A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

there's a shot of Papa John sitting in a chair rambling on about how he can't get a job, while in the background you can see his wife struggling to load the refrigerator with groceries; all kinds of interesting ironies and complexities are set up in that shot. When you start taking on part of the burden of the narrative and the interactions yourself, you can lose this kind of complexity. The interaction begins to be more perpendicular to the camera. Often, you're giving up the observed detail that reflects the depth and multileveled complexities of the world, both visually and sociologically. What you're getting instead is a self-reflective complexity that turns back on itself. Occasionally in

Sherman's March,

however, there are moments when I was able to step back and observe what was going on. The scene with the survivalists is an instance of that. They're not really part of my world, so I can step back and film them objectively. Ideally, I want my films to phase in and out of these two kinds of experience.

MacDonald:

I assume your use of Ricky Leacock to narrate the opening passage of

Sherman's March

is an homage to him.

McElwee:

Yes, but it's an ironic homage because he pioneered a kind of filmmaking in which narration, didactic narration at any rate, was to be avoided at all costs. At the time, that was a break with the convention that had been established by Humphrey Jennings and the other British documentary filmmakers during World War II and to some degree by Robert Flaherty, for whom Ricky was a cameraman: Flaherty's films were narrated with title cards. 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. I was really happy that he was willing to do the introduction. Ricky likes the film a lot. He's been very supportive. At one point, when my camera stopped functioning somewhere in Georgia, he airshipped me his.

MacDonald:

When you were moving through

Sherman's March,

filming people, what did you set up in advance? What did you tell people about what you would do? Did you just walk in on them?

McElwee:

Pretty much I always walked in on them. Obviously, I'd steer the conversation in a certain way, and indeed that's what human

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dialogue is anyway, so why not let it be part of the film? I guess what my conversations have that conventional interviews don't is a serendipitous quality, an emotional charge that has something to do with the personal connection between the subject and the filmmaker. I never came with a list of questions.

MacDonald:

Did you call ahead and prepare people?

McElwee:

Well, in the case of Karen, the lawyer, the last portrait in the film, I said, "Can I come and spend some time with you? I have my camera and I'll probably do some shooting. I'm making this film about women in the South and about my journey along Sherman's route." And she said, "Sure, come." In one sense she's startled when I walk in the door shooting; she hadn't quite expected that, but in general she's prepared. That scene on the porch when I'm asking her, "Where have you been for the last year? Why didn't you ever write?'' is exactly as it happened. We didn't talk about it beforehand. In fact, if I had called ahead and told her I'd ask her about certain things, she'd have inevitably tried to preconceive what she was going to say, or would have said, "Well, I don't think I'm going to want to do this." It's just easier to go ahead and film.

MacDonald:

What was the balance between how much you shot and didn't shoot when you were with people?

McElwee:

I think a more accurate way to think about this is that I was almost always ready to shoot. I kept the camera within reaching distance, sometimes balanced on my shoulder. Maybe

Sherman's March

took five months of shooting. I never figured it out exactly. But even between major portraits, when I was on the road, I was totally open to filming whatever might happen in a gas station or in a restaurant, or wherever. So in one sense you can count all that time as "filming time."

I'd guess the total amount of footage I actually shot was about twenty-five hours. I don't remember exactly. In the finished film I ended up with two and a half hours of thata ten or eleven to one filming ratio. But that other ratio, between five months and two and a half hoursthat's astronomical.