 | This is just first impression, for I do want to watch it again, preferable on DVD since PBS kept shooting those dumb banners across the bottom of the screen, which serves only to distract. The movie is much what I anticipated. It seems especially hard for some local people to take. All those black folks! No moonlight and magnolias and gracious Southern living! Or is it the form as much as the content? |
It isn't an easy movie to watch, for it doesn't tell you what to think so much as present images that you have to put together and find what meaning you can. What struck me most strongly on first viewing was the repetitious movement. The little kid running to and fro and to and from and on and on and on. At first it is interesting and then it is boring and as it keeps on it becomes something else. Juxtaposed with it is the next long sequence simply showing young black men hang out in the recreation room awaiting going out to play basketball and its repetitive movements that seem to have little meaning. And I began thinking about how much energy is expended in these lives with little significant effect. Bouncing in place. Like the long sequence with the coach and the basketball player. You know that the player will get better, but you wonder if he will get anywhere with it.
| In a way the movie reminds me of Frederick Wiseman documentaries, which present detailed material usually about institutions (prisons, ballet companies, museums, NY Public Library among them) or communities with no identification of persons or any explanation of what is going on other than what you can pick up from just listening. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Wiseman) Ever since “Titicut Follies” in 1967 Wiseman has been recognized as one of the great American filmmakers, and the fact that I should mention director RaMell Ross along with him indicates some of my regard for the latter. A difference is that Wiseman documentaries tend to be long. Ross’s movie is not. |  |
He came to Greensboro on a short project, stayed on to coach basketball and help out in other ways. And he got involved with black families and gained their trust and took movies, lots of footage, of them over a period of several years. Then he edited down to the present hour and 16 minute cut. He has worked hard on the festival circuit, and he has brought his movie far. I can easily see why it was nominated for an Oscar, but if I had to put my money on a movie to win in that category, it would be on "RBG." Ginsberg is old, recovering from cancer, and a hero to the Oscar voters. But the Oscar voters can surprise.
 | Another moviemaker came to mind. Terence Davies, particularly his Liverpool trilogy: “Distant Voices Still Lives “The Long Day Closes,” and “Of Time and the City.” The first two are autobiographical fiction, a grown-up artist reimagining his life growing up in a family with an abusive father in Liverpool in the 195s. (They are, among lots of other things, musicals, and in some respects they resemble documentary but with everything carefully recreated.) The last, definitely a “documentary,” I view as a |
poetic reverie as much as a nonfiction account, incredibly personal. All of these are short movies in which a lot of time passes and a few things come to stand for a lot. I felt that about “Hale County This Moring, This Evening” as well. Ross has taken a lot of footage in real time over years, gone away, studied it, cut it down an assembled it into something that works in poetic as well as documentary style.
Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” also comes to mind, but then it always does. It is, I believe, particularly relevant here.
I think I like Ross’s movie a lot.
I think I like Ross’s movie a lot.
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