'' NICKEL BOYS '' FILM + : MASTER HONOURS

 

A new sense of time marks Black cinema. In '' Nickel Boys '' and other movies, directors take life at a different speed.

By bending time and leaning on nonlinear storytelling, '' Nickel Boys '' joins a recent trend of contemporary Black filmmakers relinquishing the impulse to frame Black stories chronologically.

Adapted from Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel '' The Nickel Boys,'' RaMell Ross's film tells the story of ELwood [ Ethan Herisse ], an idealistic Black kid sent to an abusive Florida reform school called the Nickel Academy [ based on the real-life Arthur G.Dozier school for Boys ].

The movie is shot primarily from first-person points of view, but its daring graze isn't its only big swing. This is an inventive nonlinear work whose story intuitively employs archival stills and footage to leap from the 1960s Civil Rights movement to the 2000s.

This filmic disruption is present not only in '' Nickel Boys.'' It can also be observed in films like '' A Thousand and One,'' '' All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt'' and '' Time,'' incalculable surveys of Black life that feel inextricably linked to the pandemic's long hold and the tumult of Black Lives Matter.

The emergence of these adventurous films spell an imperative time revolution in Black cinema.

The World Students Society thanks Robert Daniels.