The Underground Railroad opens in confusion. Accompanied by the alarming strings of Nicholas Brittell’s score, the 10-part adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel on Amazon Prime begins with a series of arresting images — bodies falling into darkness, a woman giving birth, a girl walking through a burning house — that will only make sense in retrospect. They’re glimpses of what’s to come, but the sequence closes on a shot familiar to those who’ve followed the career of director Barry Jenkins: a character looking beyond the frame, seemingly gazing at the viewer, with an expression that’s as powerful as it is enigmatic.
Few filmmakers are as attuned to how characters look at one another as Jenkins. Both The Underground Railroad and his three feature films — Medicine for Melancholy, the Best Picture-winning Moonlight, and If Beale Street Could Talk — treat conversations as delicate dances of fleeting eye contact, averted looks, and moments of true, though not always comfortable, connection. When his characters look directly at one another, it’s always meaningful, a moment that commands attention and response. When they look directly at the viewer, they demand the same.
That isn’t the only sort of image that lets you know you’re watching something by Barry Jenkins, whose filmmaking vocabulary seems to expand with each new project. But it’s a signature touch, and the first shot that comes to mind for two of Jenkins’ collaborators— director of photography James Laxton and editor Joi McMillon — when asked to name Jenkins’ defining images.
“The direct-to-camera shots are very much a Jenkins signature,” McMillon says. “But I think they work because Barry doesn’t shoot it for five seconds and then call ‘Cut.’ He stays with these characters.” It’s not a request many actors have come to expect. “When Barry asked Stephan James to do it in If Beale Street Could Talk,” McMillon continues, “He was just like, ‘What do you want me to do?’ And he was kind of nervous about it and Barry said, ‘Just look into the camera.’ And that is such a vulnerable ask of people, You see at first the uncertainty of what they’re supposed to be giving you, and then they relax and actually let that guard down. And it’s now a window into these people and their lives and what they’re going through in that moment.”
It can also be as demanding physically as it is emotionally. It’s not easy to act under optimal conditions. Attempting to create a sense of intensity and vulnerability when a camera is merely inches away — and behind it equipment, lights, and a crew — makes the job exponentially harder. “You have to develop a rapport with the actors,” Laxton says. “That’s a big, somewhat unsung, part of the job. You have to find a way to make them feel comfortable and collaborate with them and engage with them in a way that makes them feel safe and protected […] For the moment, you’re their audience, before it gets to the directors, the editors, or the actual screen.”
That sense of collaboration and trust seems like an extension of Jenkins’s overall approach to filmmaking. His relationships with Laxton and McMillon date back to their time together as students in Florida State University’s film program. Laxton has served as Jenkin’s DP since his days making shorts in film school. McMillon worked alongside Jenkins in a variety of capacities while they were students and has worked as an editor since Moonlight, working alongside Nat Sanders, another FSU classmate, for that film and Beale Street. For Laxton, it also means working under sometimes challenging circumstances. The Underground Railroad follows Cora (Thuso Mbedu), a slave living in an alternate-history version of the American South who escapes via the Underground Railroad, in this world a literal subterranean locomotive line. Her journey takes her from state to state, each reworked as a fantastical, and horrific, reflection of different aspects of American history, including a South Carolina that’s seemingly given its Black residents freedom but at a horrible cost and a North Carolina that aggressively practices genocide. Each episode demands its own look and feel including a fifth episode, “Tennessee — Exodus,” set largely in a barren wasteland of scorched earth and charred trees.
To capture the full sweep of the landscape via long, unbroken shots, following characters from behind as they make their way from one place to another — another Jenkins signature — Jenkins and Laxton had the demanding technical challenge of remaining invisible. “It was a puzzle piece and something that I would talk to my gaffer, key grip and camera team about. It seems silly and ridiculous now, but [it raised questions like] ‘Where is Barry’s monitor going to go? Where’s our infrastructure that goes behind the lens going to end up?’ And we would put a little cone shape out on the set to say, ‘This is where you can be.’”
Their collaboration extends beyond the technical aspects of filmmaking, however. When asked how he and Jenkins shoot much-filmed settings like ’80s Miami, ’70s New York, and the antebellum South in ways that avoid cliché, Laxton skips past lenses and lighting to talk about feelings. “I think we come from a personal place,” he says. “Like all things with art it’s incredibly personal. I think you see that with Barry. His work is incredibly personal. And I think that you see that with myself, hopefully, as well. What you see on the screen are our emotions. I think we’re very emotional filmmakers. Barry is incredibly intelligent and incredibly intellectual, but I think oftentimes when we’re on the set, we’re really listening to our gut and the emotional story we’re trying to tell. […] There are a few themes within Barry’s and my work, and I think a big one is intimacy. I think we both feel like there’s so much story in intimacy. We look for intimate moments within nature and within our locations in general.”
Asked about Jenkins’s use of profile shots, another favorite image since his debut, McMillon explains that it “gives you access to a character a way oftentimes we don’t experience. Often when you’re talking to someone, you’re usually right in front of them. But that profile is giving you a hint that this person is allowing you in, but not fully. Like in Moonlight, where Kevin and Chiron are in the car together and Chiron just keeps stealing glances at Kevin. […] They were just so vulnerable with each other in the diner. And now, riding side by side in the car, it’s like, they’re giving a little bit of themselves, but not ready to fully expose themselves again.”
Direct looks mean a lot in Jenkins’s films, even if the meaning shifts from scene to scene. The opening of The Underground Railroad mirrors the end of Moonlight, which closes with an image of Alex Hibbert, the youngest of the three actors playing protagonist Chiron, standing at the sea and looking over his shoulder, his eyes slowly dropping to meet the viewer. Chiron has spent the film struggling to make connections and Jenkins has largely reserved moments in which he and other characters look directly at the camera as they interact with one another for scenes of trauma and abuse. In If Beale Street Could Talk, they’re deployed when Tish (KiKi Layne) tells her mother (Regina King) of her pregnancy and when Fonny (Stephan) despairingly tries to convey to Tish the abuse he’s suffering in jail. In Jenkins’s films, our moments of closest connection are also the moments when we’re most likely to get hurt or hurt others.
But they’re also the moments that make us the most human, and demand we recognize the humanity of others. Shortly before the premiere of The Underground Railroad, Jenkins released The Gaze, a 52-minute companion film that features one shot after another of costumed actors on Underground Railroad sets mostly looking directly at the camera as it moves sometimes toward them, sometimes away. Some shots feature familiar faces playing major characters, like one of the leads or Joel Edgerton, who plays the slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway. Overwhelmingly, however, The Gaze focuses Black actors who play supporting or background roles.
In an artist’s statement, Jenkins describes the film as an act of portraiture, inspired in part by the work of Kerry James Marshall, particularly his “imagined self-portrait of a real African American artist, Scipio Moorhead, who was active in the 1770s” for whom “few if any images exist.” It’s an effort to fill some of the blank spaces left behind by undocumented lives. “Standing in the spaces our ancestors stood,” James writes, “we had the feeling of seeing them, truly seeing them and thus, we sought to capture and share that seeing with you.”
The actors’ faces are often as unyielding in their expression and as ambiguous in their emotions as Cora’s in the series’ opening moments. It’s a beautiful film, but not always a comfortable one, nor is it meant to be. “No matter the length of the piece or the tone of the room,” Jenkins writes of his experiences doing Q&As for his film, “eventually, inevitably, I am asked about the white gaze. It wasn’t until a very particular interview regards The Underground Railroad that the blindspot inherent in that questioning became clear to me: never, in all my years of working or questioning, had I been set upon about the Black gaze; or the gaze distilled.”
We enter the worlds of movies and television with the unspoken agreement that we’re allowed to watch while remaining unseen. What we see there might reflect our lives. It might even make us reconsider how we see the world. But we’re allowed to remain out of frame. Jenkins’s work keeps challenging that, finding ways to erase the distance between viewer and image, now and then, us and them. He offers no promise that what we see won’t be looking back.