GOTTA SEE IT # 20 - "SHERMAN'S MARCH"
“SHERMAN’S MARCH: A MEDIATION TO THE POSSIBILITY OF ROMANTIC LOVE IN THE SOUTH DURING AN ERA OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION”
Starring: Ross McElwee, Patricia Rendleman, Burt Reynolds, Charleen Swansea.
Cinematography and Direction: Ross McElwee
Colour – 1986
157 mins
USA
Claudia: And that’s where they’re going to put the tennis court, right down there.
Ross: So, they’ll be able to play tennis in case of a nuclear attack?
Claudia: Right, they’ll have everything they need up here in case of a nuclear attack to survive in style.
You never know what you will find, if you are just open enough to look. Words of wisdom? Well, who knows? Maybe more like something you’d hear in a Disney film or any song sung by Celine Dion. I guess that makes me some kind of sappy hack. My apologies - now, back to the sappy hackery. Either way, this sentiment does apply to life, though in an admittedly simplistic way, and it fully applies to this charming and disarming documentary.
After receiving a grant to make a film about American Civil war general William Tecumseh Sherman’s devastating march through the south, filmmaker Ross McElwee proceeds to make a film about a different kind of march. Call it McElwee’s March Through Southern Womanhood While Contemplating The Nuclear Obliteration Of The World or McElwee’s March Through A South Sprinkled With Starry-Eyed, Narcissistic, Completely Bonkers Dreamers And End-Of-The-World, Little House On The Prairie Re-Constructionists, Civil War Obsessives And Also, Thankfully, Some Normal, Complicated Folk Living Their Lives The Best That They Can. Titles aside, this is what happens when a bright, thoughtful, funny man picks up a film camera and allows his subjects the opportunity to reveal themselves with a minimal amount of interference.
No matter where McElwee goes with his camera, every woman he knows – his step mother, sister, and especially his brassy friend Charleen - regards his filmmaking as a waste of time and wants to save him from this lost life by setting him up with a good southern woman. Only a good southern woman, they argue, can set him straight. Well, the southern women he is introduced to are quite pretty, some even sexy, but very few of them seem capable of setting McElwee “straight.” This is due to the fact that quite a few of them are just down right loopy – dreaming of a surreal Hollywood stardom not of this world, or preoccupied by end-of-the-world bible prophecy or just plain confused about love and life and holding on to unhealthy relationships with men who are either emotionally immature and possibly violent or just plain odd and intellectually suspect. McElwee’s back and forth with longtime friend/would-be-lover Karen is especially fascinating and hilarious when it is revealed that this beautiful, intelligent, accomplished lawyer is obsessed with a man who collects life-sized plastic animals with his friends. Talk about a mismatch. Somehow, though, she thinks that this guy is the one. McElwee’s dry observation of the man who beat him out is a beautiful bit of hilarious understatement.
Now, even though the film strays from the original purpose for which McElwee was granted the money, he still fulfills the Sherman’s March requirement and does it in an articulate and passionate way. He visits various Civil War landmarks and battle sights and delivers dramatic, half-whispered late night monologues about Sherman and what he faced before, during and after the war. It is clear that the Civil War and Sherman are ghosts still cackling down the corridors of McElwee’s dreams as well as those of much of the South. Apart from the comical and real life dramatic departures, the Sherman section alone is compelling - not to mention the fact that the whole “Southern Womanhood” part of the film is a comical recreation of Sherman’s original march. Yes, very much so a recreation, though devoid of its’ brutality, blood and relentless devastation and destruction. Well, at least in a literal sense.
The film is also a study of how one can use a camera as both weapon and shield, as McElwee does here - sometimes simultaneously hiding behind it and using it to knock his subjects off balance. Others, and he himself, comment on how his camera keeps him from connecting with the women he is supposed to be wooing and also forces them into uncomfortable confession and cross-examination type situations.
What emerges from this, one man’s idiosyncratic and personal portrait of the South, is an impression of land at once crazed, paranoid, exuberant, angry, joyous, complicated, colourful and never even two miles close to dull. This is the South, the American South - at least as Ross McElwee found it and coaxed it to open up to him in all its’ off-kilter, wacked-out glory. Enjoy.
Starring: Ross McElwee, Patricia Rendleman, Burt Reynolds, Charleen Swansea.
Cinematography and Direction: Ross McElwee
Colour – 1986
157 mins
USA
Claudia: And that’s where they’re going to put the tennis court, right down there.
Ross: So, they’ll be able to play tennis in case of a nuclear attack?
Claudia: Right, they’ll have everything they need up here in case of a nuclear attack to survive in style.
You never know what you will find, if you are just open enough to look. Words of wisdom? Well, who knows? Maybe more like something you’d hear in a Disney film or any song sung by Celine Dion. I guess that makes me some kind of sappy hack. My apologies - now, back to the sappy hackery. Either way, this sentiment does apply to life, though in an admittedly simplistic way, and it fully applies to this charming and disarming documentary.
After receiving a grant to make a film about American Civil war general William Tecumseh Sherman’s devastating march through the south, filmmaker Ross McElwee proceeds to make a film about a different kind of march. Call it McElwee’s March Through Southern Womanhood While Contemplating The Nuclear Obliteration Of The World or McElwee’s March Through A South Sprinkled With Starry-Eyed, Narcissistic, Completely Bonkers Dreamers And End-Of-The-World, Little House On The Prairie Re-Constructionists, Civil War Obsessives And Also, Thankfully, Some Normal, Complicated Folk Living Their Lives The Best That They Can. Titles aside, this is what happens when a bright, thoughtful, funny man picks up a film camera and allows his subjects the opportunity to reveal themselves with a minimal amount of interference.
No matter where McElwee goes with his camera, every woman he knows – his step mother, sister, and especially his brassy friend Charleen - regards his filmmaking as a waste of time and wants to save him from this lost life by setting him up with a good southern woman. Only a good southern woman, they argue, can set him straight. Well, the southern women he is introduced to are quite pretty, some even sexy, but very few of them seem capable of setting McElwee “straight.” This is due to the fact that quite a few of them are just down right loopy – dreaming of a surreal Hollywood stardom not of this world, or preoccupied by end-of-the-world bible prophecy or just plain confused about love and life and holding on to unhealthy relationships with men who are either emotionally immature and possibly violent or just plain odd and intellectually suspect. McElwee’s back and forth with longtime friend/would-be-lover Karen is especially fascinating and hilarious when it is revealed that this beautiful, intelligent, accomplished lawyer is obsessed with a man who collects life-sized plastic animals with his friends. Talk about a mismatch. Somehow, though, she thinks that this guy is the one. McElwee’s dry observation of the man who beat him out is a beautiful bit of hilarious understatement.
Now, even though the film strays from the original purpose for which McElwee was granted the money, he still fulfills the Sherman’s March requirement and does it in an articulate and passionate way. He visits various Civil War landmarks and battle sights and delivers dramatic, half-whispered late night monologues about Sherman and what he faced before, during and after the war. It is clear that the Civil War and Sherman are ghosts still cackling down the corridors of McElwee’s dreams as well as those of much of the South. Apart from the comical and real life dramatic departures, the Sherman section alone is compelling - not to mention the fact that the whole “Southern Womanhood” part of the film is a comical recreation of Sherman’s original march. Yes, very much so a recreation, though devoid of its’ brutality, blood and relentless devastation and destruction. Well, at least in a literal sense.
The film is also a study of how one can use a camera as both weapon and shield, as McElwee does here - sometimes simultaneously hiding behind it and using it to knock his subjects off balance. Others, and he himself, comment on how his camera keeps him from connecting with the women he is supposed to be wooing and also forces them into uncomfortable confession and cross-examination type situations.
What emerges from this, one man’s idiosyncratic and personal portrait of the South, is an impression of land at once crazed, paranoid, exuberant, angry, joyous, complicated, colourful and never even two miles close to dull. This is the South, the American South - at least as Ross McElwee found it and coaxed it to open up to him in all its’ off-kilter, wacked-out glory. Enjoy.
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