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FRONTLINE: Life at 24 fps Page 1 of 11 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 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/news/ross/harvardmag.html 7/4/2006 FRONTLINE: Life at 24 fps Page 2 of 11 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 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/news/ross/harvardmag.html 7/4/2006 FRONTLINE: Life at 24 fps Page 3 of 11 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, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/news/ross/harvardmag.html 7/4/2006 FRONTLINE: Life at 24 fps Page 4 of 11 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.

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