form. Maybe furniture could also be in that same sentence. But that’s literally it. And so if you’re, you know, you think about the way sci-fi films predict the future, or the way if you dress someone up differently, you see them differently. They’re literally different. And then you can imagine them differently. But if they’re always wearing the same suit then they’re always that, because that is the aesthetic; the visual field guides reality. It leads it by the nose.

Yeah. I mean this is kind of…I’m thinking now of Lemonade, and like, you know, it got a lot of recognition when it came out for being kind of this exciting, kind of bold, black artistic experience. But at the same time it’s sort of serving all the same mechanisms of commerce and…we’re selling music, we’re still selling, kind of, black bodies. Although it’s been reclaimed somewhat by the artist. It almost seems to be operating within the same mechanisms.

RaMell Ross: Yeah.

I think Hale County…I mean, obviously you’re trying to make money on this, like any filmmaker, but I think there’s something outside of the commercial box office film world where your film is operating that maybe frees it from that, do you think?

RaMell Ross: God, I’m so happy you said that. (Laughs) Yeah. I mean not even that you said that, that you think that. Because people say shit all the time that they don’t really think or that they don’t mean. So I’m glad you actually believe that. I mean Lemonade is great, I would never say a negative or even remotely scathing whatever about any of that because I think it’s all needed, and has so much value. But I will say in terms of Hale County, that it’s very conscious of the relationship between black folks from…the abstraction of black folks, or the production of music, to literal, physical, human beings that are black being pushed, or hung, or put into the soil; we’re always consumed. And that consumed relationship is one thing the film was really conscious of. It’s like, how do I make “blackness” not easily consumed? You know? How do I keep it open? How do I suspend the meaning of blackness? Lemonade doesn’t necessarily do that. It affirms that, in certain ways. Mine is questioning, I believe. Dissolving. Affirming and questioning simultaneously. Questioning and affirming.

Yeah, I mean, I think…it’s a film, it’s a documentary. So you can’t entirely escape that relationship between…people got to pay for a ticket. People are consuming images on the screen. But I think you’re navigating it brilliantly and…yeah, everything you just said, you know what I mean. (laughs)

RaMell Ross: Well you know what I think was the truth, or the comments, that really solidified that that part was a success was all of the companies, all these really big companies that bought all these other films, they’re like, “we really like your film”, I mean all of them didn’t say that, but some of them said “we like your film, but we don’t know how to sell it.”

You know? Like every film that those big companies bought — all the films, they’re really good and great, I’m not putting them down —  you can logline them, you know? In terms of like, “oh, that sounds interesting”. Hale County is so open and experiential that it’s impossible to have someone know what it is until you see it. And to me that is the ultimate success, if it can still participate in the commercial space, because this isn’t meant to be seen by 10,000 people over the course of 50 years in a museum or an art space. I want the entire world to see it. And obviously that sounds ridiculous, but…

Yeah, you know there’s been a lot of talk this year about like the “boffo box office” for documentaries, but if you look at those films, and again not to take anything away from them, they’re very much a specific type. You know, going back to what you were saying earlier about “roses are red, violets are blue.” You kind of get this product that people know how to consume. They have that frame of reference for it. So it’s not much of a surprise that those films would do really well commercially. So speaking of being really commercial, (laughs) you had, I’m always so bad at this, “Where-ah-seth-ah-cool”

RaMell Ross: Oh! Apichatpong.

Yeah, Apichatpong [Weerasethakul], as an advisor on the film. I’m wondering if you could give me an example of a note he might have given you somewhere along the process that you took.

RaMell Ross: Some of the feedback he gave was very…in the same way that his films are incredibly terse, you know, they may have a lot of scenes in some part, but there’s some fundamental simplicity. I think one of his strengths in terms of talking about work is sort of using that same brevity and being able to capture really big things within that. And so he responded to one of the cuts and it was really short, and he just summarized the film in such a way that you can apply what he said to the entire film truthfully and figure out if that’s what you wanted.

It’s a very idiosyncratic, yet truthful, relationship to cinema and meaning, which is super rare, I found at least in him — the feedback. Because it’s not prescriptive, it’s just personal, responsive. He’s not speaking toward the aim of making the film a certain way. Like, you talk to someone about the film and they’re giving you feedback. They’re like “maybe more of this character, maybe less of this”, but the ability to synthesize through your own language is so rare.

Of course, yeah. That’s so cool. And I mean, you had multiple…Laura Poitras, Danny Glover. As a debut filmmaker, how was having that support structure?

RaMell Ross: It’s incredible. It’s like the most confidence building, but then it’s also terrifying because there’s seemingly a lot of pressure, but there really isn’t because they’re just people who are really, really smart and good at what they do. I think that the biggest change, or the biggest contributor, to the film’s sort of difference I would think was Joslyn Barnes though. And she has a production company with Danny. Because she was there, she was part of the editing, and so she was also creatively involved on a daily basis, over the course of many, many, many months. Laura gave us a lot of feedback. Danny gave us a lot of his insight. But yeah, I will say I try to give Jos love as much as possible because the film wouldn’t be the same.

Well I gotta give her love too then, because the film that it is is just such an amazing piece of work.  I really love it, and I hope as many people see it as possible, and hope it comes out on BluRay eventually so I can watch it forever.

RaMell Ross: (laughs) I think it will! I think it will.

Okay, awesome! Yeah, I hope, whatever you do next, you know, if it takes another five years, I mean, that’s fine, but I hope it comes sooner because I’m ready for it.

RaMell Ross: Man I really appreciate your thoughts and the conversation too. It was really low-key and fun, yeah.

(probably blushing uncontrollably) Oh, cool! Yeah, no, no, yeah, thank you! 

Hale County This Morning, This Evening is playing now, and will continue to expand to more cities. Check here to see when it’ll be in a theater near you.