These Films See People the Way They See Themselves

It’s incredibly rare — in fact, I don’t think it’s ever happened before this year — for a filmmaker to get an Oscar-nomination for a documentary and then land a best picture nomination for their next feature film. (A few have come close, though, and Ava DuVernay pulled it off, but in the opposite order.) Part of the blame lies with the Academy, which has somehow never nominated a documentary for Best Picture. It’s also just difficult, though by no means impossible, to excel in both fiction and nonfiction in a way that captures voter attention.

Yet with “Nickel Boys,” nominated this year for both best picture and best adapted screenplay, the photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross has done just that. His previous film, the groundbreaking, lyrical documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” was nominated for best documentary in 2019. “Hale County” may be less well-known than its fictional sibling, but it’s a vital companion piece. In fact, revisiting it now in the light of “Nickel Boys” illuminates Ross’s bigger project, and what makes his work so disruptive and his images so indelible.

Much has been written — including here in The New York Times — about “Nickel Boys,” which topped my own list of 2024’s best movies. In reimagining Colson Whitehead’s novel, Ross and Joslyn Barnes shifted the book’s third-person narration to first person perspective, so we spend nearly the entire film looking through the eyes of two teenage boys, Elwood and Turner.

That kind of perspective isn’t alien to storytelling. Movies have used it (including Steven Soderbergh’s recent thriller “Presence”), and it’s common in video games. But in “Nickel Boys” it feels fresh and radical. Ross, along with the cinematographer Jomo Fray and the camera operator Sam Ellison, positioned themselves and their equipment incredibly close to the actors so that their perspectives would follow their performances. The effect is remarkable: While Whitehead’s novel is about how we remember history, individually and collectively, Ross’s film is about how we see history.

That “we” includes the audience — in fact, it might be more accurate to say it implicates the audience. “Nickel Boys” insistently shakes the viewer out of the habits audiences have developed when watching fiction films. The action sometimes cuts away to documentary footage, historical images of Black Americans, without a narratively obvious motivation to do so. The camera acts like a person with their own subjective view in the scene, not the ostensibly impartial eye watching drama unfold that fiction films traditionally employ. Characters look straight into the lens, seemingly directly into our eyes, dragging us into the story.