A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

You know, I hear myself saying these things and immediately feel uncomfortable. I'm not sure I have the sociological background to even begin to define who's eccentric and who's not, who's conventional and who's not. And yet I feel somehow that the women I filmed are out of the norm, and that's why I decided to film them. I can only say that I wasn't attempting to make any statement about the status of women in the South or in the United States. I felt no obligation to select a group of women who were somehow representative of something. I think the women in the film are wonderfully individualistic; some are eccentric, some seem quite normal to me. A lot of them are struggling with life, and I'm interested in that kind of struggling. We all do it.

I'm

doing it in the film. I was interested in capturing some of that. A lot of documentaries try to package things very neatly from an ideological point of view. In some ways it leaves the viewer with a false sense that problems have been solved, points of view have been neatly defined. I think that's very dangerous. Life isn't like that.

A more valuable question to ask is, are we laughing with people or at them. Pat, the woman in search of Burt Reynolds, is an aspiring actress. Some of the things she says are quite outrageous, but she has a sense of self that in my view enables her to get away with saying the things she says. I think she's a fascinating and complicated and very unique person in the film, very entertaining, very funny; she knows that we're laughing at a lot of the things she says, but she's pleased with that fact. It's part of her way of presenting herself to the world. She's seen the film and is

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Pat Rendleman in McElwee's

Sherman's March

 (1986).

delighted by it. She's even had her agent circulate it to studios in California, hoping that she can get work.

It's true that a lot of the situations that I end up in or that the women end up in are humorous or comic, but it's important to have a sense of humor about life and about oneself. I see the situations as being funny, but not pathetic. I've made films that flirt with filming the pathetic in other people's lives, and it makes me very uncomfortable. I hope I've avoided doing it in

Sherman's March

.

MacDonald:

Do you think of yourself as a Southern filmmaker? The South has not played a particularly conspicuous role in independent filmmaking.

McElwee:

I don't feel a responsibility to film the South. When I made

Backyard

and

Sherman's March,

the South seemed very rich in possibilities, and as you say, not so many other people have explored it. I'm glad that you've asked this question because I do think that aspect of

Sherman's March

often gets overlooked. It's not merely an autobiographical film; it's a film about a region, to some degree about a way of life. I don't think I would be satisfied doing purely ethnographic films of the South. There are certainly filmmakers who choose to do that. There are a number of documentaries that deal with the customs, the rituals, and the arts and crafts of the South. These themes are a peripheral interest

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to me. But I continue to be very interested in the way the South resists the homogenization that seems to have made most other parts of the United States indistinguishable from one another.

As to whether I consider myself to be a particularly Southern filmmaker: it's not important to me that I be described that way. I'm sure I could have gone to California and made a film that in some senses would have been an equally accurate portrait of California life. But because I am from the South, I have a particular slant on the South that non-Southerners might not have, which includes having access to people and places an outsider might not come across. I take advantage of the fact that I'm Southern in making my films, but I don't really think of myself as a Southern filmmaker, and I hope that the films I've made are of interest to people outside the South. Of course, there is a tradition of Southern fiction (Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe . . .), and the label as used there to indicate a genre of literature that was created by writers from the South but transcends the region, transcends the label of "Southern," is what I'm striving for.

Macdonald:

The parallel between Sherman's march through the South and yours suggests that you also think of yourself as a Northerner.

McElwee: