Shermans_March._Themes

Shermans March Mcelwee originally set out to make a film about how people felt about the American civil war but he became sidetracked when his girlfriend left him at the begging of filming the film composses a general parodic comparison of roos mcelwee filmmaker and general Sherman warrior the devastating acts of war filmmaking and love affairs are implicly compared throughout the film. McElwee sets out to record his encounters with various southern women. But he continues to film places where General Sherman lived and fought. When he includes segments during which he films himself alone, voicing his own thoughts about his failures in love affairs, he includes asides about the life of General Sher-man and his own fears of nuclear annihilation. Small sequences portraying the filmmaker's trip through the South punctuate the larger commentaries by Mc- Elwee and the women he interviews. The women interviewed by this filmmaker talk about the Civil War, about their careers and plans, about love, and about their relationship with the South The first woman to be portrayed at length is Pat, an actress, who, like McElwee, grew up in the South but left her home to pursue her career. She is very comfort-able with McElwee and his camera, and teasingly performs cellulite exercises for him and tells him the plot of her fantasy movie script. He juxtaposes his and Gen-eral Sherman's personas with that of Burt Reynolds, whom he calls his "neme-sis" at one point in the film. Pat is trying to meet Mr. Reynolds, as he is filming a new movie in the Atlanta area. McElwee develops the theme of Mr. Reynolds as the perfect romantic hero in a film script (Draper 1987:42). This theme is pur-sued later in the film when McElwee uses footage of a Burt Reynolds look-alike he meets (who is also searching for Mr. Reynolds) and the set of the movie where Mr. Reynolds is signing autograp Even though Ross McElwee has no crew, thus forcing him to stay behind the camera, he is, like Michael Moore, undoubtedly an “avowed participant” in his film. To begin with, he is constantly asking his subjects questions that pertain directly to him, so that they address him personally, as if the camera was not even there. And there are numerous instances when McElwee turns the camera on himself. One is privileged to see him watching TV in a hotel room, for example, and talking about bugs while trying to sleep on the island with Winnie, the linguist. He even talks to the camera in the classic “talking head” style medium shot (quietly so that he doesn’t wake his sleeping father) at great length about General Sherman and his march through the South. In this final example, McElwee is no doubt playing on the expert testimony technique so often employed by more traditional documentaries. But in this instance, he is the expert witness in his own film. This hybridization of documentary techniques is evident in other scenes as well. Arthur explains: “Sherman’s March starts with a brief invocation of common materials out of which historical documentaries are fashioned: maps, still photos, voice-over recitation of facts” (128-129). This beginning immediately recalls the work of Pare Lorenz in The River and even Frank Capra in his Prelude to War series. From this point on, however, it becomes a distinctly different and more personal film. Arguably the most remarkable aspect of this film essay, perhaps, is the way that it mixes characteristics of cinema verite with direct cinema techniques. As Barnouw clarifies: “Direct cinema found its truth in events available to the camera. Cinema verite was committed to a paradox: that artificial circumstances could bring hidden truth to the surface” McElwee is more reliant on events (and people) that are presented to him, rather than caused by him. To begin with, he readily admits throughout the film that he has no concrete idea of what he is filming: “I keep thinking I