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Ross McElwee
During the Italian Renaissance, schools of painting came to be identified with particular cities. In recent decades something similar has been occurring in North America, where "schools" of independent filmmaking have become identified with specific places. San Francisco has been a center for surreal forms of avant-garde cinema. For a time, New York (and subsequently Buffalo/Toronto) was identified with what had come to be called "structural filmmaking." And for three decades, cinéma vérité has found a home in Boston. Many of the leading vérité filmmakersRicky Leacock, the Maysles Brothers, Frederick Wiseman, Ed Pincushave had and continue to have crucial ties with Boston. Over the years, the cinéma vérité procedure (a hand-carried 16mm rig, hand-carried tape-recording equipment for synch sound, a one- or two-person crew) has been articulated in a variety of forms within a continually developing history. For a time, the assumption of a number of the prime movers of cinéma vérité was that the value of the procedure was precisely its ability to capture events without the intrusion of the filmmaker: the filmmaker's persona, either in a visual embodiment or in narration, was to be avoided at all costs.
By the seventies, however, a reaction to this position was occurring: men and women (Ed Pincus, Martha Coolidge, Amalie Rothschild, Alfred Guzzetti, others) were carrying 16mm cameras and tape recorders into their domestic environments to see what they could discover. Even within this more personalized kind of cinéma vérité, a good bit of articulation has been possible. One of the most interesting recent developments has occurred in a series of films by Ross McElwee, a native of