“It’s not every day that you witness a new cinematic language being born, but watching RaMell Ross’s evocatively titled documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening qualifies,” argues Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “The director, a photographer and teacher who was coaching basketball in the middle of the Black Belt region of the American South, knew the subjects of his documentary for several years before deciding to create a film around them. The finished work, a half decade in the making, is informed by his deep familiarity with its characters, which might be one reason why he has the confidence to abandon traditional narrative structures and strike out on his own lyrical path.”
This is “the first film shown at Sundance to list Apichatpong Weerasethakul as a creative advisor, which alone would have been enough to get my attention,” writes Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, noting that Ross was one of the magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2015 “and interviewed Strong Island’s Yance Ford for us last year, so some of his artistic concerns were already on my radar. . . . It feels a cop-out to assign any film the I-give-up label of ‘tone poem’ . . . My favorite shot/sequence is the spookiest: the camera, in a car, drives up to a house whose facade screams ‘plantation-era leftover.’ Tires and other rubbish are being burned, and Ross cuts to footage of vaudeville/silent film blackface performer Bert Williams hiding behind/poking his head through bushes, a ghost of a complicated past still haunting a trope-ridden property.”
“At its strongest, the film feels like kin to Kirsten Johnson’s great Cameraperson (2016), a free-associative nonfiction memoir comprised mostly of B-roll and personal footage,” suggests Keith Uhlich in the Hollywood Reporter. “Though the subject here isn’t Ross himself (despite a few offscreen aural appearances) but an entire community that, in both micro- and macrocosmic senses, has remained historically unacknowledged and unseen.”
Hale County is one of the films Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes discuss in a recent episode of the Film Comment Podcast (36’42”).
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