This article appeared in the September 27, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, 2024)

If you’re familiar with RaMell Ross’s work as a photographer or with his Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), the news of him helming an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel The Nickel Boys might have come as a surprise. Ross is a dedicated practitioner of nonfiction whose images locate moments of wondrous eloquence in everyday life, particularly amid Black communities in the American South. Whitehead’s novels, by contrast, are grand in form yet grounded in style, cannily filtering American history through the templates of speculative and genre fiction.

Yet in Nickel Boys, which opened the 62nd New York Film Festival last Friday night, the sensibilities of these two artists collide into something revelatory. Whitehead’s novel interrogates how we remember, drawing on the real-life history of the Dozier School for Boys in Florida, a juvenile reformatory notorious for abuse. Through the story of young Elwood, a bright teenager in 1960s Tallahassee who ends up in the reform school because of racist profiling, Whitehead imagines the victims of Dozier—boys whose lives are either lost or remembered only by their suffering—as flesh-and-blood individuals who had love, hope, and friendship, and who fought heroic, tragic battles for survival within the school’s dark walls.

In keeping with Ross’s preoccupations as a photographer and documentarian, the movie turns this text into a treatise on how we see, and the way that informs how we remember. It hinges on an audacious formal maneuver: a point-of-view camera that anchors us, almost for the entirety of the movie, in the first-person perspectives of Elwood and his friend at the reformatory, Turner, so that this narrative of the past feels as if it is unfolding in the thick of an eternal, inescapable present. It’s a move that reengineers how we empathize with on-screen characters, not by looking at them but as them, seeing what they see as they encounter the world. Sustained by the fluid kineticism of Jomo Fray’s cinematography and Nicholas Monsour’s editing, the film builds up to the novel’s climactic twist with the force of an out-of-body experience, a jolt that awakens the viewer to the stories buried deep in the sediment of history.

Last week, I chatted with Ross over Zoom about how he arrived at the point-of-view conceit, his approach to the archive, visual representations of the American South, and more.

I remember you telling me about this project at the Camden Film Festival last year.

You didn’t believe me, though, did you? I was like, “Devika, this shit is crazy, just wait. I can’t believe they let me do this.”

I did believe you, and I was so excited. I know you like historical revisionism, but we’re not gonna revise that history!

No one’s ever said that so clearly to me. You’re right. [Laughs]

What were your first impressions of Colson Whitehead’s book?

What stuck out to me is what didn’t stick out, which was that it wasn’t overly described. I’m a fan—as you can probably imagine by the way that I talk—of the verbose.

The florid.

Yeah, purple prose. [Laughs] His narrator just tells the thing but doesn’t overly describe it. I’m used to American fiction, like Jonathan Franzen or Toni Morrison, where it’s just rich, rich imagery. In this sense, it was such an imaginative relief, an opening-up experience, where I was allowed to make up images while I’m reading his book that just fit into whatever he was telling. It overlaps with my sensibility, because I can just populate this with poetry.

You’ve talked about Henri Cartier-Bresson’s idea of “the decisive moment” in photography—that moment when reality presents itself to be photographed—and how reinterpreting that framework is really crucial to your practice of making images. You are in search of the indecisive moment, which can induce ambiguity in the mind of the viewer. I thought about that a lot while watching Nickel Boys, and about how even fictional images are inflected by this idea.

That is my sensibility. I call it the epic banal. The movie is populated with what in the script we called “adjacent images”—images that are appended by traditional images, but have a visual cadence that is separate from the need to convey the information to move the narrative forward. Like in real life, there are many things going on in each moment, and we choose to narrow in on meaning as it serves our desire for understanding our past, present, and future. It would have been really funny for anyone to sit in on my conversations with our archival producer, Allison Brandin, and hear me be like, “So, we’re looking for a kid tripping on the street in 1970.” And she’s like, “Uh…” You know, these really indecisive, open-ended, lack-of-context moments—rescuing those interstitial moments from time.

There are images from Hale County This Morning, This Evening that I’ll never forget in my life, which are seared into my brain because of the way you isolate sensory experiences—like sweat dripping off a man onto the concrete of the basketball court. Nickel Boys is full of moments like those, too. Reading the book, I was really affected by the scenes of abuse—even though Whitehead’s style is so matter-of-fact—and I was wary of seeing them visualized in the film. I thought it would wreck me. It did, but in a different way, because you don’t show us the thing that was happening, but instead, you show us the thing that no one ever writes about: what the boy was looking at when he was being beaten. 

That’s my way of depicting history—replacing or reproducing an archive that didn’t exist, producing poetry in times where poetry wasn’t allowed to be in these forms. In cinema, you look at the person’s wound and empathize through watching their pain. But when I dislocate my shoulder or break my foot, and I’m in immense pain, I’m not staring at the wound. I’m looking at an ant on the ground, like, “Help me, my friend!” A question [co-writer/producer] Joslyn [Barnes] and I asked ourselves is: when someone is going through trauma, where do they look? That is how [cinematographer] Jomo [Fray] and I came to the macro shots in the film—the “thrown gazes,” as we called them—in which you’re in a visual moment and you home in on something really minute. Like when your friend’s talking to you and you zone out, or you are concentrating on something, you find yourself stuck, and then you pop back into the larger frame. It wasn’t necessarily about not showing, because it’s not that simple. It’s more like: why can’t cinema get closer to the sensory experience of subjectivity?

There are things missing from the archive that we’ll never recover. And the most radical thing we can do is build those out with subjectivity instead of trying to recover them objectively. I was thinking about that a lot while watching the film, especially because you’re often weaving those subjective moments with archival images from history, like the moon landing. The two threads are intertwined: the epic history, which is abundantly recorded, and the epic banal, which doesn’t really exist in the record. 

I think maybe [philosopher and orator] Alan Watts said that everything is about scale. The closer you are to something, the more difficult it is to see the big picture; when you see the big picture, it’s more difficult for you to see the inside. The idea that you can be Elwood, a bright young boy, and have love in your life, and see guys going to the moon, and stargaze, and then walk outside and be harassed—I can’t imagine how psychologically devastating that could be to a human being. The way that not only undermines hope but also squishes generations of people into complacency is largely why society is the way that it is.

What was the moment that the point-of-view conceit clicked?

Right away!

Was there a line or a scene that made you have a eureka moment?

When I was maybe halfway through the book, I wondered at what point Elwood knew he was Black. No, I’ll say it better, at what point Elwood knew that he was raced. Because I’ve had to come to that conclusion, where I’m like, “Oh, I’m a Black person. I thought I was just hanging out.” To me that’s a visual thing. So that stirred the possibility of POV, and I had already done POV in Hale County—there were three scenes from that film that I kind of used as proof of concept. We called it “sentient perspective” on set. But it clicked in terms of it being a powerful way to adapt the film once Joslyn and I started developing it, and we swapped the point of view to Turner’s. I was like, ”What if Turner and Elwood could only see each other? What if there was this spiritual exchange?”

I also want to ask you about filming the South, though I know that is a broad term and you have a strong sense of place in your films that is not generalizable. But I’m curious—when you’ve been in the South as a documentarian or photographer, what is it about images of the American South that feels distinctive to you, maybe like a structural principle?

I love that question, only because it’s unanswerable. It forces you to think about the part of the viewing process that produces emotion and familiarity. When I think about the South, it’s tropes: the heat, the glow. But aside from that, there is something about the South that has the palpability of a Jerusalem, which I’m not sure is something cognitive. But the South has a weight to the air and the water and the land that just doesn’t exist in the bottom tip of Florida, or on the West Coast.

When I think about reproductions of the South, though, you’ve probably noticed if you’ve looked closely at my images that I like to decontextualize—but have just a little bit of context in there. There’s a hint, but you’re unsure, and you’re forced to choose. You complete the image. It’s both there and not there, kind of quantum in a way. Let me ask you this: do you think the film felt Southern to you?

I wouldn’t call myself an expert on what feels Southern, but I thought it felt different from other images of the South. It felt authentic, but didn’t lean into those clichés of the fields, the sweat. Partially because so much of it takes place within the reformatory, but there’s also a dislocation of some sort that I can’t put my finger on.

See, you’re too good, because I was setting you up! I was like, “Oh, so it feels Southern to you, huh? Well, we didn’t do that!” To me, it was supposed to be an everywhere place. I wanted it to feel hot, luscious, and beautiful. I wanted the town to feel like a specific type of small town, but having the markers of the South—like a weeping willow or a cotton field—that type of iconography is too decisive. The school itself is just a bland, everyday institution. It’s not a place that’s falling apart. That’s not the way these things worked—they happened in front of your eyes in places that looked normal. And they still do. It’s important we don’t use the language of the South as a scapegoat to imagine that that’s the place where this occurred.

I also thought of how different the images in the film looked from “third-person” images of the South, those tableaus that have this sense of looking through the eyes of a visitor. There’s a kind of objectification of the place that you’re disrupting with the first-person camera. Did that also change the approach to production design? Because a person’s eyes can go anywhere, whereas with an objective camera, you can be very storyboarded. There’s a mobility to the POV camera in the film, it doesn’t look rehearsed, but I imagine that meant paying attention to all the small details. 

The first script was all images and camera movements; they were all preplanned, because that’s the language of the film. But when you’re shooting, certain details become more interesting and you move over to them. Jomo and I realized quite early on that you have to miss things. You can’t always be on time or hit marks. You get there when you get there. We had a manifesto, and one of the lines was: “The camera, and characters’ gaze, is the purpose and central organizing principle of the moment. There are no sets. There are no stages. There’s no direction for the action to face.” So we’re telling everyone they’re on camera all the time, but we know we’re not going to see them unless something [unplanned] happens.

I interviewed Colson Whitehead when Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad series came out [in 2021]. I asked him what he hoped people would take away from the series, and he said, “I hope that high-school students who are assigned the book watch the TV show instead, and get busted for using stuff that’s in the adaptation but not in the book in their papers.” 

Such a writer’s answer!

So I ask you, what do you hope people will take away from your film?

I hope people read the book and say the movie’s better. Just kidding! The relationship between the camera and reality is a deep, philosophical thing to me, so I hope people get to glimpse another person’s subjectivity or genuinely leave theirs for even a fraction of a second, and have something as revelatory as what I felt when filming Hale County, where you’re genuinely invested in not being the center of the universe. But how realistic is that?

Well, it’s beautifully put, and that’s all I need. Pretty words!

Purple prose! [Laughs].