Ross
McElwee
September 21–28, 2005
For the past twenty-five years, Ross McElwee has given new meaning
and flair to first-person nonfiction cinema. A native of Charlotte,
North Carolina, McElwee studied at MIT with the legendary filmmakers
Richard Leacock and Edward Pincus, from whom he learned that the
verité documentarian need not be a detached recorder of
events—as practitioners of direct cinema in the 1960s often
claimed—but rather an engaged, even intrusive, participant
in the unfolding action. The confessional mode of McElwee’s
autobiographical films like Sherman’s March (1986), Time
Indefinite (1994), Six O’Clock News (1996),
and, most recently, Bright Leaves (2003) is always wise
and irreverent yet rarely solipsistic; ever the unreliable narrator,
McElwee is aware of the strictures of self-knowledge, and of our
limited ability to know the hearts and minds of others. In his
eleven films to date, he has chronicled his encounters with family
and friends, lovers and strangers, in ways that have caused those
relationships to change, while also having broader implications
for race relations in America and the history and culture of the
South. McElwee makes the grandest themes of human comedy his artistic
province: love and death, chance and fate, memory and denial, the
marvelous and the appalling. On September 21, the filmmaker will
introduce Bright Leaves, followed by a conversation with
Darryl Pinckney, author of the novel High Cotton. All
the films are produced, filmed, written, and edited solely by McElwee,
except where noted.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Media. Special thanks to Seymour Wishman and Marc Mauceri of First Run Features for the loan of prints.
Curating. 2002. USA. Portrait of the artist Annette
Lemieux selecting fifteen slides from 415 submissions in one arduous
day of curatorial work for the Boston Center for the Arts. 6 min.
Bright
Leaves. 2003. USA. Part mystery, part
ethical inquiry, and part home movie, this brilliant and frequently
hilarious documentary explores the cruel twist of fate that has
led some to make their fortunes from tobacco, and others to die
from it. McElwee returns home to the tobacco farming country of
North Carolina to investigate a bit of family lore: that his great-grandfather,
who developed the formula for Bull Durham tobacco, might have become
very rich had James “Buck” Duke not stolen the formula
from him—a saga that may have been the basis for Michael
Curtiz’s Bright Leaf, a 1950 Gary Cooper melodrama.
105 min.
Wednesday, September 21, 6:30 (introduced by McElwee,
followed by a conversation with Darryl Pinckney); Sunday, September
25, 5:00. T2
Space Coast. 1978. USA. Michel Negroponte and
McElwee follow three residents of Cape Canaveral, Florida, several
years after the phasing out of Apollo moon missions: a salty newspaper
reporter who has witnessed 1,600 consecutive launches; an out-of-work
maintenance man who now leads a motorcycle gang; and the owner
of a small construction company who sidelines as the clown-host
of a local kids television show. Negroponte and McElwee transcend
the “God, guns, and family” clichés of small
town America in this emotionally complex, novelistic portrait of
people living in hard times. 90 min.
Thursday, September 22,
6:00; Saturday, September 24, 8:45. T2
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Resident Exile. 1981. USA. Coproduced, directed,
and edited by Michel Negroponte and Alexandra Anthony. After enduring
fourteen months of imprisonment and torture by the Shah’s
regime, Iranian engineering student Kazim Ala flees to Houston,
where he marries an American woman and resumes his studies. But
Ala remains a man without a country: during the hostage crisis,
his impassioned criticisms of American foreign policy and the repressive
Ayatollah government alienate him from both his adopted and native
lands. 30 min.
Something to Do with the Wall. 1990.
USA. A meditation on the absurd vagaries of history: Growing up
in 1950s America, McElwee and Marilyn Levine were brought up on
a steady diet of Cold War paranoia. So were the West Germans they
began filming in 1986. But as the Berlin Wall came down three years
later and hard-line Communism collapsed with it, the filmmakers
and their subjects were suddenly faced with a new world order.
88 min.
Thursday, September 22, 8:00; Saturday, September 24,
6:15. T2
Charleen. 1978. USA. The “wise and flamboyant” Charleen
Swansea, McElwee’s friend and former high school teacher
in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a born raconteur who can charm
equally a classroom full of wary African American poetry students
and a Bible studies group of genteel southern white women. 59 min.
Backyard. 1984. USA. McElwee depicts a microcosm
of southern society: his brother, an aspiring medical student;
his father, a surgeon; and the African Americans with whom they
come into contact—the family cook, a beekeeper, and the staff
of the local country club, who can scarcely contain their anger
at the casual racism they confront every day. Also casting a shadow
over the film are the deaths of McElwee’s mother and brother,
traumas that his family would prefer to leave unexamined. 40 min.
Friday,
September 23, 6:00; Monday, September 26, 6:00. T2
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Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility
of Romantic Love in the South during an Era of Nuclear Weapons
Proliferation. 1986. USA. “You should use the
camera as a way to meet women….” What begins as
an attempt to retrace the path taken by General Sherman and his
Union soldiers in their devastating sweep through the secessionist
South, becomes, in the words of McElwee’s sister, a brokenhearted
filmmaker’s clumsy chivalrous quest to find love. In his
most celebrated film, McElwee points up the paradox of the inquisitive
documentarian: “He’s gotten scalded by life, his
lover left him, and so he retreats into the mollusk shell of
his camera and pokes his head out now and then.” Winner
of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. 155 min.
Friday, September
23, 8:15; Sunday, September 25, 2:00. T2
Time Indefinite. 1993. USA. The death of a father
and a grandmother, the birth of a marriage and a son—as McElwee
observes, “Everything begins and ends with family.” And
in the life of a family, as in everything else, it is those seemingly
inconsequential moments that often turn out to be profoundly important,
such as the moment when McElwee’s father picks up his son’s
movie camera, and the moments when McElwee decides to put it down.
Filled with black humor and deepest pathos, Time Indefinite is
a magisterial chronicle of place and character, capturing the fullest
range of human emotion. 114 min.
Saturday, September 24, 2:00;
Monday, September 26, 8:00. T2
Kosuth. 1997. USA. McElwee and Marilyn Levine
follow the somewhat enigmatic Joseph Kosuth as he visits Boston
to oversee the installation of his latest conceptual artwork. 8
min.
Six O’Clock News. 1996. USA. Catastrophe,
disaster, tragedy: if it bleeds, it leads. In an attempt to go
beyond the stock figures of the evening news—victims of earthquake,
disease, and murder—McElwee travels from town to town filming
these human interest stories over a period of several years. When
terrible things happen, how do such people go on? And how can McElwee’s
own newborn son be brought into such a bizarre and frightening
world? 90 min.
Saturday, September 24, 4:30; Wednesday, September
28, 8:30. T2
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