- 76 - Art by Tom Martin McElwee’s Confessions

A Meditation on the Possibility of Autobiographical Art in America During an Era of Social Media Narcissism

by William Giraldi

- 77 - how to tell tales as difficult and true as they are richly funny.” In one of his finest poems, Theodore Roethke wrote that “a man goes far to find out what he is.” McElwee has lived and worked in Boston since the late 1970s, and you’d think that returning to North Carolina to film his own family wouldn’t have been too far to go to find out, to be reacquainted with what he is—I’m helpless to remember that John Updike’s story collection about the ruination of a family is titled Too Far to Go—but it’s very far indeed when you’ve delved as deep into the familial morass as McElwee has. Backyard looks at his brother Tom as he prepares to depart Charlotte for medical school, and also at the dignities of the black domestic help employed by his family—it’s filmed almost entirely in the backyard of his boyhood home. Sherman’s March attempts again and again to focus on General Sherman’s incineration of the South, but the film keeps ertain works of art have an occult way of of the self in search of its own coordinates, veering into a self-portrait of an intelligent finding us when we are most in need of its own particular pitch of being in a world klutz baffled by romance, McElwee’s ode to them, of their example and wisdom and wit. that lurches between the malignant and the American restlessness. Time Indefinite begins One night recentlyC I was considering ways divine. as a marriage film, a coda of romantic success to to wiggle out of having to write a memoir, McElwee’s subject is the oldest one, wed to Sherman’s March, but quickly becomes which I had insensibly signed a contract to the messy one, the eternal one—his own his memento mori film after the deaths of his do, and was moving alps of books from one family and the family’s collisions with and father, his grandmother, and his unborn child. corner of my library to another. There, atop gratings against the wider world. Backyard Six O’Clock News takes to the road to immerse a shelf, reemerged a gift from a friend in the (1984), Sherman’s March (1986), Time In- itself in a handful of personal stories which, South: not a book, but a DVD collection definite (1993), Six O’Clock News (1997), through the toxic acts of God or man, have of the films of Ross McElwee, the North Bright Leaves (2003), Photographic Memory appeared on the nightly news—it’s a macabre Carolina documentarian whose far-famed (2011): his autobiographical investigations meditation on the random dangers of the “real Sherman’s March is a charismatic masterwork pulse with a profound subtlety, with a re- world” versus the new diapers-and-bottles of autobiographical filmmaking. verberant charm that is both erudite and domesticity of McElwee’s homestead. In Bright I was staggered by the mainlined purity unpretentious. What other filmmaker has Leaves, McElwee parses not only his tobacco of McElwee’s filmmaking: no cloying mea- embarked on such a ceaseless expedition baron great-grandfather and the legendary dis- sures or intent to dazzle, no sensationalism of self-awareness? Who has made of him- pute he had with the Duke family, but also the or emotion in extremis. Extremity is always self such a willing pilgrim to disconcerting inevitable artistic agon between the fictions simple; nuance is hard, and McElwee’s films truths? Allan Gurganus has written of his and the facts. Photographic Memory revisits are paragons of nuance. To spend time inside fellow North Carolinian: “No one else’s body St.-Quay-Portrieux, where McElwee attempts his filmic cosmos is to become enlarged by of work feels so unified, human, freckled, to find the sprite of his younger self—when a singular chronicle of modern selfhood, questing. No one else’s documentaries know he was twenty-four he worked in St.-Quay as

- 78 - SPRING 2015 ing, teasing, testing us.” A Ross McElwee film is outright impossible to mistake for any other.

cElwee’s ancestors settled in the foothills of North Carolina in the M 1700s. In Bright Leaves, McElwee admits: “North Carolina still seems, in a kind of understated way, like the most beautiful place in the world to me.” Gurganus writes that McElwee “embodies our state’s proudly professed modesty, our love of tribe, our abiding connection with the land itself as our literal history.” He was born in Charlotte in 1947 and brought up in a family of doctors: his father, his grandfather, his brother, and a mélange of relatives. One uncle was a camera aficionado they named “Super-8 Nate.” He left Charlotte in 1966 for Brown Uni- versity, where he studied literature under the anarchic fiction writer John Hawkes. His plan was to become a novelist but he was com- pelled and then seduced by photography and film. After Brown he returned to Charlotte and was hired as an in-studio cameraman for a local TV station, WSOC. This proved dull and dulling, and after a year he enrolled in a three-week filmmaking seminar at Stanford, where he worked in Super-8. He intended to an assistant for an eccentric French photogra- sonality is style, and style, as Nabokov taught remain in California, the logical terminus for pher—while also struggling to comprehend us, is matter. What in lesser hands would any inspired soul with a movie camera, but a the maddening intransigence of his twenty- seem a fetishizing or exploitation of ordinary friend phoned to tell him about a job offer at a year-old son, a young man blitzed by cyber- existence, an adolescent indulging in the many television program in Washington, D.C. The space and his own sense of anomie. storms and quirks of personality, becomes in program? Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. The If McElwee’s output can constitute a McElwee’s films a lasting revelation of the position? Loading camera magazines with single movement, an elongated cinematic necessities and contingencies of selfhood. 16mm film stock as fast as the cameraman memoir, then these six films constitute his To be modern is nothing if not to be in- could shoot them. He took it. cadenza. Here is an autobiographer offering dividual. For all of Augustine’s probing of Soon he’d read about a new graduate film some direction about how one could go about the self it’s striking how little individuality program beginning at MIT, one that would presenting to the world one’s ostensibly quo- you’ll find in Confessions. Modernity owes star two filmmakers he’d admired while at tidian life. In his essay “The Knife in the a tremendous debt to Romanticism, because Brown: the socio-political and personal docu- Brain,” McElwee writes that “autobiography one of the chief differences between the mentarian Ed Pincus and the cinema verité is where DNA’s double helix gets bent and classical and the Romantic is the conception pioneer Richard Leacock. McElwee showed twisted, turns in on itself, tangles and knots of self, of how individuality perforce leads up at MIT, an eager young man full of frisson, its strands, and yields its greatest challenge to individualism. McElwee’s work is heir and interviewed with Leacock and Pincus. to the writer.” to Romanticism not only in its unabashed They took him. He began Backyard during Maniacally descriptive, Updike yearned in alloy of thinking and feeling, but in its un- his time there. After graduation he worked his work to “give the mundane its beautiful derstanding that the ineffable self will seek as an editor for the science program Nova, at due,” and McElwee does exactly that in what its own sound—it understands that the self WGBH, the PBS affiliate in Boston: another he’s called his “home movies”—unscripted has agency in the world, that the self is a occupation of spirit-quashing banality. He and mostly spontaneous in the truest sense mover and not merely a thing moved upon. quit to finish Backyard, and Backyard pre- of cinema verité, ruminative in pursuit of McElwee, Gurganus maintains, is “our own pared him to make Sherman’s March, and the meaning but always conversational in that updated Don Quixote” whose investigations rest is, as the sayers say, history—although irresistible Southern way. For McElwee, per- into selfhood are constantly “teaching, lead- future is more like it, because in the aesthetic,

OxfordAmerican.org - 79 - narrative, and box-office success ofSherman’s consummate skill as an autobiographer: he spent half of his life holding a microphone in March, McElwee had earned his future. permits you to know him, chaperones you the direction of other people’s mouths, and He’s been teaching filmmaking at Harvard into his life, as few are willing to do. he showed no annoyance that for three hours since 1986. His office is a relaxed and car- On his desk sat three large monitors on I held one in the direction of his. peted bunker in the basement of Sever Hall, which he does his film editing—“Where at the campus hub in Harvard Yard, and on the magic happens,” I suggested, and he the day we met to converse about autobiog- said, “It doesn’t feel like magic when it’s raphy, an Old Testament rain whipped at happening. Magic is supposed to be nice and he conflict I’m having, Ross, with au- the windows. He has the kind of mien that quick. Editing takes me forever.” Surround- tobiography and my own forays into makes you want to take him in and feed him ing us on shelves were everything you’d T memoir, is a conflict I’ve articulated to a bowl of soup. As anyone can see from his expect from an archivist—“my attempt to myself as one between expression and assertion. films, he’s impeccably kind and courteous deal with the chaos of being an indepen- I’ve stolen this formula from G. K. Chesterton, with the slightest tincture of vulnerability. dent filmmaker”: mini DV cassettes, now who used it to damn the poetry of Swinburne. His voice is just slightly more than a whis- obsolete; DVCAM cassettes he once used Expressing yourself is simple: any personal per, a medicinal sound that has retained its for teaching purposes (now, of course, he experience or impulsivity will do. Go holler Southern lilts, although it’s true that decades and his students use memory cards); Beta in the street. Asserting yourself, however, is in Boston have thieved from the auditory copies of 16mm film (Beta was stabler than another matter. I mean assertion is expression prominence of North Carolina. 16mm); his completed films on DVCAM, on augmented by or filtered through deep consider- It’s tricky to meet someone about whom VHS, on Beta and Beta SP, on DVD; written ation of the conundrums of selfhood, and not just you already know almost everything. More logs of everything he’s shot in order to locate a promiscuous emotional romp through one’s own than once I had to scold myself into remem- images on film; detailed production notes past or through one’s own feelings. This is what bering that the intimacy I felt was not an in binders; scrapbooks relating to his films I’m seeing in so many contemporary American intimacy born of personal experience but, and film festivals. This cave-like space gave memoirs: lots of emotional expression, not a lot rather, a kind of intimate abracadabra oc- off the distinct aura of having witnessed the of artistic assertion. casioned by his art. This is testament to his completion of important work. McElwee has “I like your idea that there’s a mistaken identity going on in autobiographical story- telling that confuses expression with what you call assertion, but that I would word as reflection. That’s interesting because the kind of filmmaking I do combines those two things. In other words, to film the way I film, which is pretty impulsive and spontane- ous, could be likened to the kind of writing without thinking that you’re talking about. I’m responding in the best sense of cinema verité to what’s happening in front of me— I’m not trying to direct it or control it, not doing multiple takes. That’s the equivalent of an impulsive response to what’s happen- ing around me. But then, for me, it always seemed vital to add the voiceover, to give that filtering process you speak of. That narration in the voiceover is highly considered and worked on, wrought, over a long period of time. The hardest part of making my films is not the shooting of them, which is pleasur- able for me, but writing the damn narrations. The transcripts of my narrations are probably only thirty pages, but it takes me months, months, to get it the way I need it to be. It’s no different from what you do, in that sense. The juxtaposition of those two things, the impulsivity in filming and then the deep consideration in editing, their marriage, cre- ates something different from the kind of

- 80 - SPRING 2015 unconsidered expression we’re seeing in so the culture as a whole has a tendency to self- in an interview you gave ten years ago, how much contemporary memoir.” examine and to think about one’s own life, in “horrifying” it was that all these parents are terms of context or social reality or whatever, obsessively recording their kids. People now have access to their pasts in a way and it’s being done no matter how superficial that’s unprecedented in human history—it’s that examination may be. And when you “I was probably being dramatic when I said possible for people to have their entire lives marry that with the media that’s now avail- horrifying, but let me give you an example available to them on video and in photos. Com- able to those kinds of people, then you have of what I meant. Here at Harvard there are bine that with the current belief that anyone an onslaught of autobiographical filmmaking nonstop tour buses. I saw a guy yesterday can become a writer, with the proliferation of and memoir publishing. But I think, also, with a cell phone camera, striding along, MFA writing programs and writing workshops, that it will run its course. It has to. There’s recording everything as he walked. It was and with the ease of online publishing, and you a resistance to it, frankly. I know that from as if he didn’t have the time or the inter- have our current avalanche of autobiography. film festivals—there’s less fascination than est even to consider Widener Library or the And in terms of filmmaking—we’re all film- there was a decade ago with that tendency to chapel now as architectural presences, but makers now because we all carry around movie turn a camera on your own life. When I did maybe he’d catch up with them later on his cameras in our pockets. Sherman’s March in the mid-1980s it was cell phone. He was by himself, too, that was a truly bizarre thing to do, to roam around the strange thing: striding along, shooting “Yes, in terms of media, of the arts, of with a camera to record the things that were this, shooting that, in a hurry to get to the memoir, the fact that there’s now an inex- happening to you.” next attraction that he also won’t fully see or haustible supply of the record of the past appreciate. And I thought about that after- for people to access is going to make it very, I empathize with that compunction to take out wards: what does it mean that he’s recording very difficult for artists to produce inter- the phone and film everything the kids are up these images now, expecting to look at them esting work. And I think this is what you to. I’ve got to fight myself to keep the damn later? What will they mean when he looks yourself are finding when you say that so thing in my pocket, to be a part of what my at them later? Will he think: I recorded that, much American memoir has become defiled kids are experiencing rather than just a passive good, now I don’t have to think about it, or will by a kind of promiscuity with one’s own past: documenter of it. I remember what you said it occur to him, Wow, I was actually there and

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PHOTO BY DAVE ANDERSON

OxfordAmerican.org - 81 - I didn’t take it in, didn’t sense that I was in getting shorter because the culture’s atten- write about Man, write about a man,” and this centuries-old important location. He was tion span has shrunk. Sherman’s March is two you have what must become the artist’s credo too busy recording to actually respond to or hours and forty minutes, and Photographic for creation. That’s what elevates a McElwee feel what he was seeing. That must happen a Memory is only eighty minutes. That’s half. film onto the honored peak of art: the climate billion times a day, people recording images But I still indulge in the long shot, the un- of his mind as it tempers the weather of his with no purpose, assuming that later they edited sequence in which people can start emotions, and his interest in the varieties might want to look at them and reflect on sentences over again when they’re explaining and vagaries of humanity. (In addition to his them, but of course they never do because something, or those shots in which nothing autobiographical films, he’s co-directed fea- they’re too busy recording other images. It’s much happens. All of those traits I developed tures about people living among the rockets- a real conundrum, much more so than when as a documentarian thirty years ago I’m still and-moon madness of Cape Canaveral and a I gave that interview in 2004.” practicing now. I still believe in them. Maybe community that dwells in a curious limbo I’m a dinosaur, but I’ll continue to use that along the Berlin Wall.) Because there was no real social media then, kind of filmmaking technique in my work, McElwee has taken Montaigne’s admoni- not the kind of online rabidity we see today? no matter how attention deficient the culture tion “I propose an unimportant life with- becomes—even though I’d be lying if I said out luster” and shown precisely how the “Exactly, yes. There was no YouTube at that it wouldn’t matter to me if no one saw my lusterless can gain importance when the that time, nor had Facebook really taken off. films, if no one responded. I can tell you that life is shifted, twisted into the proper light. This current social media networking has had I’m not calculating, not trying to achieve cer- McElwee as a filmmaker is literary in every an immense effect on what we think of as tain effects in an audience when I put a film sense of the term, since he crafts his exten- autobiography and nonfiction filmmaking. I together. I’m composing from some flawed sive voiceovers and since his films wouldn’t talk about this a lot with my filmmaking stu- place within me, that source of inspiration function without them. His voiceovers have dents, this suspicion of media, of filming, of and aspiration, hoping to make connections the knowing glare of literature—Gurganus the idea that anything that is being filmed can with someone out there.” writes that McElwee’s “voiceover persona is end up on YouTube and potentially be viewed always that of The Little Fellow blessed with by one half of the earth’s population. That’s Chaplin’s investigative energy leading to a huge consideration, and one of course that Keaton’s fall-guy grace”—and it’s not surpris- didn’t exist at all when I was filming Sher- ’m not the first to notice the essayis- ing to learn that there was a time when McEl- man’s March. Of course the other thing that tic quality of McElwee’s films—one wee considered becoming a novelist. The has caused a change in the culture’s reaction to I admiring scholar likens him to Mon- opening voiceover of Backyard is a lustrous autobiography and nonfiction filmmaking is taigne, and while that might appear a trifle example of the conversational and comedic reality television, in which we have hundreds hyperbolic, surrender to the almost desultory tenor McElwee employs in his narrations: of shows that supposedly show us people in pace and the narrative pitch of a McElwee their real lives dealing with some version of film and you’ll begin to see the sense of that When I was eighteen, I left my home in a real-life challenge. They have affected the comparison. Aldous Huxley conjured a great North Carolina to go to college in New way most of the population thinks about phrase about Montaigne’s method, “free as- England, and I ended up living in Bos- documentaries, what it means to become sociation artistically controlled,” and G. K. ton. Ever since then, my father, who was involved in nonfiction filmmaking, even if Chesterton once commented that the essay, born and raised in North Carolina, and I it’s not autobiographical. All of this has com- as invented by Montaigne, was the only liter- have disagreed about nearly everything. plicated the picture immensely. On the other ary genre whose very name suggests “a leap When I graduated from college, my fa- end, as you said earlier, what’s different now in the dark.” Watching a McElwee film you ther, who’s a conservative Republican, from when I began is that everything’s been have the distinct sensation of that leap, of a asked me what I planned to do with my democratized, access to camera and editing thrilling aimlessness through that dark. As in life. I told him I was interested in film- equipment: anyone can make a movie now. your own life, anything can happen—you’re making, but there were also some other That part of it can be terrific, I suppose, but never completely sure how one predicament alternatives, such as black-voter regis- it does make everything much more com- will morph into the next. William Rothman tration in the South, or getting involved plicated, especially when you’re teaching has written: “That he finds his stories by in the peace movement, or entering a younger people how to make documentary.” filming his life as he lives it is part of the Theravadin Buddhist monastery. My story a McElwee film tells.” father thought this over for a moment But how has your own aesthetic, your own McElwee shares with Montaigne the con- and then said, “Son, I think your concept idiopathic vision been altered by all that? I viction that one’s life gains fuller meaning of career planning leaves something to would think that it must have had a cata- only outside the confines of the personal and be desired. But I’ve decided not to worry strophic effect. parochial, only through more ecumenical about you anymore. I’ve resigned myself concerns, a dialogue with the pressing issues to your fate.” I didn’t exactly know how “No, I don’t think so, although maybe it of one’s world. Take this boast by Terence, to respond to this, but finally I said, should be having a catastrophic effect. The one “Nothing human is alien to me,” and add “Well, Dad, I guess I have no choice but effect that I can quantify is that my films are it to this advice from E. B. White, “Don’t to accept your resignation.”

- 82 - SPRING 2015 DON’T BE SCARED

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Photo by Kevin Leighton, kevinleighton.com Perhaps because he’s both an essayistic and rogue filmmaker, McElwee often doesn’t get credit enough for the manner in which his lovely eye apprehends, and especially the way it can apprehend nature. Wordsworth, you will not be shocked to learn, had a para- mount influence on McElwee in college.Bright Leaves begins with a beautiful shot of tobacco plants breathing hotly in a field. InPhotograph - ic Memory there are lovely considerations of the St.-Quay coast, waves flopping onto shore, sandy paths cutting through tall grass. In Backyard, we hear hidden dogs barking behind an almost surreal scrim of shadows and sun-stroked flora. And halfway through In Paraguay—McElwee’s unreleased 2008 film about the adoption of his daughter—there’s an astonishing long shot of the shadows of tree limbs and leaves swaying, brushing against a stucco wall before a man enters the frame and departs on a scooter. That unknown Para- guayan man is key to the shot—where has he come from? where is he going?—because he saves the image from approaching a sentimen- tal fixation on the splendor of nature. Writing in the New York Times, Mike Hale suggested that McElwee leans toward “self- indulgent philosophizing,” a suggestion that performs the trick of being simultaneously wrong and redundant—what philosophiz- ing doesn’t contain some element of self- indulgence? Sustained thought, by defini- ment of narci-cinema” is a faux-pithy quip dication of probity and obeisance. That might tion, requires the self to indulge in its own of error. Marian Keane has pointed out that be an apt description of his autobiographical mind and motives, its own undulations as McElwee’s work “is no more narcissistic project: an artist attempting to maintain his they relate both to others and to the unseen. than Leaves of Grass,” and I wish to second probity and obeisance while trying not to Marian Keane, writing of a specific shot in that contention. Think of narcissism as self- be outwitted and outdone, trumped by the Bright Leaves, a shot in which McElwee films obsession stuck to egomania and vacant of any troublous stipulations of living. himself on a park bench, observes that “he sincere concern for others: for true narcissists, Consider his refusal to pass judgment, to shows us himself thinking . . . he gives us other people have no reachable reality in interfere with our own verdict on his sub- an image of thinking”—Ross McElwee as either the actual or the abstract. McElwee, jects. In Bright Leaves, there’s a tobacconist Auguste Rodin in a medium less adamantine on the other hand, is so virtuous, and so whose mother died from an ironclad smok- but no less imperishable. So part of McEl- committed to both actual human lives and ing habit. We hear her epic idiocy when she wee’s mission might be “how to make sense their abstract implications, that his own life claims that her growing of tobacco has noth- of the data one gathers from what appears to and art would be inconceivable without the ing to do with her mother’s death, “nothing be a metaphysically senseless world,” as he welcomed participation of others. to do with anyone who dies,” and McElwee wrote in his essay on Walker Percy, but that In Photographic Memory, there’s a compel- cuts away at once, leaving us with the re- probing into metaphysical problems does not ling shot of McElwee’s son, Adrian, in a café, verberation of that self-padding stupidity. ipso facto equate to self-indulgence in the on his computer at the window, and you can He understands that her own sentences are pejorative sense in which Hale meant it: as see McElwee’s reflection in the window out- more damning than anything the camera or the straightest avenue to narcissism. side, Adrian’s face superimposed where his his voiceover could give us. Or in Sherman’s The Delphic injunction “know thyself” father’s is behind the camera—the melding March, when he’s too much of a gentleman has become for McElwee indistinguishable of identities, the fusing of selfhoods in as- to criticize three fantastically doltish women from “film thyself,” and yet the key to his sertion of continuity and love. No truly self- with whom he pursues romantic possibili- autobiographical films is that they are mostly indulgent artist is capable of such an image. ties—one who believes she’s a prophetess about other people. A. O. Scott’s assessment McElwee’s films are tremendously tender who can get Burt Reynolds to fall in love with of Sherman’s March as the “founding docu- toward others, and tenderness is always an in- her; one who believes in millennial hocus-

- 84 - SPRING 2015 and calm despite his condition. With its eye on the wreckage of this world, on the indis- criminate doling out of woe, Six O’Clock News becomes a film about the agon between faith and fate—“the invisible virus of fate,” McElwee calls it. And then: “I keep find- ing myself in church with a camera.” Why? Because the pews are where his subjects find some unnameable solace, and he’s earnest enough to follow them there. And that’s the one thing a genuine narcissist can never quite pull off: empathetic earnestness.

rtists are by default a narcissistic set, and I’m loath to add to that reputa- A tion by writing a whole book about myself. I also have a strict policy of never disagreeing with Oscar Wilde, who said, “I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering.” Wilde also said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own per- son. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” Fiction is the mask that shows the truth, while memoir is normally the bare-faced lie. But watching your films gives me hope for my own enterprise. You’re the reluctant narcissist. pocus and keeps company with gun-toting was grotesquely murdered in a robbery. “Out “That’s a useful phrase, reluctant narcis- survivalists; and one whose nutty Mormon- of control this world,” Im says. “God cannot sist, and probably an accurate one. And it’s ism requires her to deny the life-enhancing control this world.” interesting that you raise this issue of narcis- pleasures of coffee and alcohol and also to And that’s the other ingredient that con- sism because I grew up having been taught stockpile nonperishables in preparation for tributes to the roiling dynamism of a McEl- Southern manners, and Southern manners the coming apocalypse. McElwee once said in wee film: his unforced cerebrations of spirit. always included the stipulation that you an interview, “I try as best I can not to present And I don’t mean his own precious spirit—I needed to be attuned to other people much people as being ridiculous,” and yet you can mean the spirit of us all. An agnostic intel- more than to yourself. There’s a way in which almost see his camera cringing in the face of lectual, McElwee nevertheless knows that that can be a superficial trait but there’s also so much unreason. without some engagement with the holy, something profound about it, something In Six O’Clock News there’s just a few sec- some overlap of the secular and sacred, a work necessary, at least for me, to make my way onds of veiled criticism in the voiceover, of art remains stymied in a pupal phase. In in the world. It was a good lesson for me to after an old couple, whose home was spared an interview with Lawrence Rhu, McElwee have been taught. Therefore it’s incredibly by a tornado, tells McElwee that God directs admitted that “apocalypse is a common theme ironic that I have ended up making auto- their fates—that God directs the vanquishing that keeps coming up in the films,” and let’s biographical films because I don’t feel com- paths of twisters. McElwee wonders if life remember his dark-night-of-the-soul insom- fortable talking about myself or dwelling is easier if you believe God is in control, or nia in Sherman’s March, his bad dreams of upon my own situations. But the way I’ve easier only if your home has been spared. nuclear hecatomb—the film’s half-serious dealt with that discomfort is to allow it to In other words: let us ponder the fatuity subtitle is “A Meditation on the Possibility of be in my films, and I think you have cor- and smug presumptuousness of claiming, Romantic Love in the South During an Era of rectly read that strain in me, my reluctance as you stand there unscathed, that the Lord Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.” In Paraguay to put myself forward. Another way I save knew what he was doing when he ravished has a stunning scene of a wordless cripple myself from self-obsession is to weave in those other lives but left yours untouched. begging on the steps of a church in Asunción, themes from the world at large. Without In that same film, McElwee connects with McElwee wondering in the voiceover if faith those my films might indeed be narcissistic. Steve Im, a Korean immigrant whose wife permits this man his seeming contentment Sherman’s March takes into consideration a

OxfordAmerican.org - 85 - very tragic era in American history and the Proustian—I went back to France to make tant editor, and then as an editor at WGBH. very real threat of nuclear weapons prolif- a Proustian film. My intersection with my I augmented this with work as a teaching eration. It takes very seriously the notion son at that point in his life provided an op- assistant for a course in filmmaking here at that it is difficult to establish a meaningful portunity for me to think about the profound Harvard. I kept thinking I would get back loving relationship in a time fraught with implications of thirty years having passed by, down South after a year or so of WGBH and such anxiety, as the Eighties were, and that thirty years since I was his age, and what that Harvard, but the contracts and freelance work certainly hasn’t changed much.” means to us as mortals. It’s a significant chunk kept getting extended. As a Southerner, I of one’s life. I think in that sense the film is sometimes think of this as accepting an illicit There’s also the self-referential aspect of the film, pure and successful in its goals. The question bribe to stay put in Yankeeland. The other its playful awareness of itself. I remember you is always how does an autobiographical artist reality is that I tried very hard to find funding say at one point in the film that it seems you’re presume to take in the world’s complexity.” for Sherman’s March as a work in progress, filming your life in order to have a life to film. and applied to ten arts foundations and PBS And then you say that your “real life has fallen This passage of time you speak of: it’s something affiliates in North and South Carolina. All into the crack” between yourself and your film. I’m aware of in all your films, and aware of of them turned me down—and who could most pointedly in the voiceovers. In Backyard blame them? A film like Sherman’s March “That’s true, the film also investigates or the voiceover is youthful, optimistic, brimmed had never been made before. However, a gives thought to, sometimes humorously but with curiosity: it retains that wide-eyed wonder WGBH-Boston producer named Peter Mc- sometimes seriously, what it means to make of what remains possible, the awe of discovery. Ghee, who had something of a reputation of documentary images as opposed to fictional The narrating in Sherman’s March is similar, taking chances on programming, provided images, as represented by Burt Reynolds and so steady and pleasing in juxtaposition to the me with funds to get the rest of my footage his making of a Hollywood feature at the hurly-burly often in play around you. I hear processed and a print made. He then had same time I was making Sherman’s March. that voice begin to shift in Time Indefinite, and the good sense to allow for the film to be There are some humorous juxtapositions and by Six O’Clock News your voice has taken on distributed theatrically for a year before air- intersections there that I’m very interested a slightly pained lilt, all the illusions siphoned ing it on PBS. That’s fairly common practice in and have pursued in my subsequent films, from it. And the narrating of Photographic now, but back in the 1980s, it was absolutely this notion of nonfiction versus fiction. How Memory is downright despairing to my ear. forbidden that PBS programming be seen are they different, what are they striving for? in theaters before airing. Peter and I were So by allowing my films to have these other “It’s undoubtedly true what you say, al- sort of inventing a distribution model for considerations, other themes, I think I have though no one has pointed that out to me be- independent documentaries in the States, partially counterbalanced the autobiographi- fore, and it’s got to be a result of the fact that as and I don’t think we were even aware that cal component, and diffused to some degree you get older, life in many ways has to become we were doing this. So if I had gone back to the danger of narcissism, though not entirely, sadder, for all the obvious reasons. My voice’s the South, Sherman’s March might never I know. I think if Photographic Memory has a sadness in Photographic Memory comes from have been made.” problem, the thing it doesn’t do as well as the two things: pondering the fact that thirty years other films is to open its eyes to look around have gone by so completely, so quickly, and also at the world and think about something that’s my concern about my son’s welfare. Those two going on elsewhere.” things have got to be contributing to what you n Sherman’s March, McElwee is, in a flaw- detect. I think you’re very sensitive about this, less Saul Bellow phrase, “a phoenix who To my mind Photographic Memory isn’t marred this gathering sadness in my narration. But I I runs after arsonists”—each romantic pos- at all by that lack of ecumenical engagement: I hope that’s not the preponderant thing that the sibility is practically engineered to incinerate find it a necessary meditation on the quagmire film conveys because it’s so necessary to have him, to leave him disappointed and dejected, of the parent as agent in the life of his child. a sense of humor about one’s life and to allow and yet panting, ready to rise again for another Because, you know, Time Indefinite doesn’t comedy to move into art, to have a place in the charring. “A sort of creeping psycho-sexual have an extensive worldly engagement either. film. Without it, we can’t survive. Humor is despair begins to overtake me,” he says in the totally critical to making these kinds of autobio- voiceover, after yet another love interest lights “It doesn’t, you’re right. But its passion graphical films, an agent that helps you devote out for vistas wider than what McElwee can and emotion are so pure, if I may say that, that portions of a film to your own life. Otherwise offer. His diffidence with women, combined it carries the film—those primal things that it’s unfettered narcissism, as you’ve said.” with his high regard and unstanchable desire the protagonist/filmmaker was going through for them, is a stinging cocktail to sip from. at that time. Photographic Memory is special I should add, too, that your Southern accent When Henri Barbusse, in his 1908 novel to me, of course, and I appreciate what you has suffered some attrition at the hands of New L’Enfer, wrote: “It is not a woman I want—it say about that film, but I understand some England. Why didn’t you return to the South is all women, and I seek for them in those people thinking that it’s perhaps not as broad after you graduated from MIT? around me, one by one,” he could have been as the other films in its considerations of the speaking about McElwee in Sherman’s March. world. The main thing I’m investigating in “Well, I stayed in Boston after MIT because But the film succeeds so resplendently that film is the passage of time, something almost immediately I found work as an assis- because it manages to be about many things

- 86 - SPRING 2015 at once, one of which is the inevitability of his friend Charleen introduces McElwee to Here, too, is what McElwee admits in arrivals and departures (there are two airport a young woman and he insists on filming his essay on Walker Percy: “Events of life scenes), of how we enter periods stage left the moment. “This is not art!” she scolds. around my family’s house were somehow quite differently from how we exit them stage “This is life!” In Sherman’s March, of course, transformed when I saw them through the right. The film is overrun by those writhing there is little aesthetic distinction between lens,” and then this bit of antinomy: “The on that pivot between desperation and ambi- the two. In this, as well, McElwee becomes experience of filming both gave me a de- tion—the Burt Reynolds look-alike who waits heir to the Romantics, to the Wordsworth tached perspective on what I was filming hours at a hotel in hope of finding stuntman of The Prelude. Neither Wordsworth nor and simultaneously led me to see deeply work; the aspiring thespian who believes her McElwee subscribes to a fatuously idealized into the world I was filming.” He makes a destiny lies in Tinseltown; Ross McElwee conception of his own existence as art in the similar admission in Time Indefinite, when himself. In his whiskey-sipping, improvised making, common enough among a certain he films the drawing of his own blood: “If speech to the camera about General Sherman, species of outlaw artist working from a deficit I watch through a lens it seems less real to late at night in his father’s house, McElwee is of imagination. For McElwee the autobio- me.” It’s a matter of apprehension, of course, dressed as a Confederate soldier (having just graphical filmmaker, as for Wordsworth the but the proper apprehension, an apprehension come from a costume ball), and twice in this autobiographical poet, the process of living that is both artistic/aesthetic and personal/ speech he refers to Sherman as “tragic,” his does not in itself equal art—rather, the exi- purgative—the purging of personal devils voice shot through with sadness at the pos- gencies of having lived contain the potential while the aesthetic embraces the artistic. sibility that his own life will wrap up just as to become art through imaginative assertion. “I’m camera shy in a reverse way,” he says in tragically. McElwee remains aware of Sher- The art/life duet in McElwee results from Sherman’s March, but what is also reversed is man as an ambitious failure, and he remains his contemplative agitations, from his seri- the way in which each shot peers inside him aware of their similarities, right down to their ous thinking about the ways in which an even as the lens remains pointed at others. russet beards. ordinary life accrues significance. This is part In Bright Leaves McElwee suggests that But this question is waiting: Why the of what Gurganus means when he says of he films his son so incessantly in an effort incessant filming of his own life? Why this McElwee that “no filmmaker working seems to thwart the rapidity with which he will autobiographical itch? In Sherman’s March, more organically aligned with his material.” drift, the surging away that causes every

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OxfordAmerican.org - 87 - loving parent great heartwreck. “When I depended heavily on the viewer’s willing- look through a viewfinder,” he says, “time ness to accept the profundity of generational seems to stop. A kind of timelessness is continuity—what we owe to our parents momentarily achieved.” But film, he ac- and grandparents . . . what we owe to our knowledges, actually slows down nothing: progeny.” It’s an enormous debt, and one it’s an illusion, a bitter trick that film plays on that simultaneously, paradoxically takes as our shaky conceptions of time. Still, those much as it gives. This question of what the innumerable hours of film that McElwee generations owe one another is compounded has on the progress of his household are by the complementary question of what an invaluable contribution to one family’s the present owes to the past, and what the Bistro 1121, Blytheville understanding of itself. What I wouldn’t future will owe to the present always upon give to have a cache of home movies of my us. “We need to determine what that balance boyhood—those years of my life are ghosts is between the past and present and how we flitting before me. What I wouldn’t do to be remember the past in the present,” McElwee able to see, to know my deceased father in told me. “There is a tendency we all have to home movies in the same way McElwee’s romanticize the past or to reframe it in a way kids will be able to know him more fully that enables us to go on into the future.” through his films. That’s exactly what McEl- In the Full Frame catalog McElwee dis- wee proposes in Time Indefinite: his inces- cusses the dissolution of his twenty-three- sant filming, like the having of children, is year marriage, a dissolution that has toppled a stay against his own mortality. his conception of the last two decades of his life and the documentaries he created The Ridges at Village Creek, Wynne during that time. In an aching line about certain scenes from Time Indefinite, the n Photographic Memory, there’s this documentary that depicts his marriage, he memorably accurate line after com- writes: “These scenes now lacerate—shards Imenting on how hard it is not to stran- of a beautiful stained glass window through gle one’s unhinged adolescent: “Teenagers which a brick has been thrown.” Such is the don’t even realize how much they are pro- bargain made by the autobiographical art- tected by a smaller version of themselves ist: you get to document your life and then which rises up to defend them”—every par- your life lies all around you, in images and ent sees the vulnerable child still dwelling words, forever prepared to taunt you with within the hellacious teen. And in Time the way your world used to be, to remind Indefinite, McElwee addresses the camera you of what you’ve lost. with a speech worthy of Strindberg or Shaw: The weft of his world has been undone by Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum, Piggott this divorce, and he told me that his film in Everything begins and ends with fam- progress, tentatively titled Redux, “is a por- ily. I don’t know, some part of me re- trait of a filmmaker who’s momentarily mis- sists that idea. I mean, there’s so much placed his mind”—or lost his grasp on the conflict in family, especially between past/present interchange, which amounts to the generations. You drive your par- the same thing. In some footage he showed ents crazy. They drive you crazy. And me, he sorts through boxes of his belong- then suddenly they’re dead and you’re ings in his new condo, an array of items on stunned and heartbroken. I mean, first a table, many of them inexplicable to him. you’re twisted by their lives and then One is labeled “grill door,” but there is no you’re twisted by their deaths. And grill. The new film will no doubt contend Southland Park Gaming & Racing, then you grow up and do the same with beginning again in one’s mid-sixties, West Memphis thing to your own kids. . . . Once you with the demolished imago of a beloved, get sucked into the vortex of family and with how one can be both haunted by there’s no way out except to die. the living and chastised by the dead—with what McElwee himself once aptly called Family, always family. In the catalog to “the tangle of ironies and connections . . . the 2012 Full Frame Documentary Film the little moments in time that seem sud- ARKANSAS.COM Festival at Duke University, for which he denly to fall into place so that we can see curated a thematic program called “Family the complexity, and humor, and absurdity Affairs,” McElwee writes: “My films have of life.” ø

- 88 - SPRING 2015 YOUR TRIP BEGINS HERE

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