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McElwee's films are also portraits of the contemporary South.
Charleen, Backyard,
and
Sherman's March
expose the complexity of Southern race relations from the inside, with a subtlety, a directness, and a humanity we rarely see in film or anywhere else. The oppression of black people is often obvious in the films, but so is the diversity of experiences blacks and whites share in this part of the nation where the races have lived longer and more intimately together than anywhere else on this continent.
McElwee and I talked on February 14, 1987, and subsequently fleshed out the interview by exchanging tapes.
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MacDonald:
Could you talk about your educational background and about how you got into filmmaking?
McElwee:
When I was in high school and then in college as an undergraduate, creative writing was what I wanted to do. For a couple of semesters I worked with novelist John Hawkes, who teaches at Brown. Then during my last year in college I took still photography courses at the Rhode Island School of Design. I met students there who were making a film, and watched them work on the moviola. That got me thinking about the process of putting a film together. I went to student screenings at RISD, and I guess that's when I first thought about filmmaking as something an ordinary mortal could do. Also when I was in college, I saw
Primary
[1967], Richard Leacock's film about the 1960 Humphrey-Kennedy race in Minnesota, and Wiseman's
Titicut Follies
[1968] about the insane aslyum in Massachusetts. These two films stuck with me. They represented a very different approach to filmmaking. There was something gritty and startling about their attempts to capture real life. Also, the notion that there wasn't a large film crew, just two or three individuals out exploring the world and filming it, appealed to me in some vague sense. But I didn't really act on these feelings until close to two years later.
I saw
Touch of Evil
[1958] for the first time in Paris when I was twenty-two or twenty-three, at the Cinémathèque Française, and was dazzled by the opening shot where the camera tracks across the Mexican border. I suddenly had a kind of satori about the energy and magic of filmmaking. Later, I realized that by being a documentary filmmaker, I could satisfy my curiosity about the real world
and
I could indulge in that magical experience of presenting a film to that dark room full of people. It took awhile, but I got a summer job as a television cameraman at a station in Charlotte.