NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2018 (March 28–April 8, 2018)

[Chris Knipp]

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENIng (RaMell Ross 2018)

This is where Walker Evans and James Agee's 1941 dust bowl classic photo essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was set, but it focuses (for 76 minutes) exclusively on African Americans befriended by the photographer during five years where he came to the region to teach photography and coach basketball. The editing is "fractured," the emphasis on kinetic energy. The fractured portraits are vivid and touching. But this made sense to me more as a still photographer's work extended somewhat unnecessarily into motion than as a traditional documentary, which it is not. Let us not think it is a celebration of the short attention span.