In the Opening Scene of His Latest Documentary Film, Time Indefinite , Ross Mcelwee Shows His Relatives at Their Annual Reunion on the North Carolina Coast

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In the opening scene of his latest documentary film, Time Indefinite , Ross McElwee shows his relatives at their annual reunion on the North Carolina coast. A crew of convivial, easygoing Southerners, they are gathered on the porch of a rented beach house for the cocktail hour. There is much laughter and much showing off of babies; the men are all clean-shaven, the women are all evenly tanned.

Suddenly there is a glimpse of McElwee himself in a brief shot taken by his stepmother. He is dressed with bohemian simplicity in a black T-shirt and black jeans. A reddish beard covers the lower half of his face, while the eyepiece of his movie camera conceals the upper half. Taking no part in the noisy chatter all around him, he is concentrating on the focus of his zoom lens. "At this particular point," McElwee comments on the film's soundtrack, "I'm not exactly blending in with the rest of my family."

If this is eccentricity, there is method to it. McElwee has been shooting the events of his own life for nearly two decades, using the footage he amasses as the basic material for his unique first-person documentaries. Now 45 and a visiting lecturer at Harvard, McElwee makes films that seek to convey the complex texture of his private life with authenticity and humor.

Time Indefinite covers a period in McElwee's development when he finds himself facing some of the central challenges of adulthood: getting married, having children, watching one's parents die. At the beach-house reunion, he surprises his family by announcing that he has finally become engaged-- to Marilyn Levine, a fellow

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documentary filmmaker. She helps him film the jubilant scene that follows his announcement as his stunned relatives rush forward to hug and kiss the happy couple.

The documentary tracks McElwee's misadventures as the wedding day approaches. He goes to the printer to watch the invitations being printed, but a power failure stops the press midway through its run. He visits his old grandmother at her nursing home, hoping to cheer her up with news of his engagement, but she is sunk in a terminal decrepitude and doesn't seem to follow a word he says. Some filmmaking buddies take him out to celebrate on the eve of his wedding, but they are all divorced, and the conversation takes a depressing turn as they go over their respective marital failures.

On the day of the ceremony, McElwee is unwilling to get himself ready. Following Marilyn into her dressing room, he films her reflection in a mirror as she arranges combs and flowers in her auburn hair. With its blend of adoration and nostalgia, the shot embodies his lingering regret that their courtship is at an end. When the time at last comes for exchanging rings, he offers Marilyn the wrong hand; but they are married without further mishaps.

Soon we see Marilyn letting her parents know she's pregnant. Her father is exultant, telling McElwee, "Kid, I always knew you had it in you!" The couple begin making practical arrangements for the baby--even going on an exploratory visit to the local layette store, where they study a profusion of cribs and coverlets, breast pumps and pastel sheets.

Then the tone of Time Indefinite changes abruptly. Marilyn miscarries and McElwee's grandmother and father die, all within the space of a few months. Too stunned to drag his camera about, McElwee at first shoots nothing but the scene from his bedroom window, bare ruined trees against a gray New England sky. Soon, however, he is taking another trip down South, camera in hand. He plans to come to grips with death by filming its shadowy traces wherever he can.

He finds his father's house in Charlotte oddly unchanged by its owner's death. Lucille, the housekeeper, is still ironing. Melvin, the groundskeeper, is still mowing. And the local Jehovah's Witness is still coming by to warn of a "time indefinite" when the world will meet its appointed end.

McElwee is taken aback by all this unexpected stability. In

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the hope of clarifying his feelings, he tries talking to his sister and brother about their father's death. His sister can hardly say anything at all. His brother does little better; a surgeon, like their late father, he is too used to seeing death, and too unused to brooding about it, to give McElwee much guidance on the subject.

Taking an interest in his brother's practice, McElwee accompanies him on his rounds. One of the patients they visit is recovering from breast cancer surgery. His brother shows him a slide of her excised tumor: a gruesome mass of sickly reds and pinks. Here is a vivid picture of death as he is ever likely to come across. He tries to focus his attention on it, but within moments his mind begins to wander. The photograph, he remarks, "is like death itself. You know, this huge grotesque thing that stares us in the face but that somehow we manage to deny, to abstract."

He had come down South hoping "to corner death with a camera. But now," he says, "this filming of my family--it's all beginning to feel like a distraction." Looking for answers about the meaning of death, he concludes, was just another way of evading the hard fact of his father's death, of death in general.

With this anticlimactic insight, McElwee finally abandons his morbid quest. His camera is free to revel once more in the beauty of the physical world. It follows the autumn leaves as Lucille rakes them off the driveway. It studies the white clouds-forms passing beneath the airplane as he flies back home to New England. It traces the swell of Marilyn's belly as her second pregnancy advances. And it contemplates, at film's end, the startled face of Adrian, the couple's newborn baby.

Time Indefinite takes place in kitchens and airplanes, churches and doctors' offices, cemeteries and suburban backyards. The variety of settings gives the impression that McElwee had his camera running all the time. Yet he seldom shoots more than a half-hour footage in a day. Generally working alone, he takes charge single-handedly of both tape recorder and camera. He wants no crew around to disrupt his rapport with his subjects.

McElwee's ideas about film grew out of his interest in the early works of the cinema verite movement. Using the lightweight equipment that was first becoming available in the late fifties, filmmakers like Richard Leacock and Frederick Wiseman, tried to capture the unrehearsed reality of American life. They hung about the hallways of typical institutions--high schools, mental hospitals,

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presidential campaign headquarters--never participating in the activities going on around them and filming everything they saw as unobtrusively as possible. Although their documentaries are vivid, the films sometimes have a cold, voyeuristic quality that can make them hard to watch.

It was McElwee goal to put more of himself into his films than the rules of cinema verite allowed. He figured out how to do this in stages. He began by filming his own friends and family. Then he added commentary to the soundtrack. Finally, he got in front of the camera himself.

In theory such techniques might make him seem arrogant or self-indulgent. In practice they create just the opposite impression. They prove he is willing to run the same risk of being scrutinized and judged as the other people who appear in his films. "If the story becomes some of your story as well," he explained in a recent interview, "power is a little more equally distributed." By accepting a more exposed and therefore more modest role in his documentaries, he involves the viewer emotionally in a way the disciples of a pure cinema verite seldom did.

When talking about his filmmaking methods, McElwee often lets a note of hesitation enter his soft, Southern- accented voice. It is as if he were always reserving the right to change his mind. His office-cum-editing-studio, a windowless cell at the foot of the stairs at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, seems fittingly protective of his reticent nature. The walls are concrete, and the two yellow doors are made of heavy steel. He can work here in peace.

As he is the first to admit, he can't get life onto film without changing it. While he is shooting, the camera always creates a slightly artificial dynamic between him and his subjects. The viewer of the film is also aware (if only subliminally) of the camera's presence. "So you have this triangular structure of tension," he says, "which is at times comic and at times poignant, that makes these films different and provides them with some kind of slightly subterranean dramatic edge."

In Sherman's March , his last diaristic work before Time Indefinite, McElwee brings his tension to the fore. The Massachusetts Artists Foundation gave him a grant to make a film about Sherman's

campaign and its effects on the contemporary South. Just as he was getting ready to start shooting it, however, his girlfriend dropped him. As the documentary opens he is

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drifting despondently down to join his family in North Carolina, unsure how, or whether, to proceed with his project.

His sister gives him the inspiration he needs. They are chatting, on a canoe, about the sorry state of his love life. When he turns to film a lithe young swimmer going by, she suggests he use his movie camera as a way of meeting women. "At least it's a conversation piece," she says.

For the rest of the documentary, McElwee takes his camera on a quest for love across the Southeast, always keeping more or less to the path of the death-dealing general. He dates friends of his family, old flames from high-school days, and strangers he meets on the road. His insistence on filming these women even as he pursues them gives an absurd overtone to the encounters. Yet one source of the fascination of Sherman's March is how differently each woman reacts to McElwee's camera mania.

Some make a point of ignoring it. Winnie, a hyper intellectual graduate student in linguistics, succeeds best with this difficult strategy. She babbles away about "referential opacity" and "existential quantifiers" as if it were nothing out of the ordinary to be filmed by her lover. But other women energetically play up to the camera. Pat, an aspiring starlet, falls into this camp. Whether she is eating, flirting, or thrusting her hips vigorously in an exercise to ward off cellulite, her self-conscious-ness actually seems to diminish when she knows she is being filmed. As McElwee observes, "Certain people come close to revealing more about themselves when they have a camera in front of them than when they don't."

Over the course of his five-month odyssey, McElwee spends time with Pat, Winnie, and a half-dozen other women. But he rejects, or is rejected by, each of them in turn. In the black periods between prospects, he retreats into bed at budget motels. For days at a time he never gets out of his pajamas. Propping himself up on his elbows, his face in shadow, his sheets in disarray, he speaks directly to the camera. He is suffering, he says, from insomnia. If he does sleep, he has nightmares of nuclear war. These he vividly describes.

While he was shooting them in Atlanta and elsewhere, McElwee thought these bedroom soliloquies were "silly" and "egocentric." He did not even consider using them during the first twelve months he spent editing raw footage. Fortunately, he changed his mind before

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Sherman's March was released. With their poor focus and grubby atmosphere, they are anything but self glorifying. But they do invite the audience inside the mind of the filmmaker, and it is this self-revelatory mood, so unexpectedly in the documentary medium, that gives the film its unusual impact.

Paradoxically, for a work born of rejection, Sherman's March turned out to be one of the most popular documentaries ever made. More than 250 theater managers booked it to run on their screens. Big newspapers published glowing notices. People sent a photographer to McElwee's apartment. Hollywood executives called him on the phone. (McElwee hastens to point out, however, that most hadn't actually seen the film; they were relying for their information on the notice in The New York Times . He didn't take their attentions too seriously. "A month later," he says, "they couldn't remember your name if a .357 Magnum were held to their heads.")

By the standards of mainstream cinema, the financial returns of Sherman's March were negligible. Yet it did earn a small profit--a rare feat in the documentary world. McElwee used his royalty checks to quit teaching for a while and "take up the grand project of my belated adulthood, in terms of moving out of my cramped little apartment, getting married, and taking on an adult life." He began having the experiences, in other words, which would furnish some of the material for Time Indefinite .

Only those who have seen Sherman's March can appreciate the tremendous leap forward that Time Indefinite represents. The later film is structured more densely and presents its insights with greater subtlety than the earlier one. Yet because Time Indefinite is also darker than its predecessor, dwelling on mortality rather than on the dating scene, McElwee suspected that it might have less box-office appeal. "Life is hard," he says. "All of us often go to films to get away. That's just a fact of the way the medium has been absorbed by our culture."

His fears have been borne out, at least in New York. Time Indefinite closed after just two weeks at the Film Forum. By comparison, Sherman's March lasted for months at the now defunct Bleeker Street Cinema. Nevertheless, McElwee persists in viewing the fortunes of Time Indefinite through the prism of his congenital modesty. "I look at what happened, rather than at what can happen. For me, to have it run for two weeks in Manhattan and do very respectably was a thrill."

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McElwee gave the name Backyard to the first documentary he ever made about his family. In a typically understated but significant scene, his father is carefully setting up a volleyball net on the lawn. McElwee is filming the procedure but wants to help. So he grasps one end of a measuring tape (holding his microphone with the same hand) while his father paces backward with the tape's other end. A power mower roars in the distance.

Backward steps, taut nets--apt metaphors for the tensions underlying this seemingly innocuous encounter. McElwee's brother is leaving for medical school the next day. A party has been arranged in his honor, and volleyball is among the scheduled activities. By taking so much trouble with the preparations, McElwee's father is implicitly emphasizing (as he has done again and again over the past week) his approval of his younger son's choice of career.

As for McElwee himself, he is shooting with a camera on loan from MIT's new film school. He has just finished his first year of graduate work there--a course he embarked upon as "a kind of cold calculation that it would be the fastest way to get a film." Although he doesn't say so, it's clear there were no parties for him when he left for MIT. To his family he is still a puzzle, not a source of pride. As his father tellingly remarks, "What I can't figure is how you figure what it's worth spending your expensive film on."

The family's vast lawn epitomizes the well-to-do Southern world from which McElwee is slowly drawing away. As Backyard shows, it is a world where black men cut the grass and black women clean the kitchens, where staunch Presbyterians go about their chores wearing Bermuda shorts, and where golfers drive to country-club weddings in canopied carts. It is a world where displays of feeling are avoided ("Not much more to be said," McElwee's brother observes on the morning of their departure). It is a world where families never seem to do enough arguing.

Looking back on it now, however, McElwee remembers his native town not as a repressed but as a secure and happy environment in which to grow up. Charlotte was much smaller in the fifties than it is today. Playing outdoors was a simpler matter. McElwee recalls riding his bike down to the creek to hunt for turtles and tadpoles. Vacationing with his family at the beach, he would add to his mollusk collection, which swelled to become the second largest in the state. (He visited the largest, in Raleigh's natural history museum, when he was 14.)

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Movies were a rare but gratifying treat. "The presence of the dark air-conditioned cave in the heat of the furious North Carolina summer was very alluring," McElwee remembers. His mother took him to see The Eddy Duchin Story and wept all the way through it. His own tastes ran to more exotic films. The Sinbad series he admired for its special effects. Another favorite of his junior-high years, Ben-Hur , prompted him to create storyboards for his own Roman epic.

Nevertheless, for most of his adolescence McElwee's aspirations were strictly literary. He wrote short stories for his high-school magazine and news articles for the school paper. It was on the advice of an English teacher that he took the radical step of leaving the South after graduation. He enrolled in the creative writing program at Brown. Only after sampling some still photography classes at neighboring Rhode Island School of Design did he begin to think he might prefer creating pictures to books.

McElwee hasn't considered himself a writer since his college days. He boasts of being "one of the few humanoids on the face of the earth who's not yet written a film script." But he admits that he has returned to writing through the "back door" with his documentaries. He adds a carefully worded commentary to the soundtrack of each of his films, using it to question, to explain, and sometimes to subvert the meaning of the action on the screen.

McElwee headed off to Brittany after finishing his degree at Brown, leaving filmmaking to one side. He tried various schemes for making money, some less successful than others. First, he had the idea of producing a puppet show he could take from village to village; then, of snapping first-communion photos of children to sell to their parents. He finally wound up in Paris, running through the last of his francs and trying to think of what to do next. Orson Welles's Touch of Evil was playing at the old Cinematheque. He went.

"I was pulled out of my chair," he recalls. "I thought, film is so powerful, and I reunited with it after a year and a half. I thought, this is what I want to do. Not necessarily Hollywood, although I didn't know."

The lights are out in McElwee's office. On the huge Steenbeck--his ancient, German-built editing console--a TV-sized screen flickers in the darkness. It shows a small boy in a blue turtleneck romping across a wooden floor. "I got a new name today," the boy declares. "My name is Ike the Mouse."

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McElwee is making the first cuts in the footage he has amassed for his next film, provisionally entitled Six O'Clock News . It will be, he says, "a meditation about the strangeness of bringing a new life into the world, given the world's brutality as depicted on the nightly newscasts." Six months ago, on his son's fourth birthday, he shot at his home in Brookline the reel he is now reviewing.

Turning his fists on the Steenbeck's steel knobs, he makes the platens spin backward and forward half a dozen times. He watches and rewatches as Adrian tells of his new make-believe name--now at full speed, now at half speed, now frame by frame. Finally he draws a few waxy squiggles on the sixteen-millimeter film so that his assistant will know to drop the whole sequence. "The most painful thing about editing," he laments, "is that you have to give up these wonderful details."

McElwee's great fondness for his material can make editing a difficult chore, but it is also what sets his completed films apart. Every scene is infused with the warmth he feels for his family and friends. Yet he doesn't idealize them. In this sense his style is antithetical to Hollywood's. Those agreeing to appear in his films must do so not for stardom's sake but because McElwee's loving treatment extends even to their flaws.

Never tiring of the members of his "cast," McElwee is apt to feature them again and again in his work. One of the most colorful of these regulars is Charleen Swansea, a poet and a teacher of poetry, and a friend of McElwee since his high-school days. Her vivid personality, at once dramatic and candid, self-aware and spontaneous, makes her a perfect subject for his documentaries. In each of her appearances she faces a new predicament with characteristic theatrical intensity.

In Charleen she is the frantic divorcee struggling to keep up with demanding students, her own teenage children, and a querulous young lover. In Sherman's March she is the over-helpful confidante hilariously plotting matrimony between McElwee and a female acquaintance. In Time Indefinite she is the grieving widow grappling with the shock of her second husband's death.

As McElwee points, out, Swansea's captivating screen presence owes little to conventional ideas of glamour. Short, buxom, with teased reddish-blond hair piled high on her head, her physical type is the opposite of the svelte Hollywood starlet's. Yet McElwee knows how to bring out her latent magnetism. This is a matter partly of focusing on

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her gestures--the puckered lips, the outthrust chest--and partly of letting her speak her mind in her wonderfully articulate outbursts and soliloquies. Other documentary- makers have tried filming her, generally without success. Not having laid a groundwork of friendship, as McElwee has done, they lack his understanding and his sympathetic vision.

Vision, sympathetic and otherwise, is the faculty McElwee most wants to develop among the undergraduates in his filmmaking courses at Harvard. But setting his students free of their "intellectual and verbalizing mindset" is, necessarily, a gradual process. In the first term of an introductory course in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, he requires only very short films-- four minutes or less-- asking them to convey in that interval a single emotion, such as fear, hope, or surprise.

In the second term he has them collaborating on a ten- minute film. "In typical Harvard fashion," he says "they invariably put it off until the last minute but then they sleep and camp [at the Carpenter Center] for nights at a time and edit around the clock. As often as not, they come up with something that justifies the expenditure of time and effort." By the second year of their coursework, they are ready to tackle more sustained individual projects.

More than just the scene of McElwee's teaching and editing, the Carpenter Center houses the theater where he took Marilyn on their first date. Jean Renoir's The Southerner was on the bill. He promised it would be a wonderful film; the title and the director guaranteed as much. It turned out to be an inferior Renoir, and he feared he had "really blown it. But," he says, "things worked very well...Not to be banal about it, we fell in love almost immediately." The two have joined forces professionally only once, to make a film about the Berlin Wall; for the present, their collaboration is limited to getting food on the table, keeping up the Brookline house, and raising Adrian, "a consuming child" who "takes a lot of attention."

McElwee's desire to explore more deeply his love for his subjects--Marilyn, Adrian, Charleen, and the cast of thousands of unrehearsed walk-ons--is what binds him to his art. In his movies, as he sees it, "you're both getting away from real life and getting deeper into it. That's what intrigues me about this kind of filmmaking. That's what will keep me doing it despite the incessant question of, "When are you going to make real films?'"

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