In 'Nickel Boys,' striving for a new way to see

NEW YORK (AP) — RaMell Ross sometimes sends his photography students out on a unique assignment. He tells them to photograph a white person, a Black person, an Asian person and an Indian person. “And,” he adds, “I want you to ask them how they want to be represented.”

Before Ross was a photographer, a professor, a documentarian and, most recently, a feature filmmaker, he was a point guard whose 6-foot-6-inches height allowed him to peer over defenders to see the entire court. Ross' basketball career was derailed by injuries while at Georgetown University. But he has, ever since been fascinated with the ways we see.

In "Nickel Boys," one of the most thrillingly innovative American films of the decade, Ross adapts Colson Whitehead's 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It's about two young men — Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) — who've been sent to an abusive, mid-century Florida reform school called Nickel Academy.

The story, laced with the cruelties of the Jim Crow-era South, has commonalities with films made before. But the grammar of “Nickel Boys” is entirely its own. Ross shot the film, which opens Friday in New York and expands in coming weeks, almost entirely from the point of view of Elwood and Turner. As we watch, we’re looking through their eyes. We gaze up at the sky or feel a blow to the head or feel the warmth of someone affectionately looking back at us.

“It’s an ode to looking out of the eyes of those whose eyes have been owned by others, and whose perception has been managed by others,” Ross says. “Films that take place in the past reproduce the aesthetics of the past. I question the aesthetics of the past."

In a medium that has been called “an empathy machine,” “Nickel Boys” is a striking leap forward. In situating the viewer within the inner world of Elwood and Turner, it brings us closer to their experience, while shedding many of the conventions of both modern moviemaking and historical depictions from the time period of “Nickel Boys.”

“I know if any person in here that has wild stereotypes about the world that they acknowledge or don’t if they saw through my eyes, they would be other gone, challenged or would collapse,” said Ross in a recent interview over coffee in midtown Manhattan. “The power is in the self and the eyes.”

For Ross, who teaches visual art at Brown University, “Nickel Boys” isn’t just about finding a new way to photograph. It’s an attempt to uncover a visual language of consciousness, and specifically Black consciousness. In the time of “Nickel Boys” the dominant imagery was created overwhelmingly through a perspective that wasn’t Elwood’s, that wasn’t Turner’s.

“The question is,” says Ross, “can you repopulate the missing archive?”

Seeing first person

POV camerawork has been tried occasionally through movie history. Robert Montgomery’s 1947 Raymond Chandler adaptation “The Lady in the Lake” is generally credited as the first mainstream film shot in first person. That same year, “Dark Passage” began with a first-person prison escape, and doesn’t change perspective until the escapee (Humphry Bogart) undergoes plastic surgery.

But Ross wasn’t thinking about any precedents. Ross, who wrote the script with Joslyn Barnes complete with head turns and camera moves, wanted something much deeper than a gimmick.

In his most celebrated photography series, "South County, AL (a Hale County)," Ross examined Blackness across a Southern terrain indelibly traversed by photographers like Walker Evans. (Ross had moved to Greensboro, Alabama, to do social work and teach a college readiness program.) His images tend to be in dialogue with the photography of the past. Time, Ross says, became his medium.

“I’m definitely interested in thickening the present,” he says.

For a month before shooting, Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray rehearsed with a small digital camera. Fray, who shot Raven Jackson's lyrical 2023 mosaic drama "All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt," found the process of finding new filmic vernacular enthralling.

“We have only begun to scratch the very surface of what cinema is capable of. Cinema is a medium that shares a language with our dreams,” says Fray. “We’re still at the infancy of this as an artistic form.”

Creating a ‘sentient perspective’

Ross and Fray, each of whom can be dazzlingly analytical about filmmaking and photography, found they weren’t exactly seeking POV. In reality, that would be too shaky and uncentered. Instead, they honed what they call “sentient perspective” — a POV that didn't mimic eyes but came closer to the feeling of being within a body.

“It’s an invitation,” says Fray. “The image is an invitation for the viewer to really place themselves in a body that they may or may not recognize. For two hours, you truly are walking in the shoes of another person. And that’s at the heart of the promise of cinema.”

It wasn’t easy. Countless basic actions would need to be rethought. What would a hug look like? Production design, by Norah Mendis, essentially needed to be in all directions, 360 degrees. Operating the camera, Fray almost had to be an actor in the film, himself.

“The second that we started getting into how to make the film, I understood immediately why films like this aren’t made,” says Ross.

Yet, part of the beauty of “Nickel Boys” is how impressionistic the imagery still is. We get to know Elwood and Turner not just by what they do or what they say, but how they look upon the world, what they notice. Herisse and Wilson had the unique experience of always acting either alongside the camera rig or staring back into a lens.

“A lot of time we’d be trading places with Jomo or RaMell, but we’d stay really close and try to stay as present as possible,” says Wilson. “On the other side, when you have to look down a lens, that’s a different thing. You’re trying to not look like you’re looking at a camera, but seeing the other person on the other side of the camera."

“The first time I watched it, there was a complete detachment,” says Herisse. “I didn’t make the connection that that was me.”

Perspectives on POV

The experience of watching “Nickel Boys” has been transcendent for many, though some critics have been more tepid about how the subjective POV alters your relationship to the characters. Some have said that connection is harder without the benefit of regular close-ups.

While Ross grants that "Nickel Boys" — a Golden Globe nominee for best feature film, drama, and a winner with several major awards groups — might be challenging for those who don't regularly engage with art or go to the theater, it's not a criticism he has much patience for.

“I don’t give a (expletive) that you want these Black boys’ narratives to be told in a way you think makes you feel good, or make you feel connected emotionally. Can you hear yourself? Do you know how self-centered you sound?” says Ross, addressing those critics. “Do you know a way to treat the viewer not as a voyeur in the death of Black folks? I don’t know, but I think there’s an interesting way to try that doesn’t repeat the brutality in the minds of others. It gives them life. It restores something. It’s not about their death.”

Ross imagines he’ll be making more movies, but, he says, he’s in no rush. As a professor he gets to watch movies, look at photography, and talk to smart young people who have been trained in words but not in images.

And Ross is still working out his own vernacular. “Shooting” film, for example, doesn’t sound right to him. What’s better?

“I don’t know yet,” Ross says. “Engage the world. Go participate. Go make images.”