The movie has won year-end attention (it made this year’s Oscar documentary short list), and once you let yourself glide onto its wavelength, it’s got a cosmically becalmed addictive quality.As a filmmaker, Ross keeps surprising you — you never know what the next image will bring — and that makes the film feel like a puzzle we’re assembling one live fragment at a time. It is directed by RaMell Ross and produced by RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes, Su Kim, and is Ross's first nonfiction feature. 1 out of 2 found this helpful. This allows the viewer to be present, though not in a “fly-on-the-wall” sense. 9 out of 19 found this helpful. As a documentary, it’s informative, emotional and intriguing.
“Hale County” is a work of lit-up social realism that’s suggestive enough to soar over boundaries of existence.The ultimate way one judges a film like “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” is connected to one’s aesthetic value system. I love documentaries - this is not a documentary. Was this review helpful? Through framing and editing, small moments are imbued with a sense of spiritual grace, and the entirely mundane is recalibrated as the sublime. 3 out of 6 found this helpful. During this sequence, Ross does something startling: He intercuts footage of the silent-era black comedian Bert Williams, so that it looks like Williams is gazing, from behind bushes, at the plantation, and we can’t help wondering what he’s thinking. RaMell Ross's poetic portrait of life in a fabled corner of Alabama is a documentary of radiant images poised between desperation and joy.The simplest way to describe “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” — and maybe the best way, since it’s a film of elemental radiance — is to say that it’s a documentary put together like a series of photographs. 0 out of 2 found this helpful. you'll only see a flash in this film and that flash isn't enough to learn who they are as people. At some points, the person being filmed responds to the camera as if he or she were responding to you directly. You don't have to do anything at all. It is a pure artistic statement in that arena, no question. In this way, Ross invites the viewer to act like a participant, rather than an observer, in the lives of black people in Hale County, Alabama. The camera subtracts a casual observer’s protective distance and gets close to these people, putting you in the room with them in probably the same spot you’d be had you gone in person. That said, sadly all of them have missed its indebtedness to 'A Shimmer of Possibility', a very influential 12 volume photographic work/ book released by Paul Graham in 2008. A sudden death is as shocking as it could be, yet even here life goes on; that’s an element of the devastation. 5 out of 7 found this helpful. “I feel like I’m making enough money just to go back to work,” says Quincy, and it’s part of the film’s power that the line expresses his predicament, yet who amongst us doesn’t know that hamster-wheel feeling? Sometimes it’s a question, either straight-forward or meditative. At times, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” evokes the work of Thai filmmaker Ross separates his movie into several movements, each preceded by a message written on a black screen with white lettering. Ross’ intimate knowledge of the location and of his subjects, Daniel and Quincy, strips away the usual artifice and baggage, presenting these events as matter-of-factly as life itself. Read Next: ‘Center Stage’ Cast Reunites to Talk Diversity in Ballet: ‘We Have to Do So Much Better’ It’s an uncorrupted viewpoint, though Ross is on occasion quick to remind you of prior cinematic and societal reflections of Southern Blacks. “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” is a poetic documentary with a gift for making enrapturing imagery out of what sound like ordinary, everyday events. As the title implies, days in the lives of the residents of Hale County, Alabama are chronicled in this documentary.