Quixote with a Camera 2 comments

By Jessica Mesman Griffith

Dave’s office is right next door the college library, which houses the entire Criterion Collection on DVD. He often comes home with a stack of obscure art films to watch after a long day of work. This is how my husband unwinds.

“Which one do you want to watch?” He’ll ask, genuinely excited and unable to choose. I’ll pick through the titles, imagining each one to be more bleak, pretentious, incomprehensible, and French than the next—from the complete works of Godard to twenty three short science films by Jean Painlevè, score by Yo La Tengo.

But recently he assembled a mini-festival of the “essay film,” which included the entire filmography of Ross McElwee. I’d never heard of McElwee, but the description on the box included the word “hilarious,” so I rolled the dice.

McElwee is funny, yes. But he’s not merely funny, and hilarious doesn’t do justice to the artistry of his films. Watching his work rekindled for me a love of the personal essay: its boundless range, its capability to reveal the epic in the everyday, and at its center, always, one human being, one penetrating intelligence, one soul.

McElwee’s subjects are life and death, marriage, the American south and all its historical guilt and charm. He’s the emotional center of the films, the guide and the frame.

Though his voice-overs are often self-examinations, he’s no navel gazer. There’s an engaging gameness in his persona, an eagerness to attack impossibly big ideas with one camera and a shoestring budget: Sherman’s March. The Berlin Wall. Space Travel. (Alan Gurganus once compared McElwee to Don Quixote, and in my imagination, there’s a striking physical resemblance, right down to the beard.) The big idea is brought to us in the guise of the every day.

Thus Sherman’s March begins as a conventional documentary tracing the lasting effects of the Civil War in the American south—at least that’s what McElwee told the agency that gave him the grant to make the film. But when his girlfriend dumps him just before he begins production, Sherman’s March becomes a love story—McElwee’s own quest to find the love of a good woman in his native land.

And yet, through the telling of that love story, we do see the lasting effects of the Civil War in the south. The film is an essay in the literal sense, an attempt, a process of discovery, and McElwee records each wrong turn and serendipitous arrival with his camera. In his voice-over, he examines the footage with the viewer at his side, reflecting on its meaning, its beauties and failures. We look over his shoulder.

It might all seem pretentious if McElwee wasn’t so clumsy, if his North Carolina accent wasn’t so gentle and his humor so effortless and often self-directed. One might not guess from watching the films that McElwee is a Harvard professor with degrees from Brown and MIT.

No matter who stumbles into the frame, his camera never seems to pass judgment. It’s Cinema Verité, but with a distinctively American, and I would say distinctively Southern, self-deprecation. Funny, yes. But also elegant, sensitive, and moving.

I was struck in particular by his lack of cynicism. Michael Moore’s documentaries have made him a household name. He too is funny, but there’s a smugness to his humor that is also deeply depressing.

There’s irony in McElwee, but there is more than irony. There’s art and even experimentation but there’s also a pulse, a heart.

Maybe that was the biggest surprise in the films Dave brought home: After watching them, I was energized, ready to embark. Too often the films we have watched have made art seem like something that exists to scold and critique, or worse, something entirely removed from common experience, which is usually revealed as small and mean.

But McElwee’s films, like so many of my favorite essays, reveal largeness; each character, each human life, is unwittingly bigger and more beautiful than expected.