Illustrations by Zoé Maghamès Peters.
Artists think about it all the time. What is in me? How am I going to get it out? And what is it going to be once I get it out there? These thoughts are not just the precursor to a practice, but fuel for the creative act. When you think this way, nearly everything in life becomes admissible as evidence of some great work to come: that object, those gestures, her voice, this taste, these words in that order. The resulting practice might merely represent these observations, or it might transform them into new language.
When I first speak with the artist and filmmaker RaMell Ross this fall, on a rainy morning in a small and busy PR office in midtown Manhattan, our conversation winds through combinations of questions, prompts, declarations, and answers. Ross’s way of talking, like his filmmaking style, is discursive yet harmonic. His first film, the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018), evolved out of three years spent coaching basketball in Alabama and taking photographs of his players and their families. Stylistically, the documentary is akin to the prose poem: It resists narrative, yet contains its free-floating expressions within an essayistic structure. Nickel Boys (2024), Ross’s second film and first narrative feature, is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, which explores the lives of two boys, Elwood and Turner, incarcerated in a corrupt and abusive reform school in Jim Crow Florida.
Whitehead’s narrative was inspired by the 2012 discovery of 55 unmarked graves on the grounds of the Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in Marianna, Florida, that ran for over a century and was segregated until the mid-1960s. The novel shifts between Elwood and Turner’s experiences at the fictional Nickel Academy in the ’60s and the revelations, in the 2010s, of the school’s abuses, patiently unraveling the competing ideologies and enmeshed psyches of both boys and the society they try to survive within. Elwood, who is arrested after taking a ride from the wrong person on his way to junior college, takes a principled and idealistic approach to navigating life at Nickel; Turner, who’s been in and out of the school, is more resigned to its evil. Their differences, both in disposition and background, somehow draw them closer together until their intimacy becomes the animating force of the film.
Ross’s adaptation manages an improbable degree of affective proximity. Except for some archival materials (both real and fabricated) and flash-forward scenes featuring an older Elwood (Daveed Diggs), Nickel Boys is shot almost entirely from the first-person perspective. The actors who play Elwood and Turner as boys, Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson, are rigged with cameras that sit in front of their faces, which they had to learn to operate. We see what they see: small movements of matter and nature, the subdued and exaggerated expressions of others, the blankness of a room where you experience the worst physical pain of your life. Whenever an actor addresses one of the leads, they perform directly toward the camera, looking straight down the barrel of the lens. Their perspectives are shot with a soft focus and a shallow depth of field so that the film feels not like a video game, as you might expect, but like moving portraiture. Ross, who is trained as a photographer, sees his kind of POV filmmaking as a narrative device, as well as a formal one. However, the camera is not a perfect double of each boy’s eyes—you’re not always seeing exactly what Elwood and Turner are looking at, but what Ross has chosen to look at through and as the boys: a leaf, a pair of shoes, the goosebumps on Elwood’s arm, a piece of grandma’s cake, a blood-soaked wall. It's the same as when you read a novel: what you see in your mind’s eye is what you imagine the characters are seeing and experiencing—yet the whole time, it’s you.
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, 2024).
After a screening for press and industry at the New York Film Festival, there is a Q&A with Ross and the main cast, including Herisse and Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Diggs, Hamish Linklater, and Fred Hechinger. It is my first encounter with Ross, who came off not only as intelligent, as I had surmised from his work, but also gregarious and curious. He expresses deep respect for each of the actors, his cowriter and -producer Joslyn Barnes (Bamako, 2006; Zama, 2017), and cinematographer Jomo Fray (Selah and the Spades, 2019; All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, 2023), as well as genuine interest in the questions asked—not only those of the moderator, but also those of the audience. As I watch him on stage, I notice that Ross is dressed very much like me, even wearing similar glasses to mine.
During our interview, I don’t tell Ross about my sense of overidentification with him, and we talk instead about the one I feel with both Elwood and Turner—as well as that which the characters evidently share. I say that there’s something about being a Black critic and seeing films about Black people and Black subjectivities that makes me aware of overidentifying. I wonder aloud if I should consciously enforce a critical distance. In both my personal and professional lives, I’ve found intense attachment to identity both hard to resist and unbearable to maintain. From childhood, and mostly without my say in the matter, identity, especially Black identity, has been a major channel through which I experience the world, but it is also an oversimplification and a distortion of genuine experience. It becomes a tool for approaching a work of art and, at the same moment, a stricture on how I might do so. How can I critically evaluate films with Black subjects if my way of seeing is so close yet so far?
“I feel you,” Ross says. “I’ve never seen a film like Nickel Boys. Hale County is my only reference—I’d never seen a film like [that] either. But I also know, from making images—and that leading me to see how bankrupt what one could call ‘expressions of Black subjectivity’ are in culture at large (at least in Western culture)—that any glimpse of subjectivity, a Black person recognizing the subjectivity of another Black person out in the world, is revelatory.” Still, Ross agrees, this revelation can also feel like a trap. How can I stand to be in my body and in yours?
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, 2024).
In February 2020, producers and copresidents of Plan B entertainment Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner met with Ross to propose the idea of adapting The Nickel Boys. Whitehead does not get involved in screen adaptations of his work; it would be up to Ross to find his own way in, on his own terms.
“Looking at [the novel], I was like, ‘I can’t illustrate this,’” Ross tells me. “‘I actually cannot make that movie. I could try; I know that it would be bad. I actually know that people would like it, though. And it would probably do well.” A faithful adaptation was out of the question, but Ross found himself drawn to “a certain poetic expression” to which the book might lend itself, and which he thought could be satisfying and “honest.” “I actually think it's respectful to [Whitehead],” he says, “to get farther away from the book but actually try to have the spirit and the impact of the book.”
In 2021, a year before production on the film began, Ross had work in an exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts called The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse. He visited the exhibition with his father and uncle, both of whom had grown up in North Carolina, “with hardcore people trying to kill them,” says Ross, “white people shooting, and riots at their schools.” Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) was also on view, a collage-style video essay depicting the jubilance, violence, humor, and soulfulness in various expressions of Black life and death. His uncle walked out of the video almost immediately. “I don't need to see that,” he said later. “I lived it!” It’s a common sentiment from older Black viewers of traumatic narratives about Black subjects, including those of Barry Jenkins—a friend and peer of Ross’s who has also adapted a Whitehead novel, The Underground Railroad—Gina Prince-Bythewood, Jordan Peele, Dee Rees, and Steve McQueen. The images these artists craft are only as rich as the truth behind them; to isolate joy from suffering would be to manufacture Black narratives, not channel them.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross, 2018).
Born in Frankfurt, Germany, and raised in Fairfax, Virginia, Ross was an army brat and a jock. He would go on to play Division I basketball at Georgetown University, where he double majored in sociology and English. Ross tells me he was drawn to writing to counteract the “stereotype of an athlete that is anti-intellectual and only interested in partying and [is] a physical specimen.” Embedded in this image is also the deeply racialized history of athletics in the US and in colonized Africa, with Black people serving as entertainers, usually under the direction of white proprietors. Writers, in contrast, are in control, respected as intellectual authorities, Ross explains. With any luck, a reader will forget that their favorite author’s unmistakable voice inhabits a body. But writing didn’t quite pan out—Ross found he couldn’t express what he had in mind with that form. Instead, he found more personal meaning, and productive satisfaction, in visual language, earning an MFA in photography from Rhode Island School of Design before turning to film.
I learn that Nickel Boys is intended as a response to questions posed in his manifesto, “Renew the Encounter,” first published in Film Quarterly in 2019, a year after Hale County was released, which he encourages me to read. After our interview, I trudge through sopping New York to the F train, ride it uptown, ascend to my friends’ parents’ apartment, change clothes, and go back into the downpour, running laps around Central Park for two hours; I shower, change again, eat, then go home to Brooklyn; I read the manifesto.
In it, Ross reckons with the troubled expressions of Black subjectivity that litter the visual record and stakes a claim in a new methodology. “People are the real documents of civilization,” he writes. “And one’s eyes are made for the field of events. Things come in as this and are processed into that; while most melt aimlessly in one’s memory, others cling to totems in their sky. In this personal storm of consciousness, the act of looking makes a mirror of meaning.” A few lines later, he insists, “I am not concerned with verisimilitude, I help you believe.” It’s a bold claim for someone who would go on to adapt a novel, particularly one drawn from a verified history of abuse. But Ross’s approach to art-making is informed not only by his own intuition and affinities, but by critical interventions in the humanities. At the Rhode Island School of Design, professor and artist Tony Cokes introduced him to works like Nicole Fleetwood’s Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness and Darby English’s How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, which suggested new and subversive ways of encountering artistic expressions of and by Black people. These encounters would require a marked departure from flattened readings of Black subjectivity—in particular, a refusal to assume that Blackness is a cultural monolith.
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, 2024).
Whitehead’s own work demands an inspired staging, especially for a director hoping to adapt a text that is so lucid and compelling on the page. In one sense, The Nickel Boys is a trauma narrative, a literary cataloguing of Black suffering. But while Whitehead’s formal style is direct and unflinching, he is inquisitive in his narrative approach. “The capacity to suffer,” writes Whitehead. “Elwood—all the Nickel boys—existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished.” It makes sense, then, that Ross would rig his leads with cameras—his source material isn’t only concerned with illustrating a series of events, but also with ways of seeing and transmitting those events from person to person—and with ways to exist, together, in the capacity to endure them.
The film employs the same interchange between periods as the novel, shifting the position of the camera to differentiate between eras and ideas. In the 1960s, we almost exclusively see through Elwood and Turner’s eyes. And then, at a certain point, we step back. The camera now sits behind the older Elwood. The 2010s are always depicted at this relative distance. “Make the camera an organ. Take it into your body. Shoot toward a personal poetics,” writes Ross in his manifesto. And then, “Unsuitcase black images. Remove them from the luggage of the traveling salesman. Fail at representing blackness.” The distance one might trouble over as a critic, or feel unable to establish as a viewer at a film screening or art exhibition, is the one Ross works to sublimate as an artist. If Ross has succeeded, then the admissible evidence that makes meaning of all our lives is no longer a series of shorthand or a set of cheap images, but a personal record that runs between you and me, mine and yours.
