…like some primitive organism that somehow nourishes itself by devouring itself, growing as it diminishes.
I’ve been thinking about this documentary lately: Sherman’s March by Ross McElwee. I first heard about it a couple years ago from my cousin, who I trust with all things movie. She told me I had to watch it, it was on Netflix Instant, and it was great. She and her boyfriend reenacted (probably without realizing what they were doing until it was done) some dialogue from the film, and I couldn’t believe they weren’t fabricating, but they weren’t. This documentary is terrific in it’s twisty sickening reality and honesty, in the way the man takes the lens and puts it between himself and heartbreak and his mother’s expectations for his next heartful. And these women he dates! I don’t want to say too much, because the things they say are pretty unbelievable. But I will say that there are rollerskates and talk of floating heads in space and a linguist who milks cows (I think, if I’m remembering correctly).
The basic outline is this: McElwee was all set to film a documentary about General Sherman’s march through the South, but his plans were interrupted when his girlfriend broke up with him. He couldn’t focus on his original plan, and instead turned the camera on his upturned life. The documentary became more about his personal life, the dates he went on and the conversations he had with family about the type of woman he should be with, along with his own personal reflections on the shifting landscape around him.
It’s a great movie in its own right, but I love it most for the way it addresses that elliptical question: how our lives respond to art, how our art responds to our lives, and how our lives respond to art responding to our lives: on and on and on. The stitching together of one’s own narrative is always filled with potholes and switchbacks and low-hanging branches. It’s rare to be given a glimpse into someone else’s attempt at this.
David Shields mentions it in Reality Hunger (maybe the only point in that book where I really felt I agreed with him):
I love what he says here: The confusion between field report and self-portrait; the confusion between fiction and nonfiction; the author-narrators’ use of themselves, as personae, as representatives of feeling states; the antilinearity; the simultaneous bypassing and stalking of artifice-making machinery; the absolute seriousness, phrased as comedy; the violent torque of their beautifully idiosyncratic voices.
It reminds me of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: our layered intentions, and how what one expects to create is rarely what one does create.
In the film, sometimes McElwee points the camera at a wall and talks over it, as a sort of diary. He’s painfully honest. Melancholic. Hilarious. These moments are unsettling in their openness. Like looking at a fresh wound beneath a bandaid that hasn’t had the proper time to heal.
In one of these moments, McElwee says:
It’s a little like looking into a mirror and trying to see what you look like when you’re not really looking at your own reflection.
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