RaMell Ross

The battleground is their faces.

faces.Now, if we are talking about radical cinematic techniques to adapt consciousness, we have to talk about RaMell Ross' 2024 adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel, Nickel Boys.

This is perhaps the decade's boldest formal answer to the challenge of adapting a first-person prose narrative.

The book is about the horrific racist abuse suffered by Black teenagers at a brutal reform school in Florida, and Whitehead's prose asks the reader to deeply inhabit the consciousness of these boys, a consciousness that this cruel institution is actively trying to erase from the world.

So how does a director translate that forced habitation of consciousness? RaMell Ross chose to shoot much of the film using a literal first-person point-of-view camera.

The audience is looking directly through the eye line of the boys.

Now, in a lot of movies, shooting an entire film in first-person POV is just a cheap gimmick, like a found footage horror movie where the camera's shaking as they run from a monster.