Ross himself never appears in the film, and we rarely hear him speak, but there’s a notable exception. About midway through “Hale County,” he, or maybe we, are in a car, driving down the main road in a small town. Then we abruptly swing left onto a dirt road and head toward a plantation-style house, which we can glimpse through the trees.
All of a sudden, the film cuts to black-and-white archival footage of a Black actor in blackface, wearing a straw hat and a checked suit, peering at something through some bushes. This footage is from the unfinished 1913 film “Lime Kiln Club Field Day,” and the actor is Bert Williams, seemingly captured in a moment where he is not performing the minstrelsy he was known for. He’s just looking at something. The way the scene is constructed, it feels like he’s watching Ross pull up to the plantation home in the present day. The scene cuts back and forth between the car driving up to the house and the actor peering through the bushes, creating a relationship between them.
In the yard, a man throws a tire on a fire, which generates black smoke. Ross’s camera turns upward, watching the light filter through the trees and the smoke, a beguiling if weird sight. As we watch that light, we can hear a male voice emerge from the background, asking Ross what he’s doing. He explains that he’s filming the light — “it’s just really beautiful” — and expresses pleasure when the man says something about another person getting a camera. “We need more Black folk making photos in the area, and taking pictures and stuff,” Ross says.
The scene cuts back to Bert Williams, who is still peering out from the past. He leans back a little. And he smiles, satisfied by what he sees, then walks forward, out of the bushes. Perhaps a little bit of the history of this house — only suggested obliquely by the film itself — has been reclaimed by Ross’s focus.
I think Ross quotes this sequence from “Hale County” in “Nickel Boys.” Early in the film, the teenage protagonist, Elwood, is being driven in a police car to Nickel Academy, the notorious reform institution where he will be living. We’re behind his eyes, so we see, from the back seat of the car, the road ahead, flanked by lushly green trees — a recurring motif throughout “Hale County,” too, minus the police officers. The scene is intercut with a short sequence from the 1958 film “The Defiant Ones,” which is also mentioned in Whitehead’s novel, in which Sidney Poitier, playing a convict, is surrounded by white prisoners in the back of a truck. He sings “Long Gone (From Bowlin’ Green),” a song of resistance, while everyone else listens.
