Early in the fourth episode of the filmmaker Jennifer Crandall’s new documentary project, “Whitman, Alabama,” there’s a sequence that is deeply, wonderfully jarring, like a hallucination—watching it, I felt as though a puzzle I’d forgotten about was unlocking. The camera is inside a courtroom in Scottsboro, Alabama, with green marble walls, a deep wooden bench, and a gray-haired judge flanked by state and U.S. flags. It’s a drug-court session, for addicted offenders who have received state-supervised rehabilitation rather than jail time. Judge John Graham questions a pretty young woman with a pink streak in her brown hair, both of their accents like gobs of honey in their mouths. She states her sober date for the record and fidgets as she talks about getting her kid through school. Then Graham starts reciting Verse 37 of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

“You laggards there on guard, look to your arms,” he says, behind the bench, as the camera surveys the room. “In at the conquer’d doors they crowd, I am possess’d.” The woman nods, is dismissed. A ginger-haired man in a white button-down replaces her. “Good morning, Mr. Freeman,” the judge says. The man, Chris Freeman, says he’s staying sober, and Graham approves. Then the exchange twists into poetry again. “For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,” Freeman says. Graham answers him, “It is I let out in the morning and barr’d at night.” Their eyes are calm, locked on each other, as if they’ve done this a thousand times.

Crandall, who previously worked for the Washington Post and Salon as a video journalist and producer, moved to Alabama a couple of years ago, after a woman she’d met by chance in San Francisco offered her an artist-in-residence position for the Alabama Media Group, which operates AL.com, and suggested that she do a larger project about the state. The idea for “Whitman, Alabama” came to her quickly. She figured that she could piece together “Song of Myself” in documentary fragments, with the citizens of Alabama using Whitman’s most famous poem as a conduit to speak about themselves. The poem has fifty-two verses; each video segment would pair a subject with a verse; they could release one video per week for a year.

Eight videos are currently up on the Web site, including Verse 1 of the poem, which is recited by Virginia Mae Schmitt, a ninety-seven-year-old firecracker from Birmingham. Her nails are bright pink; cameo earrings shake in her long, wrinkled earlobes. She rocks energetically in her recliner, a stuffed cat lounging on a chair to her left. After cracking a joke about Scotch, she begins: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” Her delivery is both playful and authoritative, and the familiar verse starts to glow with its almost mystical strangeness; the moment when Schmitt, nearly a centenarian, says, “I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health, begin / Hoping to cease not till death” is particularly arresting. “These words allowed them to say things about themselves that are not their words,” Crandall told me recently, over the phone. Schmitt, who performed for decades in local theatre, died not long after filming the video, which is dedicated to her memory.

The first time Crandall read “Song of Myself,” it was 1990, and she was sixteen, standing in a bookstore in McLean, Virginia, having just moved back to the United States. Because of her father’s job, with U.S.A.I.D., she had spent most of her childhood in Bangladesh, Haiti, and Pakistan. “My mom is Chinese, from Vietnam, and my dad’s a white dude from Denver, and at that moment I just felt that I did not understand America,” she said. She pulled a paperback anthology of poetry off the shelf, and Whitman stuck out right away. “Though I wouldn’t have articulated it then, what I responded to was this idea that everyone_ _embodies diversity, not just the country. That many people are negotiating multiple social contracts, the way I’d been doing since I was born.”

Crandall’s sense of kinship with Whitman lay dormant until she moved to Alabama, and then it came back to her in a flash. “Alabama is a very specific state—diverse, geographically and culturally isolated, with such a strong sense of identity—and I wanted to turn up the volume on these voices,” she said. She noted that the idea of Alabama, and of the South in general, can provoke in outsiders a reflexive disdain. “But the South is hallowed ground in America,” she said. “It contains a life and history that we need to move away from and also go towards; there’s a sense of belonging and community we need.”

Crandall found her subjects slowly, in the course of two years. Friends and acquaintances gave her recommendations; she approached people sitting on their porches and knocked on strangers’ doors. She tried to apply a “diverse notion of what diversity is,” she told me, adding, “In journalism, we can overprescribe who people are, in an attempt to get them down on camera.” Her project shows, deliberately and sometimes unexpectedly, the varied face of a region that is often thought to be homogenous, and a Whitmanesque alchemy materializes: every subject comes off both as an individual with a clear political identity and as part of an indivisible whole. “Whitman was thinking beyond his time and place, drawing on this empathy that allowed him to approach something far beyond himself,” Crandall said. “He allowed for the space that lets us use that material today.”