I’ve been known to push the documentary Sherman’s March onto people with the fervor of an evangelical. It’s so many things at once — a time capsule of mid-1980s aesthetics, a menagerie of eccentric characters baring their souls, a master class in the art of cinéma vérité from filmmaker Ross McElwee. But perhaps most importantly, it is what the film’s subtitle claims: “a meditation on the possibility of romantic love in the South during an era of nuclear weapons proliferation.”
The film’s narrative breaks down right away — in the first scenes, McElwee explains with voiceover narration (delivered with a dry, soft-spoken drawl) that his intention was to make a documentary about the lingering effects of Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 march through the South. But just before filming began, his girlfriend left him, and he’s unable to think about anything else. As he leaves New York and his now-ex-girlfriend to return to his family in the South like a lovelorn prodigal son, a new kind of film takes shape.
Ross McElwee's films serve as a kind of long-form autobiography, with each individual film functioning as a chapter in McElwee's life story. T…
In the 40 years since its 1986 release, Sherman’s March has become even more. McElwee pioneered first-person filmmaking decades before smartphones made it ubiquitous, documenting his life and the people closest to him with nearly constant attention. That’s one of the reasons that Remake, McElwee’s latest film, is so effective. The new film, which screens twice on July 21 at the Belcourt, reexamines Sherman’s March under a new, devastating rubric — his son, Adrian, has died from a fentanyl overdose.
McElwee sets up the film’s waylaid narrative in Remake, much as he did in Sherman’s March, in voiceover narration. This footage of his young son is no longer part of the film he had intended to make. “Now, as I look back over that footage from those years,” McElwee says in a similar but now older and more weathered drawl, “I find a partial record of what was happening in our lives then. What you were up to, and what I was up to, and how we were both moving closer to the day that you would die.”
