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in New York City, he was the first doctor in the city to have a desegregated waiting room. There was no fanfare, no newspaper story. (I was not told this by him but by other people.) It seemed absurd to him that black people had to sit in one room and whites in another when he was going to be operating on all of them sooner or later. He's quietly done things like that all his life. I saw them throughout my childhood. Anyway, the fact that people don't talk about racism doesn't mean they don't have strong feelings and act to eliminate it. We tend to analyze things to death up hereespecially in Cambridge, which must be the self-analysis capital of the eastern half of the United States.
Sherman's March
explores the paralysis that occurs when people are talking about their emotions rather than acting on them. That's a phenomenon we're saddled with in the Northeast.
MacDonald:
Your particular presence as a narratorial persona in
Sherman's March
makes that film different from
Backyard
. I assume all the narratorial stuff in
Backyard
was recorded after the original footage.
McElwee:
Yes. Painstakingly, with many, many revisions. The true chronology of when my films were finished is
Charlene, Space Coast, Resident Exile, Backyard,
and
Sherman's March
. But that's not the order in which they were shot.
Backyard
sat on the shelf for years and then was edited relatively recently.
Backyard
was a sketch for
Sherman's March,
an experiment in how I could approach the bigger film.
MacDonald: Sherman's March
is often formally beautiful, which is part of what makes it sustainable for two and a half hours.
Backyard
is . . .
McElwee:
Cruder. Part of the problem with
Backyard
was that I was just learning to shoot as a one-person crew. I was just getting over that odd sense of camera shyness in reverse. It takes awhile to summon the gumption to shoot people you know well, to be able to face them and talk to them as you're filming. Also, I was using a Nagra 4, a very large tape recorder: it weighs twenty pounds and I carried it slung over my shoulder. For
Sherman's March
I used a miniature Nagra SN, a very highly developed piece of recording equipment that could fit on my belt. This technological improvement made shooting much easier.
MacDonald:
In Wiseman's films you can always see that everybody is conscious of the camera, but not so much of him personally, whereas in
Sherman's March
and
Backyard
you know the people and have fairly complex relationships with them: the camera is more a part of you, rather than you a part of the camera. Your subjects may respond to the camera being there, but they're primarily interacting to
you
having the camera pointed at them. The interaction is more complicated. Or complicated in a different way.
McElwee:
In objective, detached, ''classical" cinéma vérité, you may