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between blacks and whites are captured is interesting, with Charleen usually being the catalyst for such interaction. She repeatedly confronts whites with their own racism, and blacks with their sense of separateness from whites. She's always trying to break down the barriers between blacks and whites, but never politically. It's always done for art's sake, for poetry's sake, and out of an intense enthusiasm and love for her fellow human beings. And fortunately, it's nearly always done with a great sense of humor and verve, which prevents her passions from being self-righteously political or moralistic. She draws people out and confronts them with their own racial insecuritiesand in the South, those insecurities are rampant for both blacks and whites.
MacDonald:
By the time you made
Charleen,
there was already a group of films made in the early to mid seventiesAmalie Rothschild's
Nana, Mom and Me
[1974], Martha Coolidge's
David: Off and On
[1973], and othersin which the filmmakers took their cameras into their domestic environments. Had you seen these films?
McElwee:
I saw
Nana, Mom and Me
after I left MIT, but there were other films that were much more important as influences. Jeff Kreines and Joel DeMott had spent time at MIT, and their films were definitely influential for me. And Pincus's later films, especially
Life and Other Anxieties
[1977] and
Diaries
[1976], which was a five-year portrait of his marriage.
MacDonald:
Actually
Diaries
is in some ways the closest thing I know to
Sherman's March
.
McElwee:
I'm sure I was influenced by it in all kinds of ways.
MacDonald: Space Coast
is much more detached than
Charleen
since you don't know the people except while you're filming them. But the most interesting scene in it for me is when the young daughter (who looks much too young to ever have had a baby, anyway) is in the phone booth calling to try to get welfare. She suddenly says something to you . . .
McElwee:
She asks me, "Have they hung up on me?" And I take the phone and listen at that point.
MacDonald:
That moment is something special. But during much of the film I'm a little uneasy about the film's stance. There's a fine line between looking into the lives of these weird people, and laughing at them.
McElwee:
Yes, that's the danger of this kind of filmmaking.
MacDonald:
John Marshall's
N!ai, Portrait of a !Kung Woman
[1978], was made during the same period. How did you come to work on that film?
McElwee:
There was the basic necessity to make a living. During those years [197780] I didn't have any steady source of income, so I