Taken together, three recent films provoke a deep questioning about how and why we maintain the border walls that separate documentaries from feature-length dramas. These films sabotage the purity of the genre; fashions that are supposed to stay away – for reasons of ethics, aesthetics, rewards – touch and pollute each other. The first is “The Zone of Interest,” English filmmaker Jonathan Glazer’s study of the ritual domesticity of the Nazi administrative class. In the film’s complex coda, Glazer steps away from the realm of historical fiction, a leave he takes violently. A bureaucrat retches, the scenery dissolves and we find ourselves in a famous museum that pays homage to former death camps. The bureaucracy we face today is that of history – a helplessness, we might feel, over the system of extermination it is meant to commemorate – as we watch a cleaning worker tend the floors .

The second feature film is “Dahomey,” by Franco-Senegalese director Mati Diop, released in the United States in mid-December, which complicates the genre in the other direction. Documentary as a descriptor seems terse. Diop made a talismanic film about the “impossibility of return,» as she told my colleague Julian Lucas in a recent profile. “Dahomey”, a process film, follows the journey of twenty-six Beninese works of art, repatriated from French looting in Benin, West Africa. The observation shots are complicated by a strange sound pattern. Diop gives a work of art, Artefact No. 26, a wooden figuration of the Dahomean king Ghezo, a literal “voice” – a charismatic rattle ghost in the machine, played by Makenzy Orcel.

And in the third and most recent film, “Nickel Boys,” directed by black American director RaMell Ross, it’s the whole drama – remarkable, about institutions, black male friendship, social mimicry and black political dream – it seems steeped in the history of American image-making. The archives of our world, that is to say the photos, films and news footage, cross the fictional plane of the “Nickel Boys”. The same goes for records from other worlds. An alligator – reminiscent of early American media that portrayed black babies as alligator bait – mysteriously stalks a character in the film. Ross is an impressionist rooted in a collective unconscious. He exploits the feeling that documentary produces, the feeling of being in the presence of an indomitable truth, to explore how the truth is buried.

“Nickel Boys” arrives this winter with an overshadowing Great American Novel atmosphere. The screenplay is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Nickel Boys”, from 2019, which traces, in ascetic prose, the story of two black boys, Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner, who disappeared functionally into a corrupt reform institution in rural North Florida in the mid-sixties . Would Ross adapt to Hollywood and turn a great American novel into a great American film? That’s the question many asked when it was first announced that Ross would direct the adaptation. The forty-two-year-old filmmaker is a protean talent; he works across essay, photography and film, creating vulnerable collages of black people living, such as “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” about a community in Alabama’s Black Belt. Ross, who dated his subjects for five years, didn’t even realize he was making the documentary. He’s an artist none of us wanted to see adapt to the scythe of big-budget cinema.

Ross gave us and did not give us a great American film. “Nickel Boys,” with its intelligence and, surprisingly, its sentimentality, critiques the camera of American cinema. It’s the kind of film that gives and gives but also holds back. This is an exercise in powerful non-cooperativeness, one that hides some of the breadth of life from view. This is why, I think, it was necessary to remove the definite article from the title of the adaptation.

The subject of “Nickel Boys” is subjectivity. This film, shot almost entirely from the point of view of the characters, is interested in consciousness itself and its formation in the America that Jim Crow wrote. From the start of the film, the viewer becomes fully aware of herself, of her look– and his body, which feels dizzy. But this is not the misalignment of the voyeur. Ross isn’t feeding an empathy machine either. It’s a kind of narrowing down to the personal. Ross creates a first-person world of close-ups, dissolves, visual ellipses, and other motifs that sometimes orient us and other times alienate us. The composition recalls the famous arrangers of the 20th century – Norman Rockwell, Gordon Parks, Terrence Malick – but in a biased way. We know what we are looking at: a citrus fruit picked from a branch; a glittering Christmas tree; a deck of cards shuffled while drunk; a beautiful couple snuggled up on a sofa; an ironed suit, hanging proudly, waiting for her man. And, as the images pile up, we begin to know that we are somewhere to the south – in Frenchtown, Florida – and that we are looking from a unique perspective: that of a child, named, as we discover , based on his beloved grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), Elwood (played, in his youth, by Ethan Cole Sharp). Ross and his cinematographer Jomo Fray created warm, prelapsarian images to open their film. The rhythm of the sequence creates memories; a fall is coming.

This fall is knowledge – in this case, knowledge of one’s own difference. What Ross does, with his very formal conceit, is bring the shock – a painful grandeur – back to the moment of racial awareness. Cinema, people, we feel jaded by it, unconsciously. A country struggling with its legends, driven as much by slavery as by Hollywood, takes looking at itself for granted. Blackness draws its first and simplest meaning from the image. And, from the first lynching postcard to the first silent cinema Sambos, we have been drowned in images that want to tell us what Blackness is, and how it is condemned. But every child has to discover it for themselves for the first time. So when young Elwood, as he grew older, began to understand what Martin Luther King Jr. and the other agitators were saying, he looked at his arm. The camera, which is his eye, lingers to show the depth of understanding.

Elwood is a sensual being; Ross points out funny synchronicities to her, like the coordinated footsteps of her grandmother and a white stranger in a store. As he grows, the perspective of his world expands to include the cultural and the political. Here, Ross begins his slide towards the documentary gesture. Where is the canonical image of American scientific progress, of man going into space? In the book, Elwood watches the moon landing on television. In the adaptation, the images of space exploration are not diegetic but integrated into the film itself, to the extent that the film abandons the first person. This suggests a kind of historical parallelism – a visual translation of Gil Scott-Heron’s poem “Whitey on the Moon,” for example. A poem of discontent that we know, but a poem that Elwood, living in the sixties, would not have known. In another scene, young Elwood looks into the window of an electronics store in town. He, and therefore we, see his reflection superimposed on the screens transmitting a speech by King. Elwood is dressed elegantly and his grandmother, standing next to him, receives compliments on the politeness of her grandson, who “doesn’t need much straightening.”

As Elwood ages, his voice deepens and we know we are being held by another actor, Ethan Herisse. In Herisse’s perfectly modulated speech, we hear the makings of a professional man. He is a brilliant student, an acolyte of King. At his segregated school, a teacher, Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), a Freedom Rider, notes him for his struggle and for his academic success. Elwood attends a protest against a film at a local theater and is photographed. The image, which appears in the newspaper and worries Nana, makes Elwood feel important. He is already a great man in history.

But, aside from a brief romantic snapshot in a kissing booth, we don’t get to see him, not yet. Keep in mind that the majority of the film will take place in the ailing agrarian landscape of Nickel Academy, where Elwood will ultimately be sent, but it’s in the rarefied period of its first part that one feels lost. With the POV – something of an anachronism for this period piece, as it is the perspective of our cell phone age – Ross and Fray break the routine rules of representational politics. “Nickel Boys” “goes dark,” to borrow the thematic scheme of “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility,” a recent exhibition at the Guggenheim featuring paintings that obscure the contemporary figure. This feels like a risk, both from a viewing and cinematic perspective. In some scenes in which an actor speaks to Elwood, it is assumed that the actor was speaking directly to the camera. Sometimes we feel the absence of a real person receiving the dialogue. But isn’t the film’s project to ensure that this camera, like Diop and his sculpture, speaks of the history of cinema that it has witnessed throughout the century?