The blistering drama showing the US’s racist past from a new, first-person perspective

The Oscar-nominated film, directed by Ramel Ross, is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel about two boys attending an abusive “remedial” school, and is shot from their point of view. The effect is tremendous.

No movie this year, maybe even this decade, has looked and felt like The Nickel Boys. Ramel Roth’s groundbreaking new film is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an abusive “remedial” boys’ school, and explores America’s racist past (and how it always has been). It offers a revolutionary perspective on how it is impacting the present. The era of Jim Crow. One reason for this is that the film focuses on the human experience rather than oppressive institutions and punishment, especially through its use of a first-person perspective. Ross puts us in the shoes of Elwood (Ethan Herris), an idealistic young man living in 1960s Florida, looking forward to a bright future. It was discontinued when he was wrongly convicted of auto theft and sent to Nickel Academy. The school is functionally a prison and is modeled after an actual facility in Florida, where dozens of unmarked graves were found on the grounds.

At Nickel, Elwood meets another young man named Turner (Brandon Wilson). Turner takes a more cynical view of the civil rights movement that was occurring during his incarceration. Ross frequently switches perspectives, not only between first- and third-person framing (with the camera fixed behind the characters’ heads), but also between Elwood and Turner’s perspectives, showing how the friends see each character. It shows us how we see and how we change. Our take on each in the process. Similar to the books, you can also periodically check back to see what happened to adult Elwood (Daveed Diggs).

Director Roth said that the camerawork in The Nickel Boys reflects not only how every human being is the center of their own world, but also how they experience the world in ways that have yet to be processed. He said it was designed to. “It gives the person, Elwood, not his own hindsight to see things as if they were meaningful, but to see things that would be meaningful. It’s just a matter of pointing,” he told the BBC. “The story is therefore always secondary to the experience of seeing.”

The way Elwood and Turner’s personal experiences were expressed through the camera was controlled by Ross himself, along with cinematographer Jomo Frey and another cameraman, Sam Ellison, each taking breaks. It includes movements that imitate the movements of the human eye. The characters’ voices can be heard from off-screen, and when you look at reflective surfaces you can see their hands and feet, and in some cases, their faces. Sometimes you really feel the limitations of their perspective. For example, when you’re being chased and you don’t know how far someone is behind you, or when you hear a scary noise around the corner in your racially segregated hometown.

To create that perspective, the practical requirements of shooting in first person were demanding, but also allowed for spontaneity. Ross and Frey did away with much of the traditional shot composition and planning and adjusted it depending on the scene.

“Blocking became more gestural,” Ross said. Rather than traditional orchestration of where and how actors move, it’s more about considering what the character is looking at and how to make sure their body parts appear correctly in the frame. It was said to be important. . In filming some of these point-of-view shots, the character actor whose eyes we’re looking into wasn’t even on set.

The Nickel Boys is not the first film to use first-person cinematography, but it is certainly the first mainstream film release to use it in such a profound way. Previously, this was a technique mostly limited to gimmicky horror and action movies that emulated first-person shooter games. Examples include the 2017 Korean film Villainess and the 2015 (terrible) sci-fi thriller Hardcore Henry. .

The Nickel Boys goes in the opposite direction of these types of movies. Rather than using a first-person perspective to heighten the sensationalism, Roth seeks to discard traditional narrative form and create something more memorable. This is a surprising choice, as such adaptations often rely on diary-like narration and rigid structure, especially for films based on novels. The Nickel Boys shows that providing a visual window into what a character is paying attention to is just as good as an internal monologue to help the audience understand.

The choice to shoot the majority of the film from a first-person perspective seemed obvious to Roth. “Why can’t we get closer to our sensibilities and subjectivity on screen?” he asks. In particular, the adoption of a first-person perspective “seemed to me like a refreshing act for Black people to look up at a screen and see their hands doing something in the world. I was like, “Why hasn’t anyone made this before?” [a film like] this? ‘”

Roth admits he’s not the first filmmaker to use first person – he cites Harmony Korine’s recent experimental action film Aggro Dr1ft (2023) – but uses it The context makes him stand out. His editing collapses scenes together into something akin to a stream of consciousness, and this experiential perspective feels particularly important when applied to the subject matter of The Nickel Boys. This era of race relations and racism in America is too often portrayed from the outside looking in.

“The initial concept during the writing process was, ‘What would happen if we gave Elwood and Turner a camera and created their own Hale County?'” Ross said in the acclaimed 2018 documentary Hale County. He talks about this while referring to “This Morning, This Evening”. The film that made him famous was an intimate and impressionistic look at the black community of the town in Hale County, Alabama, where Ross moved in 2009. The ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s,” Ross continues. “So no one would ever be able to collect enough footage to make something as poetic and observational as this.” When he was with the Nickel Boys, he and Frey were “thinking about how people perceive black people.” I thought about “Do you really understand this?” [would] It would have been different if people had been able to show their point of view in the 60’s. ”

Ellen Jones, journalist and author of Screen Deep: How Film and TV can Solve Racism and Save the World, praises the revolutionary effect of the film’s formal conceits. “What’s so exciting and impressive about Ross’s use of the camera in ‘The Nickel Boys’ is that you have to consider not just the story, but how the story is told,” she says. “The camera’s first-person perspective eliminates the voyeuristic distance that has traditionally been associated with racist violence.” [in film]and inserts us into the subjectivity of the black characters. The fact that there are no gimmicks and yet there is a sense of immersion is nothing short of miraculous. ”

This first-person perspective certainly sets it apart from many other films depicting the Jim Crow era. Jones is known for “Mississippi Ghosts” (1996), “Mississippi Burning” (1988), Green Book (2018) Hidden Figures (2016) focuses on sensationalized images of black people in pain, designed to speak to a supposedly white audience.

Roth’s departure from traditional narrative presentation dates back to the suitably free-form personal essays he wrote. quarterly movie The title is “Renewing Encounters.” It’s about separating the concept of “blackness” from commodified mainstream American sensibilities. This purpose is reflected in The Nickel Boys, as is the stated desire to “create a personal, poetic experience of Black people.” His films accomplish this by capturing microscopic everyday experiences and extending them into an entire visual world, and as he says in Renew the Encounter, they are “exalted by the black experience.” We aim to “bring a feeling.” It’s a delicate balance between doing this and being honest about history, but The Nickel Boys achieves it. Although the protagonists’ suffering is included as an honest reflection of their lives, that representation is not the film’s only goal.

Naturally, in a first-person perspective, there are certain restrictions on what the camera can show. The eye can only see a limited area, so some things are overlooked. Other scenes are left out because the characters simply don’t want to see them. For example, in a harrowing corporal punishment scene where Elwood avoids seeing what is happening to him, the camera’s gaze moves to the ground. Therefore, acts of physical violence often occur on the periphery of the frame. As Ross says, Elwood isn’t collecting evidence. “There’s no one in the world who shows black suffering when it’s happening,” Ross elaborated on his choice. “That’s not what they’re for as humans in this world. It’s just happening because of the larger context.”

Looking back at the basics of Hale County, Roth’s manifesto for this film (Shared on Filmmaker Magazine) emphasizes the point of “participating rather than capturing, attacking rather than attacking.” Nickel Boys may be the epitome of this technique, as it shoots from behind the characters’ eyes. This “participation” is part of the simple reason why the film stands out from many other depictions of difficult American history from the same period. This film makes it a priority to show not just what we endure, but how black people live their lives.

‘The Nickel Boys’ is in theaters in the US and UK from January 3rd.