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have very strong emotional feelings about what you're shooting, but basically the world plays itself out in front of you without any of your feelings being directly represented in what you're shooting. You're detached, separated. This enables you to develop levels of complexity within a single frame, foreground/background relationships for instance. In
Space Coast
there's a shot of Papa John sitting in a chair rambling on about how he can't get a job, while in the background you can see his wife struggling to load the refrigerator with groceries; all kinds of interesting ironies and complexities are set up in that shot. When you start taking on part of the burden of the narrative and the interactions yourself, you can lose this kind of complexity. The interaction begins to be more perpendicular to the camera. Often, you're giving up the observed detail that reflects the depth and multileveled complexities of the world, both visually and sociologically. What you're getting instead is a self-reflective complexity that turns back on itself. Occasionally in
Sherman's March,
however, there are moments when I was able to step back and observe what was going on. The scene with the survivalists is an instance of that. They're not really part of my world, so I can step back and film them objectively. Ideally, I want my films to phase in and out of these two kinds of experience.
MacDonald:
I assume your use of Ricky Leacock to narrate the opening passage of
Sherman's March
is an homage to him.
McElwee:
Yes, but it's an ironic homage because he pioneered a kind of filmmaking in which narration, didactic narration at any rate, was to be avoided at all costs. At the time, that was a break with the convention that had been established by Humphrey Jennings and the other British documentary filmmakers during World War II and to some degree by Robert Flaherty, for whom Ricky was a cameraman: Flaherty's films were narrated with title cards. When I was at MIT, Ricky was always irreverent, always encouraging us to do films for ourselves, to do films that were not conceived of as commercial entities. This is not what you hear in a lot of film schools, where you're encouraged to produce films that will get you jobs in public television, or in commercial television or Hollywood. Ricky was always very caustic and irreverent about those reasons for making films. I was really happy that he was willing to do the introduction. Ricky likes the film a lot. He's been very supportive. At one point, when my camera stopped functioning somewhere in Georgia, he airshipped me his.
MacDonald:
When you were moving through
Sherman's March,
filming people, what did you set up in advance? What did you tell people about what you would do? Did you just walk in on them?
McElwee:
Pretty much I always walked in on them. Obviously, I'd steer the conversation in a certain way, and indeed that's what human