Reinventing the Camera With Nickel Boys‘ RaMell Ross

Nickel Boys is prominently featured within the top 10 of our ranking of the 50 best movies of 2024. You can check out that full list here.
“If the white gaze is the invisible gaze, the dominant way of being in the world, at least in the U.S., I think shooting ‘from’ centralizes the black gaze.”
Director RaMell Ross is mulling over what it truly means to shoot “from” vs. shooting “toward” as we wrap up our conversation. It’s what he likes to call his style of POV filmmaking, “shooting from.” It’s what makes his debut narrative feature, Nickel Boys, feel radically different from films like it. Specifically those centered on the Black experience in America. He’s not placing the camera on a subject and recording. He’s projecting himself onto them so that we, the audience, can find our way in. “It centralizes the others’ gaze so that it makes the white gaze apparent. If everyone has their own gaze, then maybe everyone will realize that it’s the same gaze, and there’s just these sort of social-miopic binders that force us to see things in a certain way and/or ignore other things with a certain impunity.” Many American filmmakers have shot their subjects with love–cinema is a tool for empathy after all–but if a camera is a Eurocentric invention, is it possible to rework its origins to create a new cinema? Or are we confined to always pushing against what could be seen as a poisoned well? Unless you’re fully committed to creating cinema for the sake of creating cinema, all filmmaking, on some level, is a commercial endeavor. Nickel Boys might be the first commercial film to almost transcend the capitalist impulses of American cinema into something fully spiritual. If it isn’t, it’s the first American film of my lifetime to awaken thoughts I’d never had before.
A few months back, I attended a screening of Nickel Boys, followed by a Q&A with director RaMell Ross. It was my second time seeing the film, and its ethereal power washed over me all over again. If you haven’t seen it, Nickel Boys tells the story of two young Black men, Elwood and Turner, who are sentenced to juvenile correctional facility Nickel Academy in 1960s Florida. Their brutal treatment is documented through striking POV, attained by Ross and DP Jomo Fray by rigging cameras to the bodies of their leads, Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson. But more importantly, their hopes, their dreams, their joys–it’s all painstakingly photographed through this lens. Similar to his documentary, Hale County This Morning This Evening, Ross places you in a first-person perspective and forces you to sit with the people he’s documenting. A hug between characters becomes a blanket of distorted frames and a wall of sound, the way a loving hug should feel. Gazing out to the stars from a rumbling train car becomes a brief respite into the unknown, stars and space enveloping you. He’s not the first filmmaker to do this, of course not, but there’s something about his approach that gives life to his subjects and removes whatever perceived gimmick may be attached to this style of filmmaking. It was during the Q&A that Ross fully obliterated my brain. While discussing the film, he offhanded a thought about how the camera itself is a White, Christian invention. A thought experiment he likes to to play is imagining the camera as a polytheistic entity, but the conclusion he always comes away with is that it’s a dead-end line of thinking.
I haven’t stopped thinking about this, especially as someone whose favorite kind of film is what some have dubbed “Creative Non-Fiction.” Think Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson and how that film is in dialogue with the intention behind where a filmmaker chooses to place a camera, or William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasim and how he turns the documentary in on itself, becoming an argument over if any part of what we see as an audience can truly be “authentic.” Ross’s approach to being a “fly on the wall” is some of the most exciting we’ve seen in recent cinema, his camera becoming a portal into memory itself. All of this had been swirling around my head weeks after that Q&A and I couldn’t let it go. Maybe the camera isn’t polytheistic, perhaps it could never be, but couldn’t one posit that what Ross is doing with both Hale County and now, Nickel Boys, is a means of connecting us to a past life? Is that not, then, the closest one has come to the Buddhist definition of Karma? Couldn’t that, then, be a tool to instruct one’s future? Be it simple empathy, cinema at its best, or as a teaching tool for a filmmaker years from now? I had to go to the source.
“I hope so,” Ross tells me when we finally sit down together. “It’s something I’ve thought about a bunch and you know, the collaborators I have have chewed over as a deep, deep, deep concept that’s embedded in the gesture of making the camera an organ and giving it to folks. But I hope so. I think that’s a more interesting use of cinema.” I admit that this line of thinking is maybe a little too Galaxy-Brained, but Ross laughs and assures me “nothing is too Galaxy-Brained” before continuing. “(A Polytheistic Camera) is a dead end of thought if you’re a literalist. You know? If you’re a person who is not okay with contradiction … Buddhists have Koans. Koans are paradoxical traps to allow you to undo what language does. And so I think if we’re, if you take seriously a polytheistic lens, we have to first think about, almost think about Jainism in that, if we’re going to believe that something is living, that we are living, then we have to consider that everything is living. We have to not prioritize a hierarchy of value for sentients. So I think if that’s the case, then the primary thing in front of the camera would definitely not be people.”
RaMell Ross comes from a photography background. When you view his still images in concert with his films, you’re overwhelmed with a love for life, living beings or otherwise. It’s not simply that his proclivity for POV is placing you into somebody’s mind, it’s that you feel this “lack of hierarchy of value for sentients” he speaks of. Trees or buildings or comic books, they all take on an equal level of importance. The lens that keeps us on one side, the subject on the other blurs, almost erasing entirely. A moment early on in Nickel Boys sees Elwood riding a bus. A little girl slides out from underneath his seat and then back under. Elwood, playing along with her, bends down to see her beneath him. The space under the seat becomes an entire universe unto itself, the dust, dirt and fuzz, little galaxies of life. “I think the secret of this film, if there is a secret, is that everything you see in the film, I had been thinking about it for like, 15 years,” Ross says of the images he chooses to capture. “All of them (the images) are from my own memory.”
The director is innately aware that he’s approaching a history that’s been co-opted by the white gaze; how couldn’t he be? That’s why it’s important to him that for as alive as his camera is, it isn’t careless. Every burst of life he captures feels perfectly spontaneous, which is a miracle given how painstaking it all was. “This film is written, first, through images. It’s then written through the text. And so I think with that, of course I have to rely on my DP, Jomo (Fray), who is way more brilliant than I thought any DP would be.” he laughs, “I thought I was going to have to do everything … I was like, there’s no way that someone is going to be able to do all of these things, I have to do it all, but Jomo can legitimately build the emotion in the space before the camera gets there. And in terms of the continuity of a narrative, and dealing with the way in which people of color have been imaged and lit across time previously, that’s no small task.” If the camera is a Eurocentric creation, and if the vast majority of Black history has been shot through White eyes and hands, does Ross seek to create a new framework of history for Black people to be viewed through?
“I would never be pretentious enough to say ‘create’ a new history because I think we’re all creating history, we’re all making archives,” he says. Nickel Boys’ narrative is intercut with instertials from all over the place. From the opening of 1958’s The Defiant Ones, to home movies of Black children. It’s the latter that I keyed in on during our conversation. Ross shoots with an abundance of love that’s overwhelming. His images, in conversation with the images of parents documenting their children, is that “new history” playing out right in front of us. “The dialogue of the arc of visual representation as it relates to people of color, I think when I was making Hale County, I realized that first, people don’t photograph each other like they’re photographing their family members. They don’t know the people well enough, and they’re not interested in that fidelity. And the fidelity doesn’t exist, but it’s the attempt at showing the thing that’s closest to familiarity and loving you with the rest of the world. And that to me seems not only tragic, but a thought experiment that if had, you know, been the case over the course of photographic and filmic history, would have revolutionized our relationship to every culture and even to ourselves,” he explains. “One has to ask, what are the consequences of not doing that? bell hooks said that the Black Family Archive was the only sight of resistance against this white gaze or against this Eurocentric use of the camera. Because people are photographing people because they love them. That’s the actual reason why. And how beautiful it is to be able to put those images in contact with the way in which Jomo and I shot this film, and with some of the other news broadcast images and Hollywood’s images.”
That love is felt beyond a simple long take on, for example, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor playing Elwood’s grandmother, gazing back at him with love. It extends into the literal fabric of what Ross and his crew are shooting. “Not only did us camera operators have to wear clothes at times that were of the Nickel Boys, like the detail on the sleeves had to be way more extensive because the camera is here [points at his own arm], like you’re looking down at your own body.” he says, describing the process of creating a boundary-less camera. The set itself needed to be given extra attention so as to appear as it would to the exact eyes we’re seeing through. Whether he realized it at the time or not, Ross was embodying the very spirituality via camera he described to me. By treating every subject inside the lens as equal, giving it that equal attention, a shirt sleeve being as tended to as a human being, he’s manifesting a genuine act of love into the perspective of his audience. You may not grasp it as you’re watching, but the care imbued to a simple article of clothing burrows into your mind. If that care is present there, then it’s present in his human beings as well. Elwood and Turner transcend fictional characters; you transcend your role of an audience member, and now you’re one. Elwood glancing from a comic book to sneak a peek at a woman becomes you doing the same. In one glance, an entire world of possibility opens for Elwood as it opens for you. Your memories of glancing at a person who caught your eye intertwines with Elwood’s. Elwood lying beneath a Christmas tree as a child, the magic of the tree looming over him swirls with the feelings you may have had as an innocent child full of Christmas cheer. Ross isn’t framing first-person as a gimmick; he’s quite literally placing you into his memories, his characters’ memories and the memories of an America that was swept over by oppression.
It’s impossible to be a “fly on the wall” as a filmmaker. The minute you position your camera and choose a subject to frame, you’re no longer the fly. The minute you cut from one image to the next, you’re searching for reaction. “Even a fly on the wall is changing the space. Right?” Ross asks me. “The heat, the annoyance, the collapsing of a weighing function because a fly is perceiving the world, like whatever anyone wants to say, human beings are inextricable from their atmosphere and environment and geography, as is everything else. It’s all sort of contingent on each other.” That’s where the rub lies, and perhaps always will. Cinema, as a tool for empathy, as a means to reach through to someone, is always going to be subject to an outside force directing their gaze. Without the ability to actually jump into another person’s consciousness, we’re always going to be left with a guided hand, no matter how invisible.
The magic of Nickel Boys isn’t that it erases that. My conversation with Ross clarified for me that it may be impossible to ever subvert the insidious origins of the camera, at least in this lifetime. What Nickel Boys is, what the cinema of RaMell Ross is, is a jolt into something new. Cinema has been my passion for as long as I can remember. I’m not a spiritual person by any stretch, but I’ve always searched through the screen for something more. Some films have given me flutters. Personal Shopper came close to convincing me that grief could manifest spirits. The transition into becoming one with the family photos in Sophy Romvari’s Still Processing briefly made me feel as if I was inside her film. The pitter-patter of rain in Rebels of the Neon God is as close as I’ve ever come to being hypnotized.
Under that bus seat, as Elwood plays a silly game with a little girl, that was the first time I’d ever been overcome by the possibility that maybe cinema is something more. Those galaxies of life I was seeing in dust and frayed seat fabric weren’t by accident. They were the result of a filmmaker who sees life in every inch of the frame. Who loves every molecule on the other side of that lens. Who found a way to place himself into the soul of his subjects. Nickel Boys and RaMell Ross can’t remake the camera into something it isn’t. “Eurocentric use of the camera is birthed out of industry. It has Capitalist undertones. You have to remove it from that,” he says. He cites Apitchatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady, Memoria) as an example before continuing on how to achieve it in a commercialized West. “I think that when you make form the content, you’re getting closer essentially to a polytheistic lens, but maybe that’s not true. It’s really hard to think about,” he says with a laugh. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere beyond that lens. Somewhere inside the lives that Ross invites us to inhabit.