Critics reviews

The film’s signature images are indelibly American: a town’s empty Main Street awaiting a parade as we look into the distance at the point where the road disappears, then young men—not cowboys—riding horses through this town.

An extraordinarily realized film, which takes a boldly impressionistic approach to community portraiture.

In Hale County, the county is not only a landscape, but a vast territory of interpretation, feeling, individual subjectivity, community and history.

It feels like a film in the moment, a daydream in the present, not a spliced reverie of the past.

Through class difference and intellectual distance, Ross treats the down-home folk like creatures. He intersperses Terrence Malick–style images of natural phenomena to extol the lower class with existential portent. This propagandistic use of cinematic apparatus is sanctioned by film culture’s elites.

Mixing vérité filmmaking with flourishes like time-lapse photography, jump cuts and superimposed images, Hale County seeks to fracture the banalities and stereotypes of classic regional portraitures. 

Most first-time directors with sweeping aesthetic ambitions are not known for the delicacy of their approach. But RaMell Ross, the photographer turned filmmaker behind the most beautiful American documentary of the year, has managed to couch a profound sense of mission—the interrogation of how black people are framed in American visual culture—in a tone of matter-of-factness that thwarts facile interpretation.

It’s a lyrical documentary in which dramas are embedded, elicited, extrapolated, and in which tone and mood—and the visual and sonic moments and associations that they conjure—are inseparable from the observation and evocation of character and personal experience.

Ross captures an impressive scope of events in such a short amount of time. There’s birth and unspeakably tragic death, church services and dance squads, and everything seems to be of equal weight.

It liberates itself from the Western tradition of linear storytelling. Employing nonlinear editing, as opposed to long takes, to get closer to its subjects, Ross’s film finds its voice in a kind of Black art film tradition that tends to exist in galleries and institutions, or referenced in the work of Fred Moten.

Ross’s film, his first, updates exhausted modes of representation. Yet what Hale County reflects isn’t a changed reality but rather a fresher perception of it.

The particularity and power of the larger cinematic image Ross has created through a multiplicity of moments are impossible to adequately describe in critical prose.