6

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Ross McElwee

As of the new millennium, no personal documentary filmmaker had become better known than Ross McElwee. Despite what we might imagine was the influence of Ricky Leacock and Ed Pincus at MIT and of Alfred Guzzetti, McElwee’s teaching colleague at Harvard since 1986—all of whom abjured or at least avoided voice-over narration in documentary film—McElwee has become the most inventive explorer of voice-over in the history of personal documentary. Indeed, if his approach to narration no longer seems as distinct as it once did, that is because so many working in personal documentary in recent years have been under his influence. McElwee is also among the few filmmakers who have entirely devoted themselves to personal documentary. Aside from youthful experiments and from his earliest feature films—Charlene (1977) and Space Coast (1979, co-made with Michel Negroponte)—and one collaboration with Marilyn Levine (Something to Do with the Wall, 1991), McElwee has been devoted to personal documentary for going on thirty years.1

McElwee’s seven personal documentaries reveal a filmmaker exploring, on one hand, the nature of his personal relationships with family members and with friends and colleagues as they have developed over time, and on the other, the continually evolving ways in which McElwee’s self-identification as a filmmaker has affected these relationships. Further, since each new McElwee personal documentary builds (explicitly and implicitly) on the previous films, those who continue to follow his career are involved with his work on a meta-level: each new experience with McElwee’s life and filmmaking causes us to rethink the long chronicle of McElwee’s experiences and our reactions to it over time. As spectators, we are learning not only from McElwee’s experiences but from our own experiences with him. Indeed, on a certain level, McElwee as filmmaker seems more intimate with us than he is with those he films. Decade after decade we have been his trusted confidants, continually learning not only about McElwee, but about our ongoing, always evolving “relationship” with him.

FINDING A MUSE: CHARLEEN

In a way, by having made The Blue Angel, the most widely circulated German film, I had made a German woman the toast of many lands, and, if nothing else, had spread good will for the Germans at a time when they were not very popular.

JOSEF VON STERNBERG, FUN IN A CHINESE LAUNDRY2

Ross McElwee has become synonymous with autobiographical filmmaking, and his mentoring of filmmakers and films during his many years teaching at Harvard has probably had nearly as significant an impact on the field as his films. At MIT both Ed Pincus and Ricky Leacock were crucial influences. Ed Pincus’s Diaries was important for McElwee—“I’m sure I was influenced by it in all kinds of ways”³—and when he graduated with his master’s degree in 1977, he worked as Pincus’s teaching assistant for an additional year and a half. Ricky Leacock, especially his Happy Mother’s Day (1963) and his general attitude toward filmmaking, were also important. McElwee implicitly pays homage to Leacock by having him speak the opening narration in Sherman’s March (1986) and by having him appear in Time Indefinite (1993), and he has made his appreciation explicit: “When I was at MIT, Ricky was always irreverent, always encouraging us to do films for ourselves, to do films that were not conceived of as commercial entities. This is not what you hear in a lot of film schools, where you’re encouraged to produce films that will get you jobs in public television, or in commercial television or Hollywood. Ricky was always very caustic and irreverent about those reasons for making films.”⁴

Both Pincus and Leacock seem to have agreed that their job was to see that those men and women who wanted to make films got to make them (often whether they were matriculated at MIT or not), and by the time he left MIT, McElwee had shot footage for the three films that would, each in its own way, provide him with the cinematic approaches and elements that, combined, would make his films distinctive and memorable: Charleen (1979), which was McElwee’s thesis film; Space Coast (1979, co-made with Michel Negroponte); and Backyard (1984), McElwee’s breakthrough autobiographical documentary.⁵

If it took some years before McElwee settled on the combination of cinematic elements that we now recognize as his distinctive approach to autobiographical filmmaking, one of his central themes—the American South—was evident from the beginning. Though Charleen focuses on McElwee’s good friend, Charleen Swansea, he had originally envisioned the project as a portrait of the South,

or at least of Charlotte, North Carolina, with Charleen as a witty tour guide. I wasn’t at all sure that the film would be an intimate portrait of Charleen herself, though I hoped this would be the case. As it turned out, Charleen enjoyed being filmed and was a natural performer, in the sense that even though it was simply her own life that she was performing, she always performed it with a certain élan that was very “filmable.” She enjoyed revealing her life to me and the camera. As a result, much of the Southern detail simply got eclipsed by Charleen herself.6

As McElwee would explain later, in Backyard, his move to the North, and in particular, New England—first, to Providence, Rhode Island, where he was an undergraduate at Brown, then to Cambridge, to attend MIT and later to teach at Harvard—was seen by some members of his family as a kind of abandonment of his heritage; and while McElwee has often made comic use of his subsequent difference from his relatives, his films, at least up through Time Indefinite (1993), seem to have as an implicit goal a confrontation of certain prejudicial assumptions that northerners often have about his native region.

This confrontation is evident from the beginning of Charleen, as McElwee provides information about Swansea’s unusual background, and his own relationship to her, in a scrolling text:

Charleen Swansea Whisnant taught poetry in the schools of Charlotte, N.C., where I grew up. I first met her when I was a high school student and we have since become good friends.

When Charleen was quite young, she ran away from home to find a new father, preferably a famous one. She was in turn “adopted” by Albert Einstein, e. e. cummings, and Ezra Pound.

She now publishes a literary journal and teaches in the Poetry-in-the-Schools Program.

McElwee’s reference to Swansea’s impressive (and somewhat mysterious) connection with three famous northern intellectuals is followed by a remarkable sequence of Swansea at work in the Poetry-in-the-Schools Program: remarkable, because of her obvious ease and effectiveness at working with African American young people.⁷

In order to model the direct expression of feeling that poetry demands, Swansea asks a young man, Fred, to stand beside her while she pretends to be someone in love with him. “I luv ya, Fred!,” she says to Fred; then, explaining to the class that a sure way to win the attention of a beloved is to enunciate specifically what one loves about him, she says, “Freddy, you smell like a melted Hershey bar, and every time I look at you, Fred, and look into your laughin’ black eyes, it makes me feel like it’s the middle of the night and ain’t nobody in the world but me and you in the dark.” That all this is done in very close physical proximity with Fred, and to the amusement of Fred and the apparent delight of the class, represents a crossing of racial barriers in a manner that, even thirty years later, can seem surprising in any sector of the United States (indeed, for those overly concerned with decorum in the classroom, Swansea’s teaching might seem dangerously “inappropriate” because of the erotic innuendo implicit in her performance of passionate attraction). If we can assume that the fear of miscegenation remained alive in the South of the late 1970s, Swansea’s teaching is a high-spirited defiance of this fear.

At least as we witness it in Charleen, the Poetry-in-the-Schools Program seems dedicated to offering young people, African American young people in particular, an opportunity to broaden their horizons. And judging from what McElwee shows us, Swansea’s mission is to move both the black and the white South in a progressive direction. This is evident during the second sequence of Charleen, when Swansea is the guest at a Bible study gathering at her mother’s home, attended entirely by older white women. Swansea describes an incident that occurred when she was trying to give a group of young people the tools to ask for what they need. When she challenged a quiet, resistant, formidable-looking young man named Peanut, sitting in the back of the class, to “tell me what you want; talk me out of my money!,” he walked up to her, pulled out a knife, and said, “Give me your money!” A fellow classmate tells Peanut, “Nigguh, put up that knife! That’s why we tryin’ to teach you to talk, so you don’t have to use that knife!,” and Swansea explains to the women’s group, “I realized that Jasper had said it better than I’d ever said it, and I think it’s really true, that those youngsters who can’t read, who can’t talk, who can’t talk you into giving them or society into giving them what it takes to live, are gonna click that knife open.” Swansea’s story doesn’t simply confirm her skill at working with African American youngsters, it demonstrates her willingness to educate an older generation of southern white women by sharing what she feels she has learned through her teaching.

That McElwee begins Charleen with these two incidents reveals his admiration of Swansea’s courage and commitment as a teacher and makes clear at the outset that he means to document Charleen Swansea within a context of the problematic racial history of the South as this history reveals itself in the present. The two sequences make clear that southerners (Swansea, McElwee, and implicitly Swansea’s mother) are aware of this history and engaged in confronting the problems it continues to pose. Much of what follows in Charleen involves Swansea, her boyfriend (we learn early on that she is separated from her husband and is living with their two children), and a racially integrated group of young people preparing, then presenting what might now be called a noncompetitive poetry slam to students in a rural school (the group at the school seems with a single exception white). Throughout Charleen it is obvious that the city of Charlotte and the area around it remain largely segregated, but it is equally obvious that there are southerners, old and young, who, with persistence, courage, and good humor, are working to confront the imbalance of power and opportunity that segregation has created.

Having demonstrated Swansea’s commitment to using poetry and her teaching abilities in the interest of progressive cultural change, McElwee focuses increasingly on Swansea’s day-to-day life, and in particular on her relationships with Ezra Pound (she is in the process of selling her Pound memorabilia in order to fund her daughter’s and son’s college education), her boyfriend Jim, her father, her children, friends, and acquaintances, and on her interactions with McElwee and the filmmaking process he has instigated. The racial issue is evident, often subtly, within each of the situations McElwee documents, though it is Swansea’s effusive, engaging personality that becomes the foreground of Charleen. During the time when McElwee was documenting Swansea’s experiences, her relationship with Jim was in flux. She and Jim argue, try to work together on the poetry slam, and following the event, break up, seemingly for good—we learn in Time Indefinite (1993) that she and Jim later married. It is also clear that Jim’s living with Swansea creates some tension with her children, Tom and Ena; Ena in particular, while part of the crew for the poetry slam, enjoys rebelling against both Swansea and Jim.

McElwee’s documentation of Swansea begins as fly-on-the-wall observation, and whatever information McElwee provides is presented in a series of brief visual texts. However, from the beginning, and increasingly as the film unfolds, Swansea engages the camera and even McElwee directly. The first instance occurs during the drive to Swansea’s mother’s home—she talks to McElwee and Michel Negroponte, who took sound for the film, about Tom being ill the previous evening and how excited she is to be visiting her mother. The camera follows Swansea to the door of her mother’s home, and Swansea holds the door for McElwee and Negroponte. Later, Swansea provides a tour of some of the Pound material directly to McElwee and Negroponte, and during later scenes often addresses the filmmakers. Midway through the film, when Swansea says that she doesn’t think she’ll stay in her job, McElwee can be heard asking, “Why not, Charleen?,” and later, after she drives her maid to the bus stop, she expresses her discomfort with her relationship with the woman (“the only person I know in my life who, when I talk to her, I don’t look in her eyes”), then, as the maid gets on the bus, asks McElwee, “Can I go?” McElwee says, “Sure.” In other words, McElwee is “present” within the film in two distinct ways: as the implicit narrator of the visual texts and as an invisible character within the scenes documented. Of course, McElwee would continue to explore and expand this combination of detachment and engagement.

Charleen concludes with two events, one professional, the other personal. The poetry concert is presented successfully in Piedmont: McElwee documents the cast and crew gathering to travel to the concert, the concert itself and the audience’s response, and the trip back. Then, following a final visual text, “After the concert, Charleen said she wanted to be alone. Several days passed. Finally, she asked us to come to her house. She had been in the hospital and now she wanted to talk to us” The film concludes with an extended conversation with Swansea, who has injured her hand by smashing it through glass panels on Jim’s door—after finding out that Jim had been “off for the weekend with a girl younger than me.” Swansea seems devastated by his leaving, but says she recognizes the realities of having a boyfriend much younger than she and claims to be excited about moving on and seeing where life will take her: “I’m gonna love it,” she laughs. The final shot reveals Swansea alone in a classroom, singing “Georgia on My Mind” backed by a limited pianist on an out-of-tune piano.

FIGURE 27. Charleen Swansea and Ross McElwee in the early 1990s. Courtesy Ross McElwee.

In the sequence in her home, Swansea’s lying across her couch, her melodramatic assessment of her embarrassing situation, and her final attempt to put a positive face on the situation come across as instances of Swansea’s typical candidness, but also as a kind of melodramatic comedy, even perhaps an evocation on McElwee’s part of Scarlett O’Hara’s final lines in Gone with the Wind. And this comedic edge is confirmed by Charleen’s singing with the out-of-tune piano. What is clear, especially from our perspective several decades later, is that in Charleen, McElwee had found one of his primary topics—the American South—as well as his Marlene Dietrich, an attractive, highly intelligent and accomplished natural performer, who seemed to defy the conventions of her place and time and who would continue to be a crucial figure in nearly all of McElwee’s most successful films (fig. 27).

It would be five years before McElwee would develop the more complex kind of presence that makes his later films distinctive, in the remarkable Backyard.8

FINDING A VOICE: ANN SCHAETZEL’S BREAKING AND ENTERING AND McELWEE’S BACKYARD

In the Diaries [Pincus’s Diaries] McElwee discovered the basic elements of a first-person observational cinema that he would develop further to the point of transforming the conventions of direct cinema: long-term solo filming; observation of one’s familiars; presence of the filmmaker behind and in front of the camera (he becomes not only a character apart, but he also created a genuine cinematographic persona, a Keaton-like screen double); confessional monologues addressed to the camera (abandoned in his later work); and, most importantly, a subjective and partial commentary in the first person.

DOMINIQUE BLUHER, “ROSS MCELWEE’S VOICE”9

For most of those filmmakers who were excited about the potential of observational cinema, one of the advantages of the new options afforded by sync-sound, on-the-spot filmmaking was the chance to avoid the forms of narration that had come to seem inevitable in documentary filmmaking. Both Ricky Leacock and Ed Pincus avoided narration, as did Alfred Guzzetti. By the end of the 1980s, however, filmmakers working in personal documentary were exploring the possibilities of new forms of narration: not the voice-of-god expert narrator so common in informational documentary, and still quite common today (in nature documentary, for example), but voice-over narration by the filmmaker, commenting on the personal activities represented in the sync-sound imagery. McElwee has become the most famous and the most adept filmmaker with this kind of voice-over, at least within the history of personal documentary—within the more general annals of personal filmmaking, Jonas Mekas’s voice-overs in such films as Walden (1969) and Lost Lost Lost (1976) are also remarkable and memorable. But McElwee’s first major experiment with this form of narration, Backyard (1984) was preceded by Ann Schaetzel’s Breaking and Entering, which was made at the MIT Film Section and finished in 1980.¹⁰

Schaetzel’s voice-over carries Breaking and Entering; without it, the imagery would have little impact. Her narration is sporadic through most of the film, but her opening comment—heard over a sync-sound, first-person shot made by Schaetzel on an airplane—frames the entire film: “I’ve come home in a state of anger. I came back to hurt my parents; I came back to hurt them because they hurt me. It’s really that simple.” Her comments are presented in a quiet, intimate voice, as if she is speaking to a friend. This opening is followed by a brief shot of her arrival at the airport gate, where her smiling father approaches her and apparently hugs her while she is filming: he seems to have no consciousness of his daughter’s anger.¹¹ In fact, at no point in Breaking and Entering is Schaetzel’s anger ever evident to her mother and father (or to her sister and her husband). We are the only ones within the context of the film who know that more is involved here than a family visit.

Schaetzel’s anger is a result of events that took place when she was sixteen and seventeen—that is, fourteen years before this visit to her parents and sixteen years before the release of Breaking and Entering.12 Early in the film, she mentions that when her father found out she had made love when she was seventeen, he was furious, and “he threatened to kill Bob. Later he modified it and was only going to charge him with statutory rape”—the end of this voice-over coincides with her father’s saying, apropos of an entirely different subject, “I just have a continual feeling that there’s a conspiracy to make life difficult.” Schaetzel does not reveal the full story of this past event until nearly the end of the film:

When I was eighteen . . . no, when I was sixteen, I met a boy who I guess he was a man then; he was twenty-one, who was very, a very sexual person. I met him on a bus because I was working during the summer at a magazine office . . . and I knew nothing, really one of the amazing things: I knew nothing about sex. My mother had told me when I was pretty young that sexual intercourse took place when a man put his penis in a woman’s bottom. I didn’t like the sound of that.

But I fell in love with this guy, I fell in love with him, passionately in love with him and my parents forbade me to see him because they, they thought he was too old. . . . So I saw him anyway, daily, for two years, and . . . on my seventeenth birthday, I made love with him for the first time, and it was from the beginning extraordinary love-making. It was simple and powerful.

My parents discovered at one point I think about the time I was seventeen-and-a-half, that I’d been seeing him and that we’d made love. And they sent me to a farm in Belgium for the summer. . . . My mother wrote me letters everyday in which she told me my deception of them was proof that I didn’t love them and that my affair with Bob was sordid.

When I went back to Washington, I couldn’t stop seeing Bob. From then on, I was terrified of sex.

The effect of this event is evident throughout Breaking and Entering, not simply in what Schaetzel says, but in the rather depressive tone of her voice and in the nature of her cinematography.

Once she has landed in Washington, D.C., where her parents live (her father worked in the State Department much of his life and at the time of the filming was a consultant for Honeywell), Schaetzel documents everyday events: her parents reading the newspaper, a dinner party with their friends, her father pontificating about this and that, a small anniversary party thrown by her sister (during which barely suppressed friction between the parents is obvious), conversations with her mother and sister, her father’s visit to the dentist, her mother’s getting dressed to go out. . . . Ann, filming, generally does not play an active role in these conversations, and while the parents seem much involved with appearance (throughout Schaetzel’s description of the incident with Bob, her mother is ironing handkerchiefs), they seem quite oblivious to Ann’s filmmaking. Though neither parent evinces the slightest discomfort in front of the camera, this seems less a form of acceptance than an implicit indication of a smug obliviousness not merely to their daughter’s real motive for recording them but to the revelatory potential of the camera and to Ann’s seriousness as a film artist.

Breaking and Entering concludes after Schaetzel’s mother leaves the house, having told her daughter, “Don’t forget to baste.” After a few brief shots of the now-quiet house, Schaetzel cuts to a close-up of a chicken roasting on a rotisserie, and the sound of the turning rotisserie continues to be audible once the screen goes dark and the credits roll. This sound has several levels of implication: the revolving chicken seems to represent the boring repetitiveness of her parents’ marriage; it suggests the way in which the parents’ intervention in Ann’s love life has continued to affect their daughter and produce the anger (the heat) that they are so oblivious to; and it confirms with subtle humor that Schaetzel’s revenge on her parents is complete: they have been “cooked” by their daughter’s filmmaking without having any sense of what their normal activities and conversations have revealed about them.

In a very real sense, Breaking and Entering is about Schaetzel’s narration. Her implicitly depressive voice-over helps us understand that Schaetzel’s thoroughly anti-romantic black-and-white cinematography is an expression of suppressed anger and depression. The film seems an instance of what Laura Mulvey once called “scorched earth filmmaking”: that is, feminist filmmaking that “consciously denied spectators the usual pleasures of cinema.”13 Breaking and Entering shares an implicitly grim, shell-shocked mood with Su Friedrich’s films up through Gently Down the Stream (1981) and with Sally Potter’s Thriller (1979).

McElwee’s Backyard, finished four years after Breaking and Entering, depicts another trip home by a filmmaker who feels alienated from his family, and it expands on the narrative strategy developed by Schaetzel. After handwritten credits, Backyard begins with a brief précis, spoken by McElwee and illustrated by a series of three still photographs of his father and himself, camera in hand (each photograph separated from the next by one second of darkness):

[first photograph: long shot of the father and son in the McElwee backyard in Charlotte, North Carolina]

Before this film begins, I have to tell a story about my father and me.

When I was eighteen, I left my home in North Carolina to go to college in New England, and ended up living in Boston. Ever since then, my father, who was born and raised in the South, and I have disagreed about nearly everything.

[cut to second photograph: McElwee and father in medium shot, looking at each other]

When I graduated from college, my father, who’s a doctor and conservative Republican, asked me what I planned to do with my life. I told him I was interested in filmmaking, but that there were also several other alternatives, such as working with black voter registration in the South, or getting involved in the peace movement, or possibly entering a Theravadan Buddhist monastery.

FIGURE 28. The third photograph of Dr. McElwee and Ross McElwee from the opening précis of Ross McElwee's Backyard (1984). Courtesy Ross McElwee.

My father thought this over for a moment and said, “Son, I think your concept of career planning leaves something to be desired. But I’ve decided not to worry about you anymore. I’ve resigned myself to your fate.”

[cut to third photograph (fig. 28): the McElwees in medium shot, but closer to the camera than in the previous image, looking at the camera]

I didn’t know exactly how to respond to this, but finally I said, “Well, Dad, I guess I have no choice but to accept your resignation.”

This opening sequence reveals several major changes in McElwee’s approach to documentary and several distinctions from Schaetzel’s approach in Breaking and Entering. For one thing, McElwee makes it immediately clear that this voice-over means to do more than provide contextualizing information about the action within the film. This voice-over posits a relationship between the filmmaker and the viewer that supersedes the film itself (“Before this film begins . . .”). Further, it seems evident in McElwee’s monologue that he has carefully written and practiced speaking his comments; McElwee’s pun on “resignation” feels more literary than anything in his previous films, and his delivery is carefully modulated: when he recalls what his father said to him, he subtly imitates his father’s speech. This commentary is not in service of the visuals, but vice versa; the use of the three photographs is clearly (and humorously) illustrative of what McElwee says, and the changes from one photograph to the next provide a subtle and witty punctuation for the monologue. Further, McElwee’s review of his “other alternatives” not only demonstrates a youthful rebellion against Dr. McElwee and what he represents, it suggests that McElwee can be the butt of his own humor: his listing of alternatives seems amusingly typical of the often self-righteous pretension of youth—pretension that, judging from the fact that we are watching a finished film, seems, even to McElwee in the “present” of the voice-over, a thing of the past.

The most obvious change in approach, of course, is the humor of this précis, humor evident not only in what McElwee says and in his delivery of the monologue but in the way in which the three photographs reveal the two men. McElwee’s father is dressed in a suit and tie, arms folded over his chest, while McElwee is casually dressed and holding his camera, which is pointed at his father as if it were a gun. The wry humor of the précis is confirmed in the opening sequence of the film proper, when McElwee himself is seen playing the beginning of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” on the family piano (playing badly, on a piano that is out of tune); in voice-over he indicates that the one thing his father and he do agree on is the unlikelihood of Ross’s having a musical career.

McElwee cuts directly from the piano playing to a hospital operating room where his surgeon father is cutting off a growth, and McElwee’s voice-over comments, “In the past I’ve felt queasy when I’ve seen my father’s scalpel cut through warm living flesh, but I discovered that, as long as I was filming my father operating, this problem disappeared completely.” He adds, “Unfortunately, I had other problems,” just before his camera malfunctions—the conceit is that his father’s presence has the power, or more precisely used to have the power (the voice-over implicitly postdates the shooting), to interfere with McElwee’s equipment. The film’s third sequence is also comic: McElwee films his stepmother Ann and his father, sporting a yarmulke, listening to a couple singing “Silent Night” to them on the phone, a ritual that “occurs every Christmas.” “For some reason,” McElwee comments, again in voice-over, “my father is wearing a yarmulka, despite the fact that he’s a staunch Presbyterian.”

While Backyard begins with repeated instances of McElwee’s deadpan humor, it is soon clear that the film is about a good deal more than family foibles and a son’s oedipal struggle with his father. During the first piano-playing shot (he returns to this shot twice during the first half of Backyard), McElwee indicates that he had come home “to make a film about the South, which for me meant making a film about my family.” That this is the second mention of the South as a region (the first is Ross’s apparent interest in working with black voter registration), and that it is followed by his introduction of Melvin and Lucille Stafford, African Americans who have worked for the McElwee family since Ross was a child (“As I grew up, I never questioned the fact that black men were taking care of the yard, while their wives were taking care of me”), makes clear that Backyard is about the specific issue of race in the South. If, growing up, he never questioned the fact that blacks helped his family to function, McElwee is certainly questioning this now—or at least using the making of this film to see the reality more clearly than he could as a child.

As McElwee is introducing the Staffords in his voice-over, Melvin Stafford is seen raking leaves, with neighboring dogs barking at him, and McElwee asks whether the dogs always act this way. Melvin says yes and evinces surprise that the dogs never seem to get used to him, before McElwee moves in for a closer shot of the dogs, barely visible through the brush that separates the two yards. Within the context McElwee has created, the implicit evocation of slavery is obvious. Then, we see Lucille Stafford working in the kitchen, asking Ross if he wants some soup, as McElwee’s brother Tom and his friends come in and leave the kitchen (Tom hugs and kisses Lucille). After further shots of Lucille and Melvin Stafford working (Melvin and Ross also discuss Ross’s childhood treehouse), McElwee concludes the sequence with the third shot of him playing the piano: the awkwardness of his playing on the out-of-tune piano now suggests McElwee’s discomfort with his recognition that while the McElwees and the Staffords seem very comfortable, even affectionate, with one another, their relationship is nevertheless an instance of the history of the problematic racial politics of the South and the resulting economic disparity between the two “races.”

During the remainder of Backyard McElwee confirms his awareness of some of the obvious and subtle ways in which racial history has affected the present-day South, and he does this within a particular cine-historical context. By the early 1970s, film scholars were beginning to explore the representation of African American characters in American cinema and to recognize that a relatively predictable set of stereotypes accounted for most roles African Americans had played in commercial films. The first edition of Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks appeared in 1973 and, with its provocative title, established what Bogle, and most scholars after him, understood as the most prevalent stereotypical film roles available to African American actors.14 Two of these stereotypical figures, the tom and the mammy (and her offshoot, the aunt jemima), were conventionally depicted as loyal domestics whose lives were defined by the white families they worked for.¹⁵

It cannot have escaped McElwee as he was editing Backyard, and it does not escape those who have learned about ethnic stereotyping, that Lucille and Melvin seem, at least at first, to fit these roles. In a very general sense, Lucille and Melvin Stafford look like the mammy and the tom in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (which of course is set in the Piedmont region of the Carolinas, where Charlotte is located); and we see them almost entirely within the context of the McElwee household (McElwee never depicts the Staffords in their own home—though he does visit the backyard of Clyde Cathey, a beekeeper who does yard work for the McElwees and their neighbors, and he goes with the Staffords to visit Lucille’s hospitalized brother).16 Further, even though it is obvious that the McElwees are financially well off—they live in an elegant neighborhood, near a country club—Melvin must struggle to start the McElwee’s old lawnmower but doesn’t offer the slightest complaint about this.

Of course, although McElwee’s depictions of the Staffords evoke two of the stereotypes Bogle defined, the Staffords are not actors playing scripted stereotypical roles in a fiction film. They are individuals who are documented doing their jobs and living their very real lives. They are, of course, instances of the southern class system, the twentieth-century inheritance of the history of slavery, but they are neither caricatures nor sociological data; they are living individuals not only in McElwee’s film but in his life. The stereotypes defined by Bogle are normally understood within the history of the representation of blacks in literature and the visual arts, but they must also be understood as exaggerations of particular social roles that real African Americans have played in southern society: while many African Americans have in fact worked as domestics and as domestic laborers in and around white southern homes, and may have acted or even felt grateful to have these jobs, for viewers to conflate Hollywood stereotypes with real individuals, that is, to understand the Staffords merely through the lens that Bogle and other scholars of African Americans in cinema have provided, is to reduce the Staffords to caricatures and to participate in precisely the kind of reductive thinking that produced these racist stereotypes in first place.

Within Backyard the most obvious distinction between whites and blacks, other than the differences in social class, is the way in which the two groups react to McElwee’s filming. It is evident from the beginning of the film that Dr. McElwee is dubious about his son’s involvement in filmmaking and is uncomfortable in front of the camera (though it must be said that he does give his son entry to the operating room and allows Ross to join him in visits to recovering patients). At one point, he looks at the camera and says, “I’ll be glad when that big eye’s gone.” In another instance, as he is being filmed putting up a volleyball net for a party, he expresses puzzlement about what his son uses his “expensive film” to record. Even at the end of the film, McElwee follows his voice-over explanation that he and his father are “getting along pretty well these days” with a final instance of his camera jamming in the operating room—confirming the earlier suggestion that his father’s proximity (and implicit hostility to his son’s career choice) causes his equipment to malfunction. Tom McElwee is also uncomfortable around the camera and hides behind a newspaper when Ross is filming him at the breakfast table. And when McElwee visits the country club kitchen, the (white) man in charge (most of the other employees in the kitchen are black) asks, with a wry, uncomfortable smile, whether McElwee is filming “all the dirt here.”17

McElwee’s stepmother and grandmother do seem supportive of his filmmaking. McElwee tells us that during his visit Ann suggested various activities for him to film and that his grandmother offered to sing some old songs for the camera, but in general McElwee indicates that “I had many contradictory feelings about being home again, and I felt very awkward about filming members of my family.” These contradictory feelings are certainly confirmed when his grandmother sings for him and he mentions that he “was especially struck by the lyrics to one of her songs”:

Lilac trees are blooming in the corner by the gate,

Mammy in her little cabin door,

Curly headed pickaninny coming home from school

Just crying ’cause his little heart was sore.

All the children round about have skin so white and fair

None of them with him will ever play,

But mammy in her lap takes this dusty little chap

And she croons in her own kind way:

“Now honey, don’t you mind what them white childs do,

And honey, don’t you cry so hard.

Go out and play as much as you please,

But stay in your own backyard.”

McElwee was struck enough to use the lyrics as the source of his title, and I would guess that most viewers are struck by this elderly woman’s apparent obliviousness about the implications of the lyrics she sings so beautifully. Her smile when she finishes the song is both endearing and a vestige of the South’s troubling past, as is suggested by the faded quality of this imagery.¹⁸ However, even if we think of the way of life emblemized by the song as fading, the lyrics come through loud and clear and continue to have more relevance in McElwee’s life, and in ours, than we might wish.

Generally, the African Americans filmed by McElwee betray little discomfort with his camera. Melvin and Clyde seem completely at ease with McElwee’s filming, and Clyde is happy to recall stories about his beekeeping. When Ross is filming Tom McElwee in the kitchen, hiding behind the newspaper, Tom asks, “You like the camera, Lucille?” And Lucille responds, “It don’t bother me.” Indeed, Lucille seems to accept that filmmaking is part of Ross; she laughs the first time she sees Ross filming her, but she goes about her business, asking him if he needs anything, even as he films. Early in the film, McElwee explains that his mother “died the year before I moved to Boston; my father has since remarried,” and even if Ross gets along with Ann she seems to be something of a stranger to him, as in fact are his father and brother: early in the film McElwee explains that “since moving away, I felt I’d become a kind of stranger to my own family. My brother had even taken to calling me ‘the Yankee.’” If his family considers him a stranger, however, there is no evidence in the film that Melvin and Lucille feel this way. Early in Backyard, we see Lucille Stafford transferring boxed shoes to a bag, and in voice-over McElwee comments, “Lucille was given the last of the clothing that belonged to my mother.” I read this moment as a suggestion that McElwee sees Lucille not exactly as a replacement for his mother but as what she has always been: one of the women who has helped raise him, and someone who continues to support the person (and the filmmaker) he has become.

An exception to the pattern I’ve described occurs when McElwee joins Lucille and Melvin when they visit Lucille’s brother in the hospital. On one level, this suggests that McElwee feels himself a part of the Stafford family, though in the hospital sequence it seems clear not only that Lucille Stafford’s brother is uncomfortable with Lucille and Melvin but also with McElwee’s camera. After Lucille and Melvin leave the room, McElwee remains for a moment filming, and the brother’s discomfort with his presence becomes obvious. As McElwee later explained:

He makes a gesture, a sideways move of the hand that’s right on the border between being a wave, a perfectly innocent good-bye, and a somewhat hostile shooing me away. This man is very depressed, and a lot of the reason he’s depressed is because he’s oppressed. For whatever reason (I don’t know the specifics of his history), his alcoholism, growing up black in the South, never having had anything of material value, starving himself—that’s what Lucille said; he’s suffering from malnutrition—that gesture is very important; it’s emblematic of an anger that blacks in the South want to express, but can’t really because of the mutual interdependency between blacks and whites, and because of an odd sense of family. And I don’t mean “family” in a sentimental way: it’s not a good situation. . . . Certainly there’s the implication in that scene of the cameraman as one more white exploiter of the black class. I am victimizing the helpless, using them for fodder for my film. If I’d cut the shot before the gesture, I would have cleaned the scene up as far as implicating myself in this idea of white domination of blacks. But then it would have been dishonest. Godard’s comment about every cut being political is very true.19

The conclusion of Backyard reconfirms McElwee’s nuanced exploration of the issue of race in his own backyard. First, he returns to his father in an operating room visually, as his voice-over defines the temporal distance between the footage we’ve been looking at during the film and his commentary about it: he mentions that he goes down to visit his father whenever he can, “and I continue to make films. My brother is now a surgeon and Lucille continues to keep the house in order while Melvin keeps mowing the lawn. And basically, things go along smoothly, pretty much the way they always have.” Immediately after this voice-over concludes, McElwee’s camera malfunctions as his father passes near it, and the last we see of the hospital is a brief blurry image of a black orderly leaving the operating room. Things may seem to be moving smoothly, but clearly the tensions that McElwee experienced during the time when he was shooting are still in evidence.

Of course, “smoothly” for whites is different than it is for blacks: Tom McElwee has become a surgeon and Ross an accomplished filmmaker, so accomplished that he can use those moments when his camera malfunctioned as humor within the accomplished film we’ve been watching. But Lucille and Melvin have gone nowhere. During the film’s final shot we see, from inside the McElwee home, a window that looks out onto the backyard, as Melvin, on the old McElwee lawnmower, rides by. McElwee’s composition of the small window inside his film frame suggests the constrictions of black life in the South, even within households like his own; and the fact that we see Melvin through the metal grid of the window guard suggests that, for all his family’s good will toward the Staffords and African Americans in general (MCELWEE: “I’m told that when my father set up his practice in Charlotte . . . he was the first doctor in the city to have a desegregated waiting room”),20 life in the McElwee backyard remains a kind of prison for them.

DOPPLEGÄNGER: SHERMAN’S MARCH

He said, “You can’t be in love and be in this business.”

UNNAMED FILM DIRECTOR, AS REPORTED BY PAT RENDLEMAN²¹

In his canonical meta–short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ernest Hemingway uses an unusual narrative strategy.²² “Snows” charts the demise of Harry, a writer whose African hunting safari has been interrupted by a serious infection that has developed from an untreated scratch; as he lies in his tent on an African plain, he is dying of gangrene. As Harry drifts in and out of consciousness, he remembers a series of events that he had never gotten around to writing about, and he realizes that he has failed as a writer because he has allowed himself to become distracted (by wealth and fame) from doing justice to his gifts. Of course, most readers of “Snows” will remember that Hemingway himself was a devotee of hunting in Africa, and a good many of those who have written about the story have drawn comparisons between Harry and Hemingway. What is unusual about the story’s narrative strategy, however, is the way in which it offers Harry as an example of literary creativity gone awry within a story that demonstrates its author’s literary creativity going full bore. Hemingway uses italics to present the various events that Harry feels he should have written about, not so much as a way of calling attention to these events as memories (other memories, memories implicitly not worthy of becoming literature, are not italicized), but rather calling attention to the fact that while Harry did not write about these events, Hemingway did; indeed, for anyone familiar with Hemingway’s career, the italicized passages in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” evoke the italicized chapters that separate the longer stories in his first important book, In Our Time (1925). As Hemingway said in Green Hills of Africa (1935), the nonfiction account of his own 1933 safari, “The hardest thing” for a writer, “because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done.”23 In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Hemingway uses Harry to dramatize the dangers that time can pose and demonstrates, through his completion of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that it is possible to resist the moral and aesthetic corruption that destroys Harry’s career. Harry is the writer Hemingway might have become but has not.

In Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South during an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (1985), McElwee uses a similar strategy, but for a documentary comedy. He creates a Ross McElwee character, a character obviously based on his own experiences, who seemingly fails to achieve his goals, but within a film in which McElwee demonstrates, as director, that this Ross McElwee character is not the only Ross McElwee we need consider. McElwee’s double presence as director and character is set up as the film begins. First, we see a map of the American South and hear what seems to be a traditional voice-of-god narrator who provides a brief description of Sherman’s “march to the sea” during 1864, leaving “a path of destruction sixty miles wide and seven-hundred miles long.” That some aficionados of documentary will immediately recognize that this is Ricky Leacock’s voice provides an in-joke: Leacock, as McElwee has explained, “pioneered a kind of filmmaking in which narration, didactic narration at any rate, was to avoided at all costs.”²⁴

At the conclusion of Leacock’s opening narration, we hear McElwee himself ask Leacock, “Do you want to do it once more?,” and Leacock’s response: “Do it again. Yes.” This has a variety of effects. First, it reveals that the supposedly disembodied, voice-of-god narrator is in fact an actor, performing the role of expert; and second, it makes clear that McElwee is in charge of this process. As a result, when McElwee subsequently begins his own narration, with “Two years ago, I was about to shoot a documentary film on the lingering effects of Sherman’s march on the South,” we understand both that this is the voice of the film’s director and that, like the immediately previous Leacock narration, this one is a performance by an actor (McElwee himself) who is implicitly directed. That this is the case is evident in McElwee’s suggestion that he was working on a documentary on Sherman “two years ago.” At first we may understand the Leacock narration (and the map and photographs that follow it) as vestiges of this earlier project,²⁵ but even as we imagine that this is the case, we cannot not realize that, whenever this material was recorded, it has become the beginning of the film we are watching. The fundamental reality of Sherman’s March, of course, is that the film that begins to unfold (or has already begun to unfold) as the McElwee character heads South to see his family “to try and begin my film” has already been completed by McElwee, the director. Clearly, whatever frustrations and failures McElwee will be documenting have been recycled into the completed film we are watching (McElwee’s indication that he has gotten a grant to make his film confirms these implications; obviously not everyone is successful in getting financial support from grant agencies).

In his opening narration McElwee explains that the woman he’d been seeing has decided to go back to her former boyfriend and that he is staying in a friend’s currently vacant studio loft, as he is seen in extreme long shot in an empty New York loft, first pacing back and forth in front of very large windows, then sweeping up, then looking into what appears to be an empty refrigerator. This moment provides deadpan humor, in part because it is obvious that McElwee has either directed someone else to film him or he has somehow figured out a way to film himself in long shot as he reenacts activities that he may have originally performed when he came into this loft or, more likely, that he has decided will be adequate to evoke whatever that original experience was. Already, McElwee is present in this scene not only as an actor, and as the person telling us about his situation, but as the person who set up this amusing composition (McElwee seems tiny in this huge space, as “tiny” as his character supposedly feels) and as the director who, much more recently, has edited the film we are watching so that we hear his character’s comments as we watch him. This prelude to the body of Sherman’s March—the title and director credits appear immediately after McElwee’s first voice-over concludes—has much the same function as the prelude to Backyard. In both cases, McElwee’s introduction of himself creates a larger (implicitly directorial) context for the actions of McElwee as character.26

In the sequence that follows the opening credits, McElwee develops both his McElwee character and our consciousness of him as director, confirming the comic mood evident in the scene in the New York loft—and beginning the articulation of the complex approach that made Sherman’s March a breakthrough not only for McElwee but for autobiographical filmmaking. In voice-over McElwee introduces us to his family as they walk through the woods to attend a picnic and Scottish festival at a resort. McElwee films his sister and brother, then his father, and sets up the basis for the action that follows in a voice-over: “For a long time, the consensus among family members is that what I really need to do is find what they call ‘a nice southern girl’. . . . They’re on vacation in the mountains of North Carolina and they’ve invited me to go with them to a picnic and festival. They’ve also invited a number of family friends and their sons and daughters—mostly, it seems, daughters.” This voice-over, like the earlier one, has a doubling effect, first, because McElwee refers to his family as “they,” even though he is with them on this vacation (he could of course have said, “We are on vacation”—though, as a filmmaker Ross is not); but also because the voice-over is superimposed with McElwee’s sync–sound recording of the family walking through the woods: we hear his voice-over just after he says, “Hi, sis!,” and “Where’s dad? Oh, he’s way back there.” That is, McElwee is present simultaneously as a character within the action and as a commentator on the action.

Further, as Dominique Bluher has said, this and subsequent voice-overs add a doubling effect as a result of McElwee’s unusual use of the present tense: “Whereas McElwee writes and records the commentary during editing . . . the commentary is written in the present tense”—what Bluher calls a “past-present”: “More shrewdly, the manner of dating or using temporal deixis, creates an effect of coexistence, as if he were commenting on the images for viewers during the projection of the film in a movie theater. . . . In this manner, three presents superimpose themselves one on top of the other: the past-present (images), the present-present (speech utterance), and the future-present (projection); or, from another perspective, two pasts (shooting and the recording of voice-over) actualize themselves in each new projection.”27 I would add an additional “present”: the present when McElwee brought the images and the speech utterances together in the editing. Precisely at the statement, “mostly, it seems, daughters,” McElwee cuts to a line of young women walking through the woods, which is amusing because of McElwee’s precise timing. If, on one hand, we see McElwee, within the present of the film’s action, somewhat at the mercy of his family, the obvious wit of his cut to the young women filing past his camera is evidence of his total directorial control over what we are seeing and hearing.

The deadpan survey of the almost ludicrously phallic Scottish games, “various demonstrations of strength and virility,” that follows at the picnic seems to confirm the idea that McElwee himself is not strong or virile. But again, regardless of the self-effacement he performs in the action or draws our attention to in his voice-overs, it is clear that ultimately McElwee is in complete control of what we are seeing and how we are seeing it. This simultaneous development of the McElwee character as a bit of a sad sack about whom his family is concerned and of McElwee’s considerable wit as director continues throughout Sherman’s March and evokes a certain tendency in 1920s American film comedy, and in particular—as Bluher has suggested—Buster Keaton, who, like McElwee, often played self-effacing roles within films over which he had virtually total directorial control. The embarrassments and dangers Johnny Gray experiences in The General (1926), for example, are funny because, and only because, we understand that Buster Keaton created these experiences for the character he plays and that he survived his dangerous stunts and completed this remarkable film.

During the sequence after the Scottish games, McElwee takes advice about his love life from his sister Dede and subsequently attends a fashion show with his stepmother Ann, where one of the women modeling clothing is “a childhood sweetheart of mine, someone I haven’t seen in over twenty years.” These two events introduce another subtle but crucial aspect of McElwee’s approach. The conversation with Dede takes place in a canoe, as Dede paddles while making suggestions about how McElwee might “tidy up” and dress more carefully to attract women. Dede wears sunglasses so that it is difficult to see precisely where she is looking, and we understand the conversation as Dede talking with McElwee-as-the-camera. However, during the next two conversations—the first with his stepmother Ann; the second, with Mary, the childhood sweetheart—McElwee is holding the camera so that it is to the right (and slightly below) where we assume his face is, so that when Ann tells McElwee that she has planned to attend the fashion show, she looks to the left of the camera, at McElwee. That is, the gaze of McElwee’s camera is quite distinct from his gaze as a character within the action. The same is true, but even more dramatically, when he meets Mary at the fashion show: Mary looks to the left of the camera at Ross, who judging from her gaze, is standing up, and the camera captures the excitement of the reunion from below. After they greet each other, Mary asks what McElwee is doing, and he responds, “I’m making a film about Sherman’s march to the sea.” Mary sees this as a joke, but they agree to meet each other later. During their subsequent conversation, the same visual situation is created: Mary talks with McElwee, looking to the left of the camera, which provides us with an oblique angle onto the interchange.

This unusual strategy has a variety of effects, the most obvious of which is to create humor through the very awkwardness of McElwee’s conducting a social interaction (including a hug at the beginning of the reunion and kiss good-bye when Mary leaves the resort) while carrying a camera and recording equipment. But there are more subtle and suggestive implications as well. That the camera literally provides an angle on these situations different from the one experienced by the McElwee character confirms the doubling effect evident in other ways earlier in the film: there is McElwee the character and McElwee the filmmaker—a filmmaker who knows as he is shooting that, whatever else is going on, he is in the process of making a film. That is, McElwee is automatically somewhat detached from the emotional involvements that his character seems to be experiencing. The separation of the McElwee character’s gaze from the gaze of McElwee’s camera remains obvious in nearly every important interchange in Sherman’s March, and the few exceptions to this pattern prove the rule. Of course, many filmmakers who have filmed within events have carried their cameras on their right shoulders, and during interviews their subjects have looked slightly to the left of the camera’s gaze. McElwee’s distinctive exploitation of this device, however, gives it a complex psychological dimension.

McElwee’s use of the split gaze confirms the implicit doubling evident in the voice-overs, when McElwee seems to be speaking to us even while he is engaged in the film’s action. While we understand that it is McElwee’s camera that is viewing his conversations from a different angle than he himself has, the effect is that we seem to be present at these events, experiencing them from the camera’s position. Like his speaking to us in voice-over, this positioning of the camera creates the sense that we are McElwee’s confidants (as we are Schaetzel’s confidants in Breaking and Entering), intimates who are present during his experiences, and in many cases, closer to him, both physically and emotionally, and often politically, than those we see him speaking with. This becomes particularly evident during McElwee’s subsequent interactions with Pat Rendleman and Dede’s friend Claudia, the next two women McElwee meets on his march through the South.

This sense of the two Ross McElwees and the film’s positioning of the viewer as director McElwee’s confidant and partner are confirmed during several extended monologues that McElwee delivers to the camera in voice-over and in person. After Pat Rendleman leaves for Hollywood, McElwee, lying in a motel room bed, complains to the camera about his situation(“Having two large empty beds is twice as depressing as having one large empty bed”) then, as we see a shot of the moon, he remembers his experience in Hawaii as a child, when he and his family saw the white flash of the Crossroads nuclear test from eight hundred miles away: “We could see the ocean sparkling for miles out on the horizon, and behind us, Honolulu was as visible as if it were broad daylight. This flash gave way to a lingering lime green which then faded to a sort of deep dark red, and then finally, the stars and moon started to come back out through the redness. No one on the beach said anything.” The bedroom scene, of course, presents the sad sack McElwee, but the memory of the nuclear flash functions on a different register: McElwee’s elegant, sobering description suggests the immensity of the Crossroads test; whatever humor is created by his bedroom scene complaint is overshadowed by this memory, and it sets the stage for his complex response to events that occur later in Sherman’s March.

McElwee’s most memorable on-screen monologue occurs the night after a costume party McElwee attends with Claudia and her daughter Ashley. Dressed as a Union officer, McElwee talks about the good time he had at the party, then provides some history of Sherman, revealing the complexity of the general’s feelings about the South (he had lived in the South before the Civil War, then at the end of his campaign offered the South very generous terms at the surrender).28 At the beginning of the monologue, McElwee says, “I have to be quiet . . . because my father is asleep upstairs, and I think he already has enough questions about the validity of my film project without seeing me dressed up like this, talking to my own camera, so I have to be quiet.” McElwee repeatedly looks over his shoulder while he is speaking to the camera, as if afraid of being interrupted, and the effect is that we seem to be taking part in a secret conversation with him. Within the action of the film, he is speaking to the camera, but within the larger context of the finished film, he is in fact speaking to those of us who are watching this scene: even as he plays the role of the nervous son, McElwee is fully aware that he is speaking not just within the present but to the future viewers of the film he is directing.

McElwee’s development of a complex relationship with the viewer occurs just as his tour of the South in search of love (and for the remnants of Sherman’s military campaign) is getting underway. The first potential girlfriend is Pat Rendleman, whose narcissism and apparent inability to imagine how she might appear to those who will watch McElwee’s film make her a comic character. Rendleman’s performing her cellulite exercises for the camera (and saying that “I’d do them a lot better if I had on some underpants”) keeps the McElwee character awake that evening (“I keep wondering how I should have responded to Pat’s comment about not wearing any underpants; I mean, that’s not like telling someone that you’re not wearing any socks”), and provides the Sherman’s March audience with laugh-out-loud humor. Rendleman’s remarkable ability to make a fool of herself on camera is confirmed when she describes the screenplay she plans to write: in the movie she imagines, she becomes the best actress in the world in a love scene “comparable to Romeo and Juliet”; she moves to a South Seas island where she founds a think tank and cures cancer, and when her jealous “Tarzan-lover” beheads her, her head arrives in Hollywood to address the planet. The doubling of McElwee as actor and director is nowhere more obvious than during the Rendleman sequences. As a character, McElwee pretends to be fascinated, even infatuated with Pat—and while this may be the case, it is only in the sense that Rendleman is the perfect subject for the comedy McElwee the director is making. As inventive as McElwee is as a writer (his voice-overs are consistently witty, intelligent, and carefully researched), he could never have written the lines that Pat Rendleman provides him with. It is a tribute to his abilities as an actor, in fact, that he can listen, seemingly with serious interest, to Pat’s description of her screenplay and stay engaged with her as she subsequently pursues her career in Atlanta and leaves for Los Angeles.

McElwee’s interactions with Claudia and her daughter Ashley are not material for the kind of humor that Rendleman creates, but the people Claudia introduces him to (an evangelist who sees the coming destruction of the planet as a temporary stage on the way to the Second Coming and several survivalists who are in the process of setting up a compound in the mountains where they’ll be able to weather a nuclear holocaust—it includes a tennis court) are material for grim amusement (fig. 29). Again, the McElwee character pretends interest in what these men (and Claudia herself, who provides McElwee with a tour of her fallout shelter) believe, in the service of director McElwee’s determination to make these people part of his portrait of the modern South. The description of the Crossroads test that precedes McElwee’s visits to Claudia suggests the immense scope of even a single nuclear detonation, rendering these survival plans as childish as Ashley’s dollhouse. During Sherman’s March, McElwee’s creation of his often diffident character is more than a means for creating humor; it allows him to function as a kind of spy within what would otherwise be hostile territory for a northern intellectual. Obviously, it would be something of a stretch to call Sherman’s March an ethnographic film, and yet, McElwee’s lovelorn character is in large part a disguise that allows him to create a memorable and intimate panorama of a region of the country and the people who live there that can seem as surreal as the worlds we visit in Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds and Deep Hearts.

FIGURE 29. Claudia’s survivalist friend speaks with McElwee as he films, in Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1986). Courtesy Ross McElwee.

During the remainder of Sherman’s March, McElwee’s interactions with southern women vary a good deal, both in terms of his feelings for these women and in the ways in which the film depicts these relationships. None of the young women we meet after Pat Rendelman is absurdly comic in the way Rendleman is, and in certain instances McElwee does in fact develop feelings, or revisits earlier feelings, for these women. His visit to Winnie on Ossabaw Island, for example, is full of humor, but not at her expense. Unlike the other women McElwee has met, Winnie is an intellectual, a linguist working on her Ph.D. When McElwee asks her to discuss her work on camera, she responds, “I can’t explain the theory of linguistics in two and a half minutes; that’s ridiculous!” But she and McElwee talk at some length about linguistic concepts (a series of jump cuts humorously suggests both Winnie’s willingness to talk at length about her work and McElwee’s growing interest in Winnie), leading to his asking her how it is that she always got involved with her instructors and professors. Winnie, embarrassed, replies, “You’re really fascinated by someone who can talk well and think well about the things that you find most interesting. For a very long time I thought the most important things in life were linguistics and sex. It’s easy to see how one would get involved with a linguistics professor.” McElwee moves in for an extended stay, and soon is describing to Winnie his own research on Sherman, which Winnie engages, just as he has engaged her linguistics research. Not surprisingly, McElwee soon feels that he’s “stumbled into Eden.”

During McElwee’s conversations with Winnie, his camera doesn’t take a separate angle from the McElwee character.29 Here, character and director merge, and a real relationship is formed. We learn later—when McElwee returns to Ossabaw Island after an extended stay in Boston where he has taken an editing job—that Winnie has moved on from the sexual relationship they had been sharing by the end of his first visit. In other words, even when McElwee has achieved a relationship, his commitments as a filmmaker have taken precedence.

McElwee next visits ex-girlfriend Jackie. Like Winnie, Jackie is not material for McElwee’s humor, in part because her commitment to antinuclear work seems a more sensible response to the threat of nuclear war than building fallout shelters or mountain hideouts and also because she is clearly a committed and energetic art teacher at a public school in Hartsville, South Carolina, where her students seem to be primarily African American. Jackie is reluctant to talk with McElwee about whatever their former relationship has, or has not, meant to her, and when they do have a moment alone together, it is clear that Jackie is in no particular hurry to fall in love: “I think it’s all more trouble than it’s worth.” When McElwee suggests that she’s “become cynical in her middle age,” Jackie replies, “Yeah, haven’t you?” If Jackie is more fully involved in her political concerns and her teaching, and in her plans to move to California, than with her love life, McElwee is more fully involved with his filmmaking than with searching for a mate, even when he pretends that he is searching, which is, in fact, not far from cynicism.³⁰

After a brief interlude when McElwee talks with a would-be Burt Reynolds stand-in and a visit to a historical exhibit that emphasizes that the Civil War was a testing time for a breed of new and deadly weapons, McElwee travels to Charleston, South Carolina where he reunites with Charleen Swansea, who professes to be bored with his “singleness” and advises him to “forget the fucking film and listen to DeeDee,” a young woman she believes is the perfect partner for him. The meeting with DeeDee reestablishes the split gaze situation, and Swansea speaks probably the most memorable, and most ironic, line in the film. “Would you stop!,” she says to McElwee, and covers the camera lens with her hand; when McElwee says, “Don’t touch that lens!,” she replies, “I can’t help but touch it. This is important. This is not art, this is life!” A moment later, when McElwee films Swansea explaining to DeeDee that McElwee is no longer filming, just turning the camera from one person to another, Swansea’s delusion about what is happening is underlined: in fact, this meeting with DeeDee is, at least for McElwee, art, not life, something that DeeDee may understand more fully than Swansea does.

Throughout this visit to Charleston, the potential relationship with DeeDee seems less McElwee’s focus—both McElwee and DeeDee are humoring Swansea—than Swansea herself. Swansea’s considerable accomplishments as an intellectual and as a teacher, so obvious in Charleen, are invisible in Sherman’s March. Indeed, here, Swansea plays a role closer to Pat Rendleman. Further, unlike Winnie, Swansea seems not only disrespectful of McElwee’s filmmaking, but uninterested in his research on Sherman, even when McElwee tells her that Sherman “painted portraits of his friends in Charleston; he did still-life watercolors of the landscape”—clearly one of the aspects of Sherman that McElwee relates to: he too is creating portraits of people and landscape imagery of the South. What seems implicit throughout the Charleston visit becomes clear when DeeDee and McElwee talk about her commitments as a Mormon and her desire “to bring the priesthood into her home.”31 The Charleston visit ends when Swansea announces she has found still another perfect woman for McElwee, and filmmaker McElwee conveniently runs out of film: what appears to be end-leader creates a kind of cinematic ellipsis.

A visit to Sheldon Church, torched by Sherman’s troops in November 1964, leads to the McElwee character’s assessment of his filmmaking process: “It seems like I’m filming my life in order to have a life to film, like some primitive organism that somehow nourishes itself by devouring itself, growing as it diminishes. I ponder the possibility that Charleen is right when she says that filming is the only way I can relate to women. I’m beginning to lose touch with where I am in all of this. It’s a little like looking into a mirror and trying to see what you look like when you’re not really looking at your own reflection.” As he delivers this voice-over, McElwee is visible in successive long shots, in each of which he is further from the camera, as if to say that for McElwee the director, the value of the lovelorn character McElwee has been playing, this particular reflection of himself, is beginning to diminish. But McElwee’s subsequent visit to Columbia, South Carolina, quickly reveals that he will be staying with the character awhile yet. After McElwee, standing by the Congaree River, delivers a monologue about Sherman’s destruction of Columbia, he steps back and seems to lose his footing in the weeds by the river, then apparently “loses his footing,” when he comes upon Joyous Perrin, an attractive, sexy nightclub singer, performing Aretha Franklin’s song, “Respect,” in a parking lot. As with Winnie and Jackie, McElwee provides no laughter at Perrin’s expense; and while she is certainly attractive, he seems less interested in Joyous as a possible mate than in her commitment to her artistry.³² When Joyous leaves for a nightclub tour in preparation for her planned move to New York City to further her career, McElwee decides to visit one more old flame before returning north himself.

Of McElwee’s relationships with women he knew before beginning what would become Sherman’s March, his involvement with Karen seems the most substantial, though there is no evidence that for Karen their relationship was ever more than an affectionate friendship. Like Joyous, Karen is not material for humor; she is a lawyer and a feminist (we see her marching in support of the Equal Rights Amendment). Nowhere in Sherman’s March does McElwee himself, or at least the McElwee character, seem less mature and a less likely mate: as McElwee says in voice-over, “Bumbling around with my camera, I don’t really know how to film these things and I’m ruining our friendship.” Nowhere in the film is McElwee as filmmaker more evident: after his first conversation with Karen, he films himself with his filmmaking rig in a full-length mirror, the only time this happens in Sherman’s March (a premonition of this self-portrait has occurred earlier: as he hugs Joyous Perrin good-bye, we see McElwee’s back in long shot in a mirror).

Further, during his final conversation with Karen, she confronts McElwee’s filmmaking. Just after McElwee asks, “Why aren’t you in love with me?,” he snaps his fingers in front of the lens to make a slate for this roll of film, and Karen tells him to stop filming. “That’s cruel,” she says. McElwee replies, “No, it’s not cruel,” but Karen is adamant: “It is. Stop.” A moment later he resumes filming, but it seems clear that this is the end of the road, not only for this relationship, but for McElwee’s use of his camera to instigate (or to pretend to instigate) relationships. Our last glimpse of Karen is at a lake, where she turns her back to the camera, saying “Stop it. You stop it.” McElwee’s visit with Karen suggests that his commitment to the role of lovelorn sad sack is running out of gas (like his sports car and the leaky container Cam, Karen’s boyfriend, brings to get the car started), while his acceptance of himself as a filmmaker is becoming more complete.

What remains is an extended denouement that includes McElwee’s visit to the spot in Charlotte where the Confederacy officially died; the serendipitous discovery that Burt Reynolds is in Charlotte and McElwee’s unsuccessful attempt to make contact with the actor (“The production staff informs me that I’ll be arrested if they catch me on the set again”); his visit to the General Sherman statue at the southeast corner of Central Park (filmed by Michel Negroponte); and his return to Cambridge, where he explains that he has gotten a job teaching filmmaking (we see Sever Hall on the Harvard campus, where filmmakers-teachers still have their offices). At Harvard McElwee begins auditing courses, one of them a music history course taught by a young musician, Pam, who McElwee finds attractive. Sherman’s March ends during a concert at Boston’s Symphony Hall where McElwee watches an orchestra and chorus (including Pam) perform Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

That McElwee’s travels through the South conclude with his visit to a monument to the death of the Confederacy is suggestive on several levels. The Civil War involved the dividing of America into two distinct entities and the separation of American history into two eras: before the war, when, as historian Shelby Foote suggests in Ken Burns’s The Civil War [1990], the United States was a plural noun, and after the war, when “the United States” became singular. As he travels the South, McElwee is of two minds: he remains a child of the region he travels, seemingly quite comfortable with his personal history and the people he meets, and he has become a northern intellectual, visiting his native region and exposing its sometimes engaging, often bizarre dimensions. This schizoid identity is expressed in the doubling of McElwee as a character–voice-over and in the doubled gaze of his character–camera. Further, in planning, shooting, and editing Sherman’s March, McElwee was engaged in two separate but related activities: the apparent desire for a romantic relationship and the quest to complete his first feature-length film, a new kind of documentary.33 While, at first glance, McElwee’s concluding Sherman’s March with “Ode to Joy” may seem simply an amusing ellipsis that suggests that his quest for a mate continues, a closer reading suggests that the film’s mock-triumphant conclusion is a confirmation of McElwee’s maturation as a filmmaker: he has been hired by one of the most prestigious universities in the world to teach filmmaking and he has completed the film we have just finished watching.

In her canonical novel, O Pioneers! (1913), Willa Cather depicts two fundamentally different kinds of passion. The romance between Marie Shabata and Emil Bergson, who fall in love and are murdered by Marie’s husband in the midst of their first erotic encounter, represents a form of youthful passion distinguished by its fierce necessity, its sharp desire, and its inevitable brevity. The novel’s other form of passion is represented by protagonist Alexandra Bergson’s creativity in transforming wild land into productive farmland (her relationship with the land is described in more erotic terms than any other relationship in the novel). At the end of O Pioneers! Alexandra does find a human mate, her old friend Carl Linstrum, but it is clear that their friendship is based in large measure on Carl’s recognition that Alexandra’s fundamental commitment is to her creative urge, expressed in her passionate relationship with the spirit of the land. O Pioneers! and Sherman’s March are, of course, worlds apart, but McElwee’s articulation of himself as a double character throughout his film suggests a very similar understanding of the complex nature of passion. In frustration after her failure to instigate a relationship between DeeDee and McElwee, Charlene Swansea complains, “How can you be a filmmaker if you never have any passion!” McElwee answers with his only heated comment in Sherman’s March: “I have plenty of passion.” This passion, however, is not for the women he meets during the film, but, like Alexandra’s, for the creative urge that is fueling the making of this film.

The pretense of McElwee’s search for romantic love in the South is really a vestige of the filmmaker’s youth (at the time when McElwee was completing Sherman’s March he was the same age—thirty-nine—as Cather was when she was writing O Pioneers!). On the other hand, McElwee’s creative passion for making Sherman’s March, which throughout the film always takes precedence over his enacted desire to find a romantic partner, is evidence of his adulthood: McElwee’s “march” through the South is ultimately a rumination on the experience of filmmaking itself as well as a testament to McElwee’s recognition that, whatever else he may be or may become, fundamentally he is determined to be defined, to define himself, not by his family, his native region, his education, or his mate, but through his creative passion as a film director and its results.

NESTING DOLLS: TIME INDEFINITE

While at Brown University, I studied with John Hawkes, a novelist (Blood Oranges, The Passion Artist) who taught literature and creative writing there. I was very influenced by his writing, and by his emphasis on developing a voice in writing. Hawkes’s prose—dark, intense, sardonically passionate—was powerful, and you had the unmistakable sense that it arose from his own life experience. Hawkes’s voice could not be mistaken for anyone else’s. I remember that one assignment he gave us was to write an autobiographical essay, but to write it in a style that intentionally mimicked Hemingway’s style. I remember how uncomfortable it was to try someone else’s voice on for size, and yet how interesting it was to try writing from my own experience. I began keeping a journal that year.

ROSS MCELWEE34

What is relevant is what he himself believed. And there the answer is clear. He believed our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world. . . .

“SOPHIE,” ON JOHN COETZEE, IN HER INTERVIEW WITH THE “COETZEE SCHOLAR” IN J. M. COETZEE’s SUMMERTIME³⁵

I framed my discussion of Sherman’s March with allusions to Hemingway and Cather, in order to draw attention to the literary quality of McElwee’s use of narration and to provide a context for his expanded commitment to narration in his masterwork, Time Indefinite. McElwee’s voice-over in Time Indefinite (1993) is not only more obviously written than the voice-overs in his previous films, it evokes the history of the novel, where a first-person narrator in the “present” begins by recalling the events leading up to the action of the narrative and introducing the characters who will be its central figures. This is, for example, how Hawkes’s Blood Oranges (1970) begins, and in that novel Hawkes creates a narrator, Cyril, whose view of the events he describes seems quite distinct from what one imagines was Hawkes’s own. If the narrator of Time Indefinite is far less morally problematic than Cyril, his relationship with the viewer is equally complex. Few documentaries, few films of any kind, have used narration in more interesting ways and with more subtlety than Time Indefinite.

During the opening moment of the film, a continuous 37-second shot of a North Carolina beach, shot from a pier, it is clear that in Time Indefinite McElwee’s voice-over narration will be even more significant than it is in Backyard and Sherman’s March. The image of the beach is the background for McElwee’s introduction, and only begins to take on meaning as we listen to what McElwee says. He explains, “Every summer since I was a kid, my family has gathered here on the coast of North Carolina for a weeklong reunion,” as we see two young boys pushing bicycles up the beach, and by the time McElwee indicates that his family has never known “what to think of the fact that I moved north, and even more strangely, took up documentary filmmaking,” we have noticed the tiny shadow of the filmmaker, visible within the larger shadow of the pier—his shadow seems to image the isolation he has often felt because of his filmmaking.

On the other hand, Time Indefinite makes clear from the outset that, however detached from his family he may have felt in the past, McElwee has accepted himself as filmmaker (the considerable success of Sherman’s March probably had much to do with this), and he has come to understand that filmmaking is a crucial part of family itself. His presence as filmmaker is explicit from the start, and it is clear that his family has accepted his filmmaking (his father for the first time seems interested in using McElwee’s camera, presumably to record his granddaughter, Ross’s brother Tom’s child). While McElwee’s visual portrait of himself as filmmaker in a mirror might be said to begin the denouement of Sherman’s March, here we see him with his filmmaking equipment during the film’s opening sequence, being videotaped by his stepmother, Ann: “I’m sure I must look a little strange to Ann as she frames me in her viewfinder. I mean, at this particular moment, I’m not exactly blending in with the rest of my family” (not only is McElwee outfitted in a professional sync-sound rig, he is dressed entirely in black, his “negative wardrobe,” as McElwee’s father calls it). However distinct from his family McElwee may be as a professional documentary filmmaker, however, it is clear that motion pictures have become an essential element in these family reunions. This may be the first family reunion McElwee has filmed, but even if he were not present, it is clear that this family ritual would be recorded by Ann’s video camera and by McElwee’s uncles, Fred and “Super-8 Nate.”

From the beginning of Time Indefinite McElwee’s voice-over relationship to the viewer, like his presence as filmmaker, is more complex than in Backyard or Sherman’s March. As is true in these earlier films, the viewer is McElwee’s implicit confidant, but during the opening sequence of the film, he withholds information from us. After bringing us to the family reunion and introducing his immediate family members, he comments, “I guess in some ways I’ve always felt more comfortable filming the family, rather than starting one myself, and in fact today I’ve decided to begin shooting a new movie—sort of a home movie—and my filmmaking partner, Marilyn, has come down south to help me.” That Marilyn is already a good bit more than his filmmaking partner becomes evident almost immediately, but for the moment we, like his family, are in the dark about this. McElwee assembles the family for a group shot, calls for their attention, and says, “As long as we have you all gathered here, I thought we’d make this announcement that Marilyn and I are getting married!” That we are finding out about his engagement to Marilyn at the same time as the family suggests that we are intimate with this McElwee narrator, but in a different way than we are with the McElwee narrator in Sherman’s March: intimate in a more familial sense.

That McElwee has come to see filmmaking as a crucial dimension of family is confirmed not only by his assembling the family so he can film their reaction to his announcement but by what happens when his camera battery dies immediately afterward: McElwee presents excerpts from Ann’s decision to videotape “background information on how her stepson actually took the momentous first step on the road to marriage.” Ann too is using the act of filming to create family history—perhaps even to become more intimate with her in-laws and in particular to her somewhat distant stepson Ross.

As director of Time Indefinite, McElwee does not assume that viewers are familiar with his earlier work (even though in several instances his introductory comments will have special meaning for those who have seen Backyard and Sherman’s March); after introducing his family, he proceeds to review his history as a filmmaker by recycling excerpts from earlier films, beginning with shots of Tom McElwee, then Lucille and Melvin Stafford, and (after a shot of his father and Ann watching a tennis match that was not used in those earlier films) Dr. McElwee, from Backyard, followed by several excerpts from Sherman’s March—his sister giving him advice on how to dress, Charleen introducing him to DeeDee.36 This introductory review of McElwee’s cinematic depictions of his life up until he begins to shoot this new “home movie” continues with imagery recorded during the time McElwee was getting to know Marilyn and shots recycled from the film he and Marilyn subsequently made together about the Berlin Wall: Something to Do with the Wall (1990). As Marian Keane has said, McElwee’s films have come to “compose an oeuvre and call for being studied as such, for their connections and revelations of each other,” and by the completion of Time Indefinite this process is well underway.³⁷

Having created a general context for the action of Time Indefinite, McElwee reviews the series of events that followed his marriage proposal to Marilyn. Time Indefinite breaks down into to three general sections: the buildup to the marriage and the couple’s first pregnancy; the miscarriage and the sudden deaths of McElwee’s grandmother and father and McElwee’s attempts to deal with his loss; and the final recovery from loss. During the first section, McElwee combines on-the-spot recording of events (getting the marriage license and the blood test, Marilyn’s gynecological exam, talking with the printer who will do the wedding announcements, visiting Ricky Leacock, the bachelor party, talking with the wedding florist, the marriage itself, McElwee’s visit to his grandmother to tell her about his marriage, the announcement of Marilyn’s pregnancy to her parents, the move to a larger apartment, and the couple shopping for baby furniture) with recyclings of filmed imagery (old home movies of Ross McElwee and his parents, shot by Uncle Fred, and Super-8 film of McElwee’s first kiss, shot by Super-8 Nate; a shot from Something to Do with the Wall; imagery of a graveyard for children that McElwee recorded on a trip to Mexico with Marilyn).

Humor is provided by the reactions of people to McElwee’s filming and sometimes by the very fact of his filming (during Marilyn’s gynecological exam, for example), and foreshadowing, by the imagery of the children’s graveyard; but McElwee’s narration consistently elaborates on what we see, providing context and insight. It is clear that filmmaking has become the way McElwee engages the life around him, as well as his family history. He focuses on his uncles and stepmother, who, like him, are dedicated to recording the family; his wife is a filmmaker and his collaborator; and his friends are filmmakers: his bachelor party is “mostly other filmmakers” (including Robb Moss and Steven Ascher). During the moments before the marriage, McElwee negotiates with Marilyn for a few more minutes of filming, and the wedding itself is documented by McElwee’s friends (Ascher shot the imagery and Moss took sound). The only important event not filmed is the honeymoon to Italy, but even this Edenic moment is represented in Time Indefinite, by a continuous photograph of an Italian landscape and McElwee’s voice-over—“Edenic” not only because Italy “seemed the most beautiful place on earth” and because McElwee “felt incredibly happy to be there with Marilyn,” but because the use of the still photograph instead of a motion picture image evokes the Edenic timelessness that preceded Man’s “fall” into time with the knowledge of life and death.

The grandmother’s death, Marilyn’s miscarriage, and Dr. McElwee’s funeral are represented only indirectly—by a moment of the grandmother’s singing, from Backyard; by voice-over and television imagery of Times Square on New Year’s Eve; and by television imagery of the blizzard that hit Charlotte at the time of the funeral, respectively—but McElwee’s attempts to come to terms with mortality are dealt with in detail, and combine on-the-spot recording with periodic recyclings of representations of the past. McElwee visits the family home in Charlotte and talks with Lucille Stafford; he visits Charleen Swansea, who has recently lost her ex-husband (Jim died in a fire he had set in the home they had shared), then his sister Dede in Key West, and finally his brother Tom in Charlotte. In several instances, McElwee’s commentary moves Time Indefinite to a level of complexity and subtlety beyond anything in his earlier work. One of these moments occurs during the visit to Charlotte, when a Jehovah’s Witness comes to the door of the McElwee home. McElwee uses this moment to provide a bit of humor during what is otherwise a dark moment: as the man talks to him about the end of days, McElwee films the conversation, and in voice-over complains that religious witnesses of various faiths find him wherever he is and that by now he “could almost qualify for the Federal Witness Protection Program.” For the most part, we cannot hear precisely what the Witness says, but during a pause in the voice-over we hear the man describe how God’s kingdom “in itself will stand to time indefinite,” and how “that time is very near, in the near future, when this God’s kingdom will start to rule”—and recognize immediately that the man’s words have provided this film with its title. The voice-over continues, and McElwee talks about how his attention is on capturing the lovely light playing across the face of the man and his little daughter, “when suddenly, something he said about thirty seconds ago catches up with me, something about ‘time indefinite.’ It’s such a beautiful phrase, but what exactly does this mean, ‘time indefinite’? I mean the remarkable thing is that while I’m standing here, pretending to be Monet with a movie camera, this man is trying to save my soul. I mean he’s not even asking of for money, or for anything . . . except my attention.”

Implicitly, this moment posits three “Ross McElwees”: the filmmaker focused on getting the exposure right and responding to the conversation with his subtle camera movements; the voice-over McElwee, who is several seconds behind us in realizing the importance of “time indefinite” and who can comment on his own self-involvement and pretension (“pretending to be Monet with a movie camera”), and, of course, the filmmaker who edited Time Indefinite into its present form and knew as he did so that we would hear the phrase before the first McElwee seems to and wonder why this phrase was thought significant enough to be the source for the title. This moment makes clear, or clearer, that time is a fundamental issue for Time Indefinite on two different, but related levels. As a person, McElwee is trying to come to terms with mortality, with the finiteness of all lives and the many forms of loss that result; and as a filmmaker, he is working to understand how cinema might function in regard to mortality, how it can be useful in dealing with loss. His presentation of his conversation with the Witness implies that, while cinema cannot change the fact of mortality, it can allow both filmmaker and viewer to return to what has passed, to reconsider its meaning, and to be attentive to the moment-to-moment incarnation of experience: the physical light on the man’s face, the emotional sweetness of his daughter, and the spiritual sacrifice and generosity that McElwee sees in this man’s actions.

McElwee, continuing to struggle with his multiple losses, leaves Charlotte to visit Charleen and then Dede, neither of whom seems to offer him much relief (neither seems able to put the deaths of their loved ones in the past, and Dede can barely speak about her father for the camera). He returns to Charlotte, more obsessed with death than ever, but still “thinking there must be some way for me to deal with this through my filming.” At the family home, McElwee, for the only time in Time Indefinite, speaks directly to the camera, while simultaneously speaking in voice-over about his own comments.38 McElwee, speaking to the camera, says:

Everything begins and ends with family. I don’t know, some part of me resists that idea. I mean, there’s so much conflict in family, especially between the generations. You drive your parents crazy, they drive you crazy, and then suddenly they’re dead and you’re stunned. First, you’re twisted by their lives, then you’re twisted by their deaths. And then you get to grow up and do the same thing to your own kid.

His voice-over comments:

So, as I’m sitting here, talking to my camera, my mind starts to wander and I begin worrying that I’ve gotten off on the wrong track. I mean, sure, my family and I had our differences, but we did all love one another. That’s actually the problem. You get bound up in family and everyone in it starts to die. The pain just goes on, generation after generation. But I can’t just sit here and talk about all this. It’s too depressing.

Here, we have four “McElwees,” one inside another, like nesting dolls. There is the McElwee who is talking to the camera; there is the McElwee who is thinking about what he is saying to the camera as he is saying it; there is the voice-over McElwee who is remembering his debate with himself at a later time; and there is the fourth McElwee who constructed this image-sound form of shot-countershot dialogue after recording the voice-over.39

The voice-over McElwee continues to counter the McElwee who is recording himself, seemingly increasingly frustrated with the morbidity of the latter’s monologue; and the sequence comes to a close with his voice-over observation that “sitting here staring at my camera, I’ve somehow gotten trapped in a morbid metaphysical feedback loop, and to say the least, I need to break out of it. But still there are these questions that won’t go away. It’s all very complicated,” which is immediately followed by the McElwee who is speaking to the camera, saying, “It’s all very complicated.” What is complicated is not only the issue of mortality, the limited time of all lives, but the complexity of time itself, and of cinematic time in particular, and the ways in which any present includes not only memories of the past but imaginings of the future, and perhaps, imaginings of the past (did McElwee really have this debate with himself during his monologue to the camera?)—even possibly, memories of imaginings of the future (McElwee seems to have thought that talking and filming with his family and Charleen would be of more use than the voice-over McElwee now believes it has). It’s all very complicated.

McElwee’s “morbid metaphysical feedback loop” takes final form, first, in the humor of his discovery of a nest of dead and dying bees and the arrival of the exterminator, and then, during his visit with his brother, who is dealing with an unusual patient: a woman who has lived with a malignant breast cancer for years, but has ignored this gruesome reality because, as she says, “I don’t want to think about myself; I’m Scarlett. . . . I don’t like to worry people.” Tom McElwee explains that, though the woman claims the tumor had only been bothering her for a few months, in fact she must have ignored it for years: “The tumor ulcerated and started draining pus, and you could not be in the same room with her, it was so infected and it smelled so bad.” McElwee asks his brother about their father’s death, about which Tom has no information, then returns to the issue of the woman’s tumor. For 75 seconds we stare at a slide of the tumor, as McElwee explains that

she simply denied she had this thing on her body, pretended it wasn’t there. I mean it’s kind of like death itself. This huge grotesque thing that stares us in the face, but somehow we manage to deny it, to abstract it, which is what happens when I stare at this photograph long enough. And it’s what’s beginning to happen with my father’s death too. I came down here hoping to face directly his death, and death in general. I wanted to somehow corner death with a camera and prevent it from becoming abstract, but now, ironically, this filming of my family is all beginning to feel like a distraction, just another form of denial, and I need to stop.

This momentary visual caesura and McElwee’s use of the tumor as a metaphor for the deaths he’s been trying to come to terms with, and death itself, is the final turning point in the film: a shift from a focus on death to a focus on life (the fact that Tom’s patient actually is not dead but will be going home the next day is a premonition of this shift).

The tumor shot is followed by the most upbeat sequence in Time Indefinite: McElwee’s documentation of the remarriage, on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, of Lucille and Melvin Stafford. For the first time in all of his films, McElwee’s filmmaking is done at the request of someone else (“Lucille asked me if I would do her a favor; she wants me to make a video of her wedding anniversary”). As Lucy Fischer has suggested, this “reverses the pattern of Southern race relations,” allowing McElwee to become “part of their family instead of they becoming part of his.”40 The following sequence reverberates on several levels, not only within Time Indefinite, but within McElwee’s autobiographical filmmaking in general. The Staffords’ elegant remarriage event could not be more upbeat, and it ends with the happy couple, amidst their cheering family, leaving in a limousine. The union of the Staffords, of course, is a model of longevity, a temporary defiance of mortality; but the fact that the Staffords are a southern black family suggests a larger reference: the long, painful, courageous, persistent struggle of African Americans with slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and in the ongoing present, racism and economic disenfranchisement. That the Staffords’ celebration of life, despite all the reasons a southern black family might have for bitterness, lifts McElwee’s spirits is made clear in the direct cut from the departing limousine to a view out the window of the plane taking McElwee back to Boston. As McElwee is flying home, the film presents a final sequence of early home movies of his parents, and McElwee returns to “time indefinite,” redefining it in cinematic terms: “Maybe I’ve been trying to preserve things in the present, somehow keep everyone alive in some sort of ‘time indefinite,’ as my Jehovah’s Witness friend likes to say.”

McElwee’s return home, and “overwhelming desire to be with Marilyn again” results in a second pregnancy and then, a suggestive “filming” of the birth—“suggestive” for its implications for McElwee’s maturation and within the modern history of American independent cinema. Even before the birth, it has become clear that Time Indefinite is McElwee’s attempt to do precisely what his brother’s patient, and his own family members, have not done: refuse to deny disease and death, crucial and inevitable parts of aging. But once this process has become, as McElwee says, “just another form of denial,” he returns to Cambridge; desire is reborn and produces a new life. The “filming” of Adrian McElwee’s birth is a radical departure from virtually everything else in McElwee’s oeuvre: the birth is presented entirely in sound, and the film is without an image for 39 seconds. McElwee explains, “I didn’t film the birth because I wanted to help the midwife deliver him.” For the first time in the film since his honeymoon with Marilyn, McElwee forgoes image making in order to be an active participant in a crucial moment in his, and Marilyn’s and Adrian’s, lives—but in this instance, the only “image” is the empty film frame.

The fact that, despite our not seeing the birth, we are present for it has another level of implication for anyone familiar with American independent cinema. The moment of Adrian’s birth is preceded by a shot of Marilyn, nude, lying on a bed, representing the couple’s anxious wait for this pregnancy to come to term. Marilyn’s distended belly is close to the camera and at one point her hand caresses her belly; as she does so, McElwee’s hand enters the frame and covers her hand in a loving gesture. The birth immediately follows. Within the annals of independent cinema, the most famous film about birth is, of course, Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959). Window Water Baby Moving could hardly be more different from Time Indefinite: Brakhage’s commitment to silent cinema, montage editing, gestural camerawork, and the repetition of particular motifs is evident throughout Window Water Baby Moving. Perhaps the most memorable motif is a close-up of Jane Brakhage sitting in a bathtub, framed so that we see only her pregnant belly, with her hand resting on it. During this repeated shot, Brakhage’s hand enters the frame and covers her hand in a loving gesture that is virtually identical to McElwee’s gesture in Time Indefinite.

Of course, the presentations of the births in the two films are the inverse of each other. Window Water Baby Moving uses visceral visual imagery, depicting virtually the entire process: labor, the baby’s crowning, the baby emerging from the vagina, the cutting of the umbilical cord, and the expulsion and examination of the placenta. In fact, although the directness of the film must have been a good bit more powerful for audiences in the 1950s and early 1960s, when absolutely nothing like Brakhage’s film had ever been seen by film audiences, Window Water Baby Moving continues to be a shocking film for many viewers. It communicates not merely the facts of the birth but also Brakhage’s heightened emotional state: his excitement, his amazement at what birth actually is, and his terror that things might go wrong. Indeed, while Brakhage’s happy face is seen at the conclusion of Window Water Baby Moving (Jane took the camera from Brakhage to record his response), for most first-time viewers this finale is lost in the shock of the preceding imagery.

Brakhage’s commitment to cinema as a visual art and his abjuring of sound in nearly all of his films produced the most remarkable body of work in the history of avant-garde cinema (and a good many contributions to the history of documentary). And while Window Water Baby Moving remains a wondrous and beautiful film, it is also true that it transforms Jane’s body and the birth into a spectacle. Brakhage’s use of close-up magnifies much of what we see, bringing us closer to the particulars of this birth than would be possible even for someone actually present. This magnification reveals and communicates Brakhage’s astonishment and his commitment to our really seeing what had been for so long visually suppressed—but there is a paradoxical dimension to this intimacy. Brakhage has explained that filming the birth was a practical necessity as well as a cinematic challenge: “I really didn’t know if I could go through the birth without fainting. Every time they drew blood on me I used to pass out . . .”; “There was a strong desire on Jane’s part that I be present during the childbirth, and I wasn’t really wanting that burden. I thought I might faint. I rather think I would have had I not been making a film, and something in me knew that.”41 During Window Water Baby Moving Brakhage is both intimately present and detached, by virtue of his use of the camera as a kind of visual protection: as close as it allows us to be to the birth, the camera remains between Brakhage and the birth itself. His subsequent decision to present the birth as a complex, deeply metaphoric montage intellectualizes his visuals, implicitly creating a second form of detachment.

Though McElwee has told me that he was not thinking of Window Water Baby Moving when he made Time Indefinite, I read his presentation of Adrian’s birth as an implicit response to Brakhage’s film. Like Brakhage, McElwee had had his problems with experiencing the physicality of the body. Early in Time Indefinite, as Marilyn and Ross are having their blood tests, McElwee indicates that he is beginning to feel nauseous, and explains, “I’ve actually found that it’s easier for me to watch blood being drawn when I’m filming it, because for some reason if I watch it through a lens, then it seems less real to me, like I’m watching a movie.” Whatever concerns he may have had about being in the delivery room, however, it is clear that McElwee had decided not only to be present at the birth, but to participate directly with it. His decision to tape-record the birth, rather than to film it, allows him to function simultaneously as an artist and a participant-father. Further, by tape-recording the birth, McElwee avoids turning this moment into spectacle; Adrian’s birth is not presented as shocking, but as a normal and fundamentally thrilling experience: we can hear the excitement and happiness of the parents as Adrian is born. Of course, it is only fair to acknowledge that in 1959, the visual depiction of birth could not help but be shocking within a culture that had repressed all elements of the body-as-process: this repression included fathers not being allowed to see, much less participate, in the births. McElwee is the beneficiary of the change in attitudes about birth that Window Water Baby Moving helped to create.

McElwee’s decision not to film the birth sets the tone for the conclusion of Time Indefinite: “I don’t have much other footage from the first six months of Adrian’s life, partially because I felt so amazed by him and so connected to him in such a deep way that I haven’t been able to bring myself to pick up a camera and film him.” And even when Ross, Marilyn, and Adrian attend that summer’s family reunion, McElwee doesn’t shoot film, but instead presents imagery from the reunion that Super-8 Nate’s daughter has made, imagery of family members and the “great wall of babies” with Adrian in the back . It is clear that whatever estrangement McElwee felt during the reunion that opens Time Indefinite is long gone. The reunion is followed by a visit to Charleen, who is seen, for the first time since Charleen, as her intellectually engaging self—she, and Ross and Marilyn, discuss the implications of parenthood in a world where so many babies are starving. For the second-to-last shot of the film McElwee returns us to the pier on the Carolina coast with which Time Indefinite begins; this shot is virtually identical to the one that opens Time Indefinite, except that here, instead of two young boys leaving the beach, we see a man and a woman arriving. The two beach shots are an implicit synecdoche for the maturation that McElwee, as a man and as a filmmaker (again we see his tiny shadow) has experienced by facing mortality. He explains, “So as the first year of Adrian’s life goes by, I film him now and then. It’s a pleasure now, something I enjoy doing, and he even seems to like it. Maybe I’ll eventually make some sort of film about him growing up in the world.” The film ends with a 35-second shot of Adrian, the first image McElwee recorded of his son when he was one week old, and McElwee imagines, “Maybe the film can begin with that first shot of him.” McElwee’s meditation on his son represents an escape from the “morbid feedback loop” he struggled with earlier, and at least a momentary end to the obsessive engagement with his own pain that for a time shattered his identity into multiple, conflicted selves.42

ON THE ROAD AGAIN: SIX O’CLOCK NEWS

By the completion of Time Indefinite McElwee had mastered all aspects of the approach that has continued to characterize his work—his complex narration, his deft amalgam of deadpan humor with poignancy and pain, his reliance on subjective camera, and his use of his friend Charleen, his family, and himself as characters—and in recent decades has deployed this approach in several features, the first of which was Six O’Clock News (1996). While Six O’Clock News does in fact begin with the “gerbil shot” with which Time Indefinite ends (it also concludes with a sequence focusing on Adrian, three years later), the film is not really about Adrian’s growing up but rather the ways in which being married and becoming a father of a young child have affected McElwee’s life—most obviously the fact that “since the baby’s been born, we’re home a lot more now and we’ve ended up watching more TV than we used to, especially the local news.” Of course, the preponderance of television news stories, especially local news stories in larger cities, reflect an “if it bleeds, it leads” assumption about what the public will watch; and from the beginning of Six O’Clock News McElwee uses excerpts of horrific stories, filmed off television screens, as a motif and as the motivation for a new set of filmmaking adventures.

Like Time Indefinite, Six O’Clock News begins by creating a context for McElwee’s autobiographical approach that functions simultaneously as background for any viewer unfamiliar with his earlier work and as a reconfirmation of the cinematically intimate relationship he has created with those familiar with his earlier films. The first of the film’s many brief montages of horrific news stories ends with brief coverage of the damage hurricane Hugo has done to the Isle of Palms off the coast near Charleston, South Carolina, where Charleen Swansea lives. After presenting an excerpt from Charleen, McElwee documents his trip to South Carolina to be with Swansea as she confronts and deals with the damage to her new home. It turns out that, while many homes on the island, including many in her neighborhood, have been leveled, her home has been damaged but not destroyed. Even her papers are intact; she can continue to work as a teacher and editor.

McElwee returns to Cambridge, where the film’s introduction of his approach continues: he records his neighbor and landlord, Barry, who is obsessed with taping episodes of Twilight Zone and other similar fantasy TV series; and McElwee is taped by a local television crew interested in “this guy, meaning me, who was always filming his own life.” McElwee meets Debbie Shapiro and her crew with camera running, and their conversation provides first-time McElwee viewers with some sense of his thinking as well as a demonstration of how television news reporters restage reality to suit their needs: the scene of the news crew arriving at McElwee’s apartment is repeated three times. McElwee, in voice-over, wonders, “Is it any less real that they’re filming themselves coming into my apartment a third time? Ultimately, what difference does it make? I’ll edit this scene for my purposes, just as they’ll edit it for theirs.” McElwee’s unusual work with cinematic time, so crucial in Time Indefinite, is evident again here: his voice-over, obviously recorded after this scene, suggests what the McElwee character may be thinking to himself during the “present” of the television shoot, but the wit of this moment is in our recognition that in fact filmmaker McElwee already has edited the sequence we are watching.

McElwee decides to “somehow punch directly into the territory held by the six o’clock news,” by taking his camera on the road. Suddenly he is at a motel in Mississippi, where he sees a news story about the sentencing of the murderer of Gloria Im and the reaction of her husband, Steve Im. McElwee decides to make contact with Im, who moved to Arkansas after the murder. In one sense, McElwee’s decision to film a person who is a stranger to him (and who is not introduced to him by a friend or family member) is reminiscent of Space Coast (1979), his early collaboration with Michel Negroponte about several residents of Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the wake of the Apollo moon missions (see n. 8), but the tragic loss Im has experienced offers an implicit challenge: certainly the news focuses on such tragedies, but for an independent documentary filmmaker to decide to enter this man’s life in order to cinematically mine this tragedy is evidence of some considerable chutzpah.

McElwee does find his way to Im and the two explore the implications of Im’s tragic loss. At the conclusion of McElwee’s visit, the self-made, successful businessman (remarried, to a former Miss Korea) asks for a final conversation with McElwee, without the movie camera. Im explains to McElwee and his tape recorder that the loss of Gloria Im has shaken his religious faith: Im still goes to church, still believes in God, but has concluded that “God [is] out of control [of] this world; He cannot control the world.” Both McElwee’s interest in finding his way to victims of some of the tragedies he sees on the news and the fundamental issue raised during this first experiment—the rather surreal relationship between tragedy and belief—determine the trajectory of the rest of Six O’Clock News, which is organized into a series of episodes (the film’s earlier reference to The Twilight Zone seems a premonition—especially since McElwee continually finds himself transported to new, and sometimes bizarre situations).

McElwee is next seen in the outskirts of Phoenix, where a devastating storm has destroyed parts of a trailer camp while leaving others intact. McElwee visits the site, talks with several residents, and observes the ubiquitous local news crews recording sound-image bites—McElwee’s ambivalent sense of the news is evident in his voice-over: “If you view enough local news, you sense that there really are thousands of people out there waging battles against their own demons, against fate, even against God. And for better or worse, it’s only the six o’clock news that really acknowledges them, tells their stories.” Unlike Steve Im, the survivors McElwee talks with in Phoenix are grateful to God for sparing them. The sequence ends with McElwee’s wry observation, “I guess life’s easier if you believe that, in fact, God is in control of everything. Or maybe life’s only easier if your house trailer is the one that’s spared.”

A story he sees on cable TV news about an out-of-control brush fire threatening a grove of sequoias sends McElwee to California, where he attempts to join a cadre of firefighters. His Forest Service guide, who explains that “fire really doesn’t know any rules”—one tree may be destroyed while the one next to it is spared—is amusingly optimistic, though by the time they catch up with the firefighting crew, this part of the fire is under control and McElwee reports that subsequently he and the guide were lost for five hours on their way back. McElwee halts his cross-country excursion at this point, disappointed that his trip did not end “with some sort of epiphany, an epiphany about fate and news gathering and reality,” because he needs to return to his family and his teaching job.

During the following months, McElwee teaches at Harvard (a pan of the class reveals a young Nina Davenport, who was an assistant editor on Six O’Clock News) and one day receives a communication from Hollywood producer Michael Peyser, expressing interest in McElwee’s directing a fictional version of an autobiographical film. The major earthquake that hit the L.A. area in 1994 occurs soon after he begins to take Peyser’s offer seriously, and during the news coverage of the disaster, he sees a story about Salvador Peña, who was seriously injured in the quake. When, eight months later, McElwee flies to California to meet with Peyser and to continue his interrupted trip, he tracks down Peña, who becomes McElwee’s next subject.

The use of strange, often absurd juxtapositions of disparate dimensions of reality is a characteristic strategy of surrealist art, and the deadpan surrealist quality of Six O’Clock News is evident throughout the visit to L.A. McElwee intercuts between his conversation with Peyser and Josh Kornbluth (whom Peyser has chosen to play the McElwee character in the proposed film) and his observation of a shoot for Baywatch near the Santa Monica Pier, and his visits with Peña, who is continually described as “lucky,” despite his considerable injuries and difficult economic situation, and whose religious faith seems to have been strengthened by his misfortune. Peña explains, “I think of it as a test that God gave me to see how I would react to the experience. Definitely, it’s the most beautiful thing I now see in myself, that it’s made me believe more in God.” As Six O’Clock News develops, McElwee comes to seem more, rather than less puzzled by the mysterious and often absurdly comic interplay of tragedy and belief. This puzzlement is confirmed in McElwee’s subsequent conversation with Adrian “three years later.”

Adrian asks about McElwee’s microphone—McElwee is filming on Adrian’s fourth birthday—then takes his father on a tour of the “serious picture of God” that he’s just painted. McElwee asks Adrian, “Who is God?,” and Adrian replies, “Up there”; McElwee asks, “Have you ever seen him before?,” and Adrian shakes his head no but responds, “I talk to him though.” For McElwee, whose mixture of puzzlement and skepticism has been a motif throughout Six O’Clock News, this sudden incarnation of belief within his own home seems to be a disconcerting, even chilling discovery, nearly as disconcerting as the tragedy that occurs in the film’s final television news story montage, which begins with “Chaos on Beacon Street in Brookline,” where two abortion clinics have been attacked and several people killed (at the time Brookline was McElwee’s home), followed by an attempted bank robbery and a shootout in Harvard Square, “less than a hundred yards from where I’ve been working every day, editing this film.” The juxtaposition of an intimate, if disconcerting, family moment with the sudden death and destruction revealed in these news stories is the final demonstration of the chaos that, for McElwee, seems to underlie experience.

The implicit angst McElwee feels sends him back to Charleen Swansea for the final sequence of Six O’Clock News, where he films “some good news for a change”: the first visit of Charleen’s granddaughter to her grandmother, on Easter weekend. This is followed by the church service Charleen and her family attend at the predominately black Markham Chapel Baptist Church, where a gospel choir sings a rollicking version of “Ain’t Nobody Do Me Like Jesus.” However frustrating and mysterious the continual interplay of tragedy and belief remains for McElwee, he cannot ignore that the relationship between them is more than just absurd. The exhilaration of the gospel music is intoxicating—though within the context of the film and McElwee’s thinking, it is difficult not to notice the ambiguity of the phrase “do me”!

McElwee’s one place of security within this surreal world seems to be filmmaking—though in Six O’Clock News, one feels McElwee’s increasing sense of marginality and confusion, even as his reputation as a filmmaker is growing. At the conclusion of his visit to L.A., McElwee visits the camera obscura overlooking the Santa Monica Pier (fig. 30). Once a more substantial tourist attraction, the camera obscura building now houses a senior center, and there is little evidence that anyone in the center, or anyone else, visits the camera obscura on the second floor (McElwee must remove a box before he can enter). Within the quiet semi-darkness of the camera obscura room, McElwee senses the wonder of the device and its long history—it’s “the camera obscura of Aristotle and Kepler . . . the concept has been around for centuries”—and his own connection with it: “People don’t realize, the first photographic image was made with a camera obscura. I mean this is how it all began!” After briefly describing how the device works, he films the camera obscura screen, commenting, “This is so beautiful. It’s like looking at some strange planet. There’s the pier where they were shooting that TV show a few days ago. The image is so strange, off axis, and it all seems so fragile, the people and palm trees, the buses and buildings.” This description is as relevant to Six O’Clock News as it is to the camera obscura image itself, and the subtle poetic flourish at the end of this voice-over is subtle evidence of McElwee’s passion for the cinematic history of which he is part.

That filmmaking is McElwee’s deepest “belief,” his way of coming to terms with the surreality of his world, is revealed at least twice more as Six O’Clock News concludes: first, in his comment during his conversation with Adrian that a spider-like black shape within Adrian’s painting of God “looks like a movie camera”—perhaps only someone fixated on cameras would see this; and finally, in the film’s unusual credit sequence, during which the gospel choir’s performance is intercut with the extended listing of those who have worked on, appeared in, and/or provided support for the film. That this is the most high-spirited moment in Six O’Clock News is suggestive: the credits list virtually the entire community of filmmakers working in Cambridge during the years when Six O’Clock News was being shot and edited, including Steven Ascher, Nina Davenport, Robert Gardner, Alfred Guzzetti, Jeanne Jordan, Dusan Makavejev, Robb Moss, Michel Negroponte, and Richard P. Rogers. This use of the credit sequence evokes the extended credit sequences in Peter Watkins’s The Journey (1987) and Yvonne Rainer’s Privilege (1990), both of which suggest that the experience of independent filmmaking is as close to utopia as one can find in this endlessly troubled and troubling world.

FIGURE 30. Ross McElwee at the camera obscura in Santa Monica. Courtesy Ross McElwee.

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS: BRIGHT LEAVES

The seven-year hiatus between Six O’Clock News and Bright Leaves (2003) was the longest in McElwee’s career to that point, and given the considerable importance of the filmmaking process to McElwee, one can only wonder what accounts for it. In most ways Bright Leaves is of a piece with McElwee’s other autobiographical work—though its particular focus on the history of the tobacco industry in the Carolinas (the “bright leaves” of the title are tobacco leaves)—places the film more fully within the tradition of informational documentary than earlier McElwee films. Beautifully shot, Bright Leaves combines his ongoing fascination with his North Carolina family and his friend Charleen with an exploration of dimensions of the culture of the American South, all communicated through a carefully tuned and timed narrative strategy that positions the viewer as McElwee’s friend and confidant. Like the earlier autobiographical films, Bright Leaves is generally engaging and has a good many memorable moments, especially for those who have become familiar with the McElwee saga.

As William Rothman has suggested, one particularly memorable sequence occurs midway through the film, after McElwee decides to track down some of his father’s patients, part of an attempt to come to terms with the combination of his family’s early involvement in the tobacco business and a later generation’s commitment to medicine.43 He finds his way first to Dooley Strange, whom Dr. McElwee treated for mouth cancer and other ailments; then to a man named Whytsell whom Dr. McElwee operated on the day before he died; and finally to an African American woman who tells how Dr. McElwee “knelt down beside my father’s bed in the hospital. And he prayed with my dad. My father is a praying person. And your dad and my dad were together that night.” McElwee says he has never heard this story, though, as the young woman explains, it accounts for why her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Masseys, called Dr. McElwee every Christmas day to sing “Silent Night” to him. McElwee then cuts first to the Masseys singing “Silent Night,” now for him, then to the sequence of his father (wearing the yarmulke) and stepmother listening to the Masseys singing on the phone that originally appeared early in Backyard. The impact of the sequence is a function of the way in which a present moment seems to transform not only McElwee’s sense of his own past, but—again, for those familiar with his earlier autobiographical films—our sense of our cinematic past. In his best work, McElwee’s sense of time has often evoked a line from Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust: “Yesterday today and tomorrow are Is: Indivisible: One. . . . ‘It’s all now you see. Yesterday wont be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago’”⁴⁴—and never more clearly than here.

Another, humorously memorable moment (this one also interesting because of McElwee’s complex sense of time and timing) occurs during a voice-over monologue about filmmaking: “I feel it’s such a pleasure to film—especially down south—that it almost doesn’t matter what I’m filming. Even just shooting around a motel can be an almost narcotic experience—I mean I don’t want to force an analogy, but come to think of it, for me, filming is not unlike smoking a cigarette. When I look through a viewfinder, time seems to stop. A kind of timelessness is momentarily achieved.” McElwee’s voice-over is accompanied by a shot he is making inside his room at a cheap motel, using a mirror so that we can simultaneously see the filmmaker behind the camera, filming into the room, and, through the window to McElwee’s right, the outside of the motel. The voice-over continues, “I mean I’m so immersed that I don’t even notice the large rat that’s about to slip by in the background there,” as a rat scuttles along the opposite side of the motel. McElwee concludes, “I guess next time I should consider upgrading my accommodations.” Here, the voice-over, recorded sometime after the imagery was shot, and presumably after McElwee returned north and discovered the rat when he was exploring the North Carolina footage, is perfectly timed to contextualize the rat’s creepy cameo.

The presence of McElwee’s immediate family is minimal in Bright Leaves—there are a few shots of Adrian, a brief sequence of a family reunion on the North Carolina coast, and home movie footage, some of it recycled from earlier films—but the film is held together by McElwee’s interest in his family’s direct and indirect involvement with the tobacco industry, and in particular, by his interest in a film that his cousin John McElwee, a collector of film prints and memorabilia, introduces Ross to: the Michael Curtiz film Bright Leaf (1950), starring Gary Cooper, Lauren Bacall, and Patricia Neal.45 John McElwee believes that the original 1949 novel by Foster Fitz-simons and the Curtiz adaptation were based largely on the life of McElwee’s great grandfather, John Harvey McElwee, who competed with rival James B. Duke over the rights to the Bull Durham brand of smoking tobacco. Ross becomes excited over the possibility that his grandfather was played by Gary Cooper, and this excitement instigates an exploration of the McElwee–Duke rivalry and of the tobacco industry in general. The disparity between John Harvey McElwee’s ultimate failure to win the rights to Bull Durham tobacco (though he did amass fortune enough to construct his own mansion and smaller mansions for each of his children) and James B. Duke’s immense success is material for typical McElwee wit: the Duke homestead, a state historical site; the remnants of the Duke tobacco empire in Durham; and Duke University and medical center are presented in contrast to “McElwee Park,” a tiny grassy space with two benches and a broken-down sign that McElwee visits during the film.

There is much to like in Bright Leaves. Its panoramic survey of North Carolina is as effective in revealing the diversity of the South as Sherman’s March; and McElwee’s exploration of the tobacco industry is not only informative but confronts the somewhat surreal paradox that many of those who keep the industry running are passionate Christians who refuse to see a connection between the health disaster caused by smoking and the Golden Rule. As engaging and informative as Bright Leaves is, however, it suffers, especially in comparison with Time Indefinite, from a lack of the personal intensity that is at the heart of the earlier film. Indeed, since McElwee’s references to his nuclear family are primarily to Adrian as a young boy, filmed years before the film was finished (Adrian does appear as a young adolescent in two instances—in one case, assisting his father as he films), one can only conjecture that it had become part of McElwee’s working process not to reveal his family life in his films. McElwee’s parallel between being addicted to smoking and to filmmaking is subtly confirmed near the end of the film during a visit to a tobacco museum when a cigarette-rolling machine, the key to James B. Duke’s success, is seen in operation. The strips of paper look rather like reels of film, and the machine itself looks remarkably like a motion picture projector, implying perhaps that for McElwee autobiographical filmmaking had begun to have more than pleasurable results in his life.

It seems an occupational hazard of autobiographical documentary that at some point what has seemed both an engaging and convenient subject for cinema—the filmmaker’s personal and family life—becomes a limitation. This can happen in several different ways. In some cases, personal documentary filmmaking functions as a kind of cine-therapy, a way for the filmmaker to work through—or at least to seem to work through—difficult times and relationships, as is evident, for example, in Time Indefinite and to some degree in McElwee’s other films. But once the problems with parents, love life, or personal loss have been dealt with cinematically, what then is the autobiographical filmmaker to do?

Su Friedrich’s most powerful films were generated by her concerns about the nature of her mother’s involvement in the rise of the Third Reich (The Ties That Bind, 1984), by her father’s leaving the family when she was a young adolescent and its aftermath (Sink or Swim, 1990), and by what turned out to be the temporary demise of her relationship with Cathy Quinlan (Rules of the Road, 1993), but once she had come to terms with her parents and she and Quinlan were reunited, the interpersonal tension and/or trauma that had energized those films largely disappeared from her filmmaking. From the Ground Up (2007), during which Friedrich explores the process that provides her with her morning cup of coffee, has much in common with McElwee’s investigation of the tobacco industry in Bright Leaves. In both, the relatively intense therapeutic process is replaced by a somewhat less engaging educational process.

Filmmakers may also decide they no longer want to film the difficult relationships and painful events in their lives. Once Alan Berliner had come to terms with his troubled relationship with his father—an implicit subject in The Family Album (1986), more explicitly a subject in Intimate Stranger (1991), and the primary focus of Nobody’s Business (1996)—his next foray into personal documentary was The Sweetest Sound (2001), a film about the name “Alan Berliner.” The result was a well-made, engaging film, but one with a good bit less energy than Intimate Stranger and Nobody’s Business. Berliner’s frustration that he isn’t the only Alan Berliner seems a kind of fabrication of the personal, especially because at the time when he was making The Sweetest Sound, he was going through a divorce: in effect the film seems to have been an evasion of the more deeply painful personal. Hidden underneath Bright Leaves is the mystery of why, despite the film’s ostensible engagement with family, so little of McElwee’s current family life is evident in the film; might his supposed excitement about Bright Leaf in Bright Leaves be a similar evasion?

A final difficulty for autobiographical filmmaking can come from the filmmaker’s family, who might object to being filmed or to having their lives revealed in a film that has a public life. Alfred Guzzetti has pulled his Beginning Pieces (1986) from distribution because his now-grown daughter is uncomfortable with the film; and Robb Moss rarely shows The Tourist (1991) because of his concern about what his daughter, who hasn’t seen the film, might feel about its depiction of her adoption. McElwee’s recent film, In Paraguay (2009), a lovely and deeply personal film about the adoption of his daughter Mariah, was pulled from distribution after a single screening at the Venice Film Festival, apparently because of the objections of his now–ex-wife, Marilyn Levine.

Unlike the late performance artist Spalding Gray, whose work has much in common with McElwee’s, McElwee seems, at least for a time, to have accepted the idea that his filmmaking was not more important than whatever consternation his revelations might cause within his family.46 Gray defiantly continued to expose his personal feelings and experiences even after it seemed obvious that his monologues, his “talking cures” as he often called them, must have created frustration, embarrassment, and anger among those he loved or had loved. The movement away from a focus on family in Six O’Clock News and even more fully in Bright Leaves suggests, at least to me, that after Time Indefinite and the birth of Adrian McElwee, either McElwee himself or Marilyn Levine began to feel uncomfortable with his filming within the family circle and that this resulted in McElwee’s decision to separate his filming from his home life.

ORPHEUS: IN PARAGUAY AND PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY

In Paraguay, finished in 2009, six years after Bright Leaves, was a return to the deeply personal, but it is in large measure an act of nostalgia: it revisits events that occurred during the 1990s, beginning with shots of Adrian McElwee’s fifth birthday party. McElwee explains that he and Marilyn want Adrian to have a sibling and are in the process of adopting a baby girl from Paraguay; they have already named her Mariah. An early sequence of Marilyn, Adrian, and Ross shopping for the things Mariah will need is shot in the same store visited by Marilyn and Ross during Time Indefinite, and Adrian’s curiosity about breast pumps recalls his parents’ discussion about breast pumps in that earlier film, when Marilyn was pregnant with Adrian. The trip to Asunción is at first uneventful, though Adrian’s discovery that the oranges growing on the hotel grounds are bitter is a premonition that the family’s expectation of staying briefly in Paraguay is to be disappointed. The process of adopting Mariah turns out to be complicated; the Paraguayan bureaucracy works slowly, and the family is forced to adjust to a new sense of time. A second premonition occurs as McElwee is changing Mariah’s diaper; he wonders, “Maybe I’ll begin experiencing a more, I don’t know, transcendental way of seeing the world, a way to see things more vividly, you know, a sort of Blake-ian intensification of vision. And anyway, I’m thinking these somewhat rarified thoughts when Mariah suddenly reminds me of the task at hand”: Mariah pees before Ross can get the diaper on her.

As the family’s stay in Asunción lengthens and daily life becomes routine, the film develops a set of thematic and formal motifs. Soon after their arrival, McElwee explains that he senses “a shadow hanging over much of daily life here”: “Maybe it’s because I feel a little awkward being an American here, because I know the U.S. has meddled in the internal affairs of several countries in this part of the world, with disastrous results.” As In Paraguay continues, McElwee periodically adds to a chronological, thumbnail history of the country, which turns out to be “one oppressive dictatorship after another.” A second motif begins just after the incident of McElwee changing Mariah’s diaper, when nondiagetic music is heard (the first instance of nondiagetic music in all of McElwee’s films), and McElwee explains that the piece we are hearing is “The Dream of the Doll” by Agustín Barrios, a gifted Paraguayan musician and performer he has come to admire both for his music and for his dedication as a performer to celebrating Paraguay’s historical roots. Barrios’s lovely, melancholy music is heard periodically during the rest of In Paraguay.

Various dimensions of contemporary life in Paraguay provide other motifs. Early on, McElwee films several young boys selling candy on the streets, and during the remainder of the film, he records (or in his historical overview describes) the many struggles of Paraguayan boys. In Paraguay is as much about Adrian McElwee as Mariah, and McElwee is fully aware of the disparity between Adrian’s privileged upbringing and the poverty of the Paraguayan boys he films and reads about. As the weeks pass, McElwee explores the poorer neighborhoods of Asunción, often talking with the people who live and work there (McElwee speaks serviceable Spanish), conjecturing in voice-over about the obvious class disparities in Paraguay and in so much of the Western Hemisphere. These class disparities are implicit within the film’s many birthday cakes: Adrian’s birthday cake is the first image of In Paraguay, and there is the relatively humble birthday cake at the celebration of the hotel manager’s son’s birthday, the wildly extravagant birthday cake at the July 4 celebration the family attends at the immense American Embassy in Asunción, and the cake in honor of Mariah and the family’s return from Paraguay at the end of the film (in the film’s penultimate sequence, when the family meets with a judge to make Mariah a U.S. citizen, McElwee explains that they “learned a lot about patience in Paraguay,” and the judge responds that this current bureaucratic episode must be “a cake walk” by comparison).

As in earlier McElwee films, the subject of filmmaking itself is part of In Paraguay. As he is filming some boys selling candy to drivers on a crowded street, he wonders to himself whether his presence is helping or hindering the boys’ success; one young woman working in an office good-naturedly tells him, “Don’t film this! I’m embarrassed”; and later in the film it is clear he is filming surreptitiously in the Asunción courthouse. As the weeks in Paraguay drag on, McElwee mentions that his filmmaking is adding to the tension: in one instance, Marilyn says, “Ross, that’s enough! Bye!,” as he is filming dinner preparations (McElwee puts the camera down, but with it running). Near the end of the family’s stay in Asunción, Adrian is badly scalded when he spills hot water on his feet, and a few days later, assuming that Adrian is on the road to recovery, McElwee takes the camera to the hospital to film Adrian’s dressings being changed. Adrian’s screams of pain and the horrific close-up of the boy’s burned feet come as a shock to both McElwee and the viewer. In a strange way, the remembered trauma of this moment for Adrian and presumably for Ross filming is demonstrated by the sudden interpolation of a shot from The Wizard of Oz (1939) of Dorothy clicking the ruby slippers together and chanting “There’s no place like home.” Within the larger history sketched by In Paraguay the shot of Adrian’s burns is an expression of the historical agony of boys in Paraguay and the culmination of the frustration and repressed anger the family’s stay in Asunción has produced.

In at least one instance, the frustrating routine of life in Paraguay without phones, computers, and many of the other accoutrements of modern life in a wealthy nation also seems to instigate a productive boredom—and the loveliest sequence in In Paraguay. About an hour into the 78-minute film, McElwee explains, “Maybe I’m losing it, but I begin experimenting, filming very long shots in which not much is happening”—as we watch a beautiful minute-long shot of light and shadow on a wall. This shot is followed by close-ups of Mariah holding a toy hourglass, light playing on her face, then by a series of lovely images of light and shadow on the walls of the hotel, as McElwee’s voice-over describes a dream that Agustín Barrios had about how god gave him the gift of music by transforming moonbeams into the strings on his guitar.47 For anyone familiar with Stan Brakhage’s theory of child vision, this sequence is resonant; it is as if McElwee’s deepening engagement with Mariah frees his perception for a moment, producing the “Blake-ian intensification of vision” he described earlier and allowing him to experience what Brakhage would call “an adventure of perception,” a moment of seeing that recalls the world “under childhood,” again to quote Brakhage, “before the beginning was the word.”⁴⁸

For the most part, however, the amusing drama attending McElwee’s filming, so crucial in Backyard, Sherman’s March, and Time Indefinite, is absent here—partly because McElwee himself is rarely visible in In Paraguay, but perhaps also because in Paraguay, he seems just a foreign tourist with camera in hand. One of the motifs in McElwee’s voice-over is his indicating that he asks the people he films if they mind if he films them, and again and again he is moved by the good humor with which so many of his subjects face the camera. In one of the final sequences before the Paraguayan judge signs the decree allowing Mariah to leave the country, McElwee focuses on a beggar near a church in Asunción. This beggar can only crawl from one place to another, “and yet,” McElwee notes, “he smiles.” It is easy to read the beggar as an emblem for Paraguay, especially since this sequence is immediately followed by a montage of some of the faces we have seen in the film and the McElwees’ return trip to the United States.49

Earlier, I mentioned the ways in which In Paraguay refers back to Time Indefinite, but though In Paraguay acknowledges dimensions of McElwee’s past (and though his review of Paraguay’s history evokes a substantial past that concludes not long before the family arrives in Asunción), the film is otherwise locked into the time of the family’s stay in Paraguay: that is, in his voice-over, McElwee speaks from within the present of his day-to-day life in Asunción and environs, generally without reference to the future during which In Paraguay was edited. The only exceptions are his comment during his introduction of Agustín Barrios that “this music will always remind me of Paraguay” and two instances when McElwee imagines Mariah seeing his footage as she grows up. During a montage of imagery of a band on an Asunción street, he wonders “what Mariah will think when she sees these images someday. Will she feel connected to Paraguay? Will she be naturally drawn to the people who live here? Will she want to find her birth mother?”; and he takes footage of Iguazu Falls, “so Mariah can see them when she’s older.”⁵⁰ McElwee also wonders how he will explain to his daughter the complicity of the U.S. government with Paraguayan dictators and Paraguayan poverty—complicity that “enables us to come down here and adopt Mariah.”

Since In Paraguay was completed in 2009, when Mariah would have been fourteen years old, a viewer cannot help but wonder why McElwee provides no sense of what, indeed, Mariah does think of McElwee’s footage or, if she has not seen the footage, why she hasn’t seen it.⁵¹ Once the family has returned from Paraguay, the film does jump ahead eight months to the meeting with the American judge, but the filmmaking present, the period when McElwee edited the film and recorded his voice-over, remains virtually invisible throughout the film. For those familiar with McElwee’s work, this invisibility is a kind of narrative black hole, even a kind of inverse visibility. That In Paraguay was completed during the extended moment when McElwee and Marilyn Levine were divorcing suggests that by making the film, McElwee was paying homage to his marriage by revisiting events that demonstrate the impressive level of family unity that had been achieved by the time of the adoption of Mariah—a level of unity that has now disappeared, along with (at least for the present) McElwee’s affectionate representation of it.

Photographic Memory (2011) is another exercise in retrieving the past, this time with a double focus: McElwee is at pains to reconnect with his son Adrian from whom he feels alienated; and in an attempt to understand how Adrian’s life as a young man compares with his own, he returns to the tiny town of St. Quay on the Brittany coast, where he lived, made photographs, and had a love affair during 1972. As is typical in earlier films, McElwee begins by creating a familial context for the action that will follow, beginning with home movie footage of Adrian and Mariah as young children playing at boxing; Adrian announcing “Okay, round 2, ready?,” is the first sound we hear—a metaphor for the struggle Ross and now twenty-one-year-old Adrian are currently involved in. It is also round 2, perhaps, because round 1 was In Paraguay: In Paraguay is dedicated to Mariah; Photographic Memory, to Adrian. During a conversation with Eric Béranger, a photographer he meets in St. Quay, McElwee asks Béranger why his photo shop is named Morgan’Photo, and Béranger tells him that they’d named their home after their son, so they named their business after their daughter: “You have to make it even between the kids, you know?”52

As in Sherman’s March and Time Indefinite, in Photographic Memory McElwee develops a complex Ross McElwee character, in this case whom viewers are likely to identify with and resist. A few minutes into the film, Ross films Adrian lying in bed, sipping coffee and working at his laptop . Ross is frustrated with Adrian’s ignoring him and complains, “It’s sometimes hard to talk to you when you’re communicating with people via your computer; I feel like your attention is always divided among several technical tasks.” Ross then expands his complaint, confiding to the viewer in voice-over, “At times it’s so clear to me that he’s in a constant state of technological overload; I’m not sure how I would have handled it if all this had been available to me when I was his age.” While it is easy for people of a certain generation (I include myself) to identify with McElwee’s frustration, the irony here is obvious: McElwee is filming Adrian during this moment: that is, his own attention is as divided as Adrian’s and implicitly Ross also is involved in what will become a communication with people (us) via his video camera. Adrian is entirely aware of this, of course, since his young life has been regularly involved with his father’s filming, and while the McElwee-as-parent character doesn’t seem to see the irony, at least in this instance, director McElwee surely does.

The McElwee-as-parent character does recognize similarities between Adrian and his younger self; he recalls and the film flashes back to moments from Backyard during which Dr. McElwee registers disapproval of his son’s choices, including the shot of Dr. McElwee saying, “I’ll be glad when that big eye’s gone” (in Photographic Memory the words are subtitled so we cannot miss their import). The very fact that McElwee has repeatedly recycled this particular moment into his work suggests its continuing power for him, and not surprisingly he recognizes that his frustration with Adrian is very similar, and must be having a similar effect, or really, ineffect—though this does not seem to keep him from continuing to exacerbate the situation. The similarities between Adrian and Ross are also made clear by McElwee as filmmaker. Ross asks Adrian to film him perusing the journals from his year in Brittany: the journals are stuffed with ideas for stories, drawings, thoughts on photography, memories. This sequence is immediately followed by Ross’s review of Adrian’s multifaceted creativity: “He has almost too many ideas; he’s making a fiction film, doing graphic design, designing t-shirts to sell on his website, shooting and performing in ski videos, writing a novel. . . .” Nevertheless, McElwee as parent continues to vent his frustrations with his son, telling Adrian that despite his creative interests, “you’re undermining yourself by all of this other behavior [Ross is referring to Adrian’s losing a tape from an experimental documentary at a party]. . . . You’re gonna hurt yourself”—clearly hurting his own relationship with Adrian.

FIGURE 31. Adrian McElwee on his computer and Ross McElwee in reflection, in Ross McElwee's Photographic Memory (2011). Courtesy Ross McElwee.

The complex interplay between Ross and Adrian as both antagonists and collaborators is encapsulated in the remarkable shot that forms the transition into McElwee’s return to St. Quay (fig. 31). As he and Adrian sit at a café, McElwee films Adrian so that his and his father’s reflections in the café window are superimposed. Adrian’s amusement at whatever he is seeing on his computer at this moment is implicitly imbricated with what must have been Ross’s amusement at seeing and capturing this shot.53

From this point on, Photographic Memory intercuts between McElwee’s return to St. Quay and his exploration of the town (and his own past, including his memories of 1972 and his photographs from that year) and his more-or-less regular Skype contacts with Adrian and accompanying ruminations about their troubled relationship. It is immediately clear that St. Quay is not the town that has lived in Ross’s memory; he himself has changed (he’s seen enough of the world now that St. Quay no longer seems exotic), as has the town, which has modernized and become more involved with tourism. Indeed, McElwee struggles to locate even the place where he lived and worked with the wedding photographer, Maurice, whose life and passion for Merleau-Ponty made him for a time McElwee’s mentor. As McElwee explores St. Quay, Brittany, and his past, it becomes increasingly clear that his frustrations with Adrian are in large measure a function of his own discomfort with change, and not just the changes in Adrian and in the places he is seeing, but in photographic technology.

At the time of McElwee’s original stay in St. Quay, he was focused on still photography (a passion that has remained evident throughout McElwee’s films, especially during those moments when he has allowed himself the indulgence of recording the nuances of space, light, color, and texture), and Photographic Memory is punctuated with still imagery from this earlier visit: indeed the title credit is superimposed over an early photo (one that he considers a mistake, as becomes clear later). Soon after he arrives in St. Quay, he expresses his slight anxiety with using memory cards (for the first time) to record his imagery—“I mean, what if the camera’s memory fails?” Still later, a conversation with a local photographer about the change from emulsion-based photography to digital imaging (“Where are the photos?,” they laugh) is followed by this voice-over: “What happened to film? 16mm film, that you can actually hold in your hand? There was something wonderful about working with film. Its warmth. Its luminosity.”

This monologue segues into perhaps the most nostalgic moment in Photographic Memory: warm, luminous imagery of Adrian as a young boy, digging for sand fleas on a Carolina beach. When his father asks what he will do with the sand fleas he catches, Adrian says, “I heard you can make a sand flea sandwich,” and Ross, reminiscing in voice-over, responds, “Sand flea sandwich. If he had offered me one, I’d have eaten it on the spot.” This memory is obviously precious to McElwee, because of the earlier relationship with his son, of course, but also because this was the period of Ross’s early exploration of filmmaking, with all its excitements and pleasures—and no doubt forgotten frustrations. The sequence ends with Adrian asking Ross to help him dig for more sand fleas and Ross agreeing—but continuing to film the hole Adrian has finished with: he tells Adrian he’s watching in case a sand flea comes out, but it is clear that he wanted to conclude the little sequence effectively. Whatever McElwee’s sense of this moment is now—during a time when his relationship with Adrian has changed—his primary focus at that moment was cinematic.

The interplay between McElwee’s revelation of the parallels between his youth and his son’s and his difficulty in resisting the kind of contempt and frustration Dr. McElwee showed for what has become Ross’s remarkable filmmaking career peaks just after Ross reviews his many mistakes as a young photographer and his being fired by Maurice for reasons he never understood. McElwee returns to footage of Adrian extreme skiing and hanging out with his friends; and then, after admitting that his worrying about Adrian’s risky behavior has led him to do things he’s not proud of, he plays a phone message from Adrian, furious that Ross has apparently searched his room: “I can’t understand,” Adrian complains, “what all of this stuff over the last five years is doing. . . . I’m not getting in trouble with the police. . . . Think about it for a second. I’m not being rude. Just think about it for a second. Close your eyes and say, ‘What is this accomplishing? What evil have you prevented him from doing?’ Just think about it.”

While McElwee as parent within the action of Photographic Memory seems to ignore the intelligence of Adrian’s phone message (Ross responds in voice-over, “So I’ve made mistakes, lots of mistakes, in trying to protect my son, protect him from himself,” then discusses how the beloved young child is hidden within the obnoxious teenager), McElwee as filmmaker presents Adrian’s message during an extended shot, presumably made by Adrian riding on a ski lift; the message ends as the lift delivers Adrian into the darkness of the lift terminal—but seems also, at least in the long run, to have delivered Ross into a new sense of his son.

Throughout the next (and final) sequence during which Ross in St. Quay films Adrian on Skype, Ross listens patiently as Adrian expresses some sadness and frustration and resists the kind of negative feedback he has offered earlier. A voice-over recorded after his visit to St. Quay has ended, and, presented as the Skype interchange is occurring, expresses something of what Ross was feeling at that moment and something of what he has learned: he admits that his own young experience in France included moments like those Adrian is experiencing now, and explains, “I also know that in trying to give you encouragement, I only end up adding to the pressure you feel. . . . But it seems clear to me now that the reason I went to France was to get out of the house and find my own way to live. It’s so obvious, but despite the fact that I worry about you a lot, I really do need to let you carve out your own terrain, figure out your own path”—this last, accompanying a shot of Adrian skiing, presumably down the slope he previously ascended on the lift, a shot that fades to white.54

That this is the first voice-over in all of McElwee’s oeuvre directed not to the viewer but to someone else is also suggestive of his movement into a new sense of himself as both parent and filmmaker. It is as if Ross has seen the light about this dark time in Adrian’s life—and his own: it seems clear that his marriage is over and he needs “to find his own way to live” (which of course for McElwee means a new film to make). McElwee’s recognition that he needs to give Adrian the space to create a life for himself also sets Ross free (a sudden close-up of a baby pig, frightened perhaps by McElwee’s camera, may confirm Ross’s concern with facing the realities of his own life); and it is at this point that McElwee’s somewhat detached, nostalgic reminiscences about his year in Brittany become reembodied into new experiences: Hélène Landouar, the former wife of the photographer Maurice tracks McElwee down, and as they review their shared past with the deceased photographer—including their realization that Maurice lived a double life as a wedding photographer and a secret photographer of nudes—they discover that McElwee’s one good photograph of his former lover, Maud (fig. 32), was taken by Maurice. Further, it turns out that Landouar knows that Maud is still alive, living in a nearby town, and is able to find out how to contact her. McElwee’s sudden visit to Carnac in southern Brittany to see its megalithic stone formations suggests his fear of actually meeting the woman of his memory, but of course, he does go to see Maud and discovers that while their former love affair was significant to both of them, each has a very different sense of why it ended: McElwee has remembered that he broke off the relationship, Maud believes it was her doing: “Clearly one of us is wrong, or perhaps both of us are right.” The fact that it is raining throughout McElwee’s visits to Carnac and Maud Corbel-Rouchy evokes, at least for me, William Faulkner, in whose fiction rain often accompanies changes in the lives of the characters.

FIGURE 32. Maud Corbel in Maurice's photograph, in Ross McElwee's Photographic Memory (2011). Courtesy Ross McElwee.

The visits with Hélène Landouar and Maud Corbel-Rouchy transform romantically mysterious but solid (“megalithic”?) memories into living realities with complex pasts, and lead to the final two sequences of Photographic Memory. The first is the annual celebration of Saint Quay himself, the Irish monk who founded the town—once a year his cranium is removed from the reliquary and paraded once around the church. McElwee records the ceremony, then follows the caretaker as he returns the cranium to the reliquary, where it is covered in a garbage bag—McElwee in voice-over ruminating about how he now knows two Mauds: the lover of his memory and the real woman; and two Maurices: the mysterious mentor of his memory and the more complex and less impressive Maurice as remembered by his ex-wife. Memory has come to seem a set of relics, as limited as they are unchanging, as problematic as they are comforting.

During the final sequence, Ross and Adrian are visiting the Carolina coast, on a not particularly successful fishing trip, but Ross has discovered that in his absence Adrian’s life has also begun to transform: he is applying to film schools and has an idea for a film. Photographic Memory closes with what Ross explains are the opening shots of Adrian’s film, Ross acting as cinematographer and Adrian as director and performer. The protagonist, “a hipster,” wakes up, has breakfast (a beer), and leaves his hotel to go out for a run. The closing shot, of Adrian running into the distance along the beach, is deeply poignant. Adrian, the protagonist of his own film, is moving away from Ross and Ross’s nostalgic memories of Adrian as a child and yet is maintaining his relationship with his father by becoming a filmmaker and by having Ross film him: they are simultaneously separating and coming together.

But the final shot is more complicated than this, because throughout it, Ross’s shadow is visible, first on Adrian’s body, then once Adrian runs off, in the bottom left of the frame. For anyone familiar with McElwee’s long career, that shadow is an emblem not merely of the past within this film, but of the many similar shadows in Ross’s long cinematic chronicle of the McElwee family.55 Did Adrian ask Ross to include his shadow as an emblem of the fact that Adrian cannot entirely leave Ross behind, or is this a final, somewhat sardonic suggestion by Ross that he simply cannot stay entirely out of Adrian’s life? However one understands the shadow, what does seem clear is that through the making of Photographic Memory, the implicit stasis emblemized in the superimposed shot of Adrian and Ross at the café early in the film has been transformed into the complex synergy of two men struggling to retrieve what they can from their shared, lost past and working creatively together to move their lives forward.