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Charlotte, North Carolina, who studied filmmaking at MIT with Leacock and Pincus, and has taught at Harvard. Since arriving at MIT, McElwee has completed
Charleen
(1978), an extended portrait of Charleen Swansea, a friend and ex-teacher whose home became a haven for young painters, writers, and musicians"a place like no other in the South I'd ever seen";
Space Coast
(1978, co-made with Michel Negroponte), a portrait of three residents of Cape Canaveral, Florida: Mary Bubb, a local newspaper reporter who had witnessed sixteen hundred consecutive launches, "Papa" John Murphy, an ex-maintenance man turned motorcycle gang guru, and Willy Womak, small-time construction company owner and clown-host for a local kids show;
Resident Exile
(1981, also co-made with Negroponte), a portrait of an Iranian exile, tortured under the Shah's regime, living in the United States during the hostage crisis;
Backyard
(1982), McElwee's portrait of his home in Charlotte;
Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South during an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation
(1985), a record of McElwee's travels in the South, and the women he meets along the route General Sherman took during the Civil War; and
Something to Do with the Wall
(1990, co-made with Marilyn Levine), a meditation on the Berlin Wall.
In
Backyard,
McElwee's presence within the situations he records is, for the most part, similar to our sense of the filmmaker's presence in many earlier domestic cinéma vérité films: the world recorded simply surrounds the filmmaker and camera, and it's obvious that the people filmed are very aware of the camera's intrusion into their lives. But in some instances McElwee goes further: he introduces himself as a character within the imagery; we see him as we hear him comment about himself and his life. And just as important, he sometimes takes conversational actions that revise his relationships with the people he's talking with
as he is filming
. In other words, the camera is not simply recording McElwee's domestic life, it is witnessing changes in his life made possible, in part, by the camera's presence.
In
Sherman's March
this more complex presence is the central catalyst for the film. We get to know McElwee's (or McElwee's filmic persona's) hopes, concerns, nightmares; and we are behind the camera with McElwee as he uses the filmmaking process to forge new relationships and to revise previously important relationships. As is true in many literary first-person narratives, McElwee's approach in
Sherman's March
is simultaneously very revealing and somewhat mysterious: the candidness of the scenes is frequently startling, but the more the filmand McElwee-as-narratorreveals, the more we realize that there are many aspects of the relationships he is recording that we are not privy to. We cannot help but wonder about the narrator as we experience things with him.