I constantly marvel (recoil?) at how the utterly banal has become a primary mode for collective distraction. Social media has cultivated the enticing delusion that anyone and anything can be inherently interesting merely by existing: “get ready with me”; watch me play video games for hours on end; etc.
I understand the allure — my high school LiveJournal was embarrassingly and semi-publicly awash in the details of my teenaged angst. But mundanity comes in many forms, and it needn’t always be as shallow as observing someone unbox their latest “haul” of ethically dubious fast fashion. There can, in fact, be substance extracted from the day-to-day, a truth reinforced by my recent dive into Ross McElwee’s filmography ahead of the release of his latest feature — hands down one of this year’s best — Remake. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit to being largely unfamiliar with McElwee until now. But I’d heard great things about this new film, in which he processes the loss of his son, and I knew it built upon a lifetime of stories and people he’s followed throughout his career. Ahead of seeing Remake, I devoured a handful of his previous films to fill in my gap — thanks to my local library by way of Kanopy — and very quickly understood I was witnessing a key cinematic forebear to the likes of Rent‘s Mark Cohen, lonelygirl15, and countless day-in-the-life “content creators.”
His approach to the form has been consciously personal; often, McElwee operated as a one-person production crew, seemingly always carrying a cumbersome film camera to observe interesting people in his life and those he seeks out. (It’s fascinating to see his subjects’ varying reactions to being filmed in a pre-smartphone age, when everyone and their mother didn’t fancy themselves the stars of their own movie.) Figures and footage recur from project to project over the course of several decades, marking the unavoidable passage of time and forming a self-referential body of work. One of his most memorable characters is McElwee’s close friend Charleen Swansea, the effervescent and dynamic poet and educator who experiences personal tragedies and triumphs while offering cheeky wisdom and Southern charm in films like Charleen, Time Indefinite, Six O’Clock News, and Remake.
McElwee’s best-known work, Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (1986) is a would-be Civil War doc that actually ends up being about the pressure McElwee feels to find a partner and settle down. It’s navel-gazey, yet undeniably curious about humanity — a diaristic and revealing account of the fascinating women he befriends and/or dates during a certain period of his life. In these everyday subjects — among them an aspiring actress, a couple of musicians, and an interior designer — he finds extraordinary insight and connection. (Still, Charleen famously admonishes him at one point for hiding behind the camera while she plays matchmaker: “This is not art! This is life!”)
Remake is his first film in 15 years, and true to form it builds upon the McElwee lore, incorporating footage seen in many of his previous films. It explains the relatively long period since his last film, Photographic Memory (2011), which was in part about his increasingly fraught relationship with his son Adrian, who continued struggling in young adulthood and ultimately died of an overdose in 2016 at 27 years old. At this point it should be obvious, but it’s worth making plain anyhow: Remake is the kind of film that will wreck you — especially, I imagine, if you’re a parent or have lost a loved one to addiction. You will know if you can handle it, and if you believe you can, it’s absolutely worth it.
“I used to be a filmmaker,” McElwee states at the movie’s beginning. There’s a sense of regret, or at least an uncertainty, as to whether it was all worth it.
You don’t have to have seen Photographic Memory, or any other McElwee films for this one to resonate. But doing so certainly adds contextual layers to the story. His catalog represents an evolution of documentary and cinéma vérité (another obvious spiritual descendant of his is John Wilson), and watching the films unearths some of the repercussions of blurring one’s real life with art so effectively — facets that can only begin to be fully understood with hindsight. McElwee captured the sounds of Adrian’s birth and documented much of his time on Earth after that; with Remake, the director calls back to and ruminates on a life — his as well as his son’s — experienced largely through or in front of a camera lens. He wonders if Photographic Memory, which only hinted at the depths of Adrian’s personal troubles, gave his son a “distorted” sense of self that prevented him from fully addressing his addictions. He also excavates personal archives belonging to Adrian — himself an aspiring filmmaker who recorded his own drug use in hopes of making a documentary about his struggles.
“I used to be a filmmaker,” McElwee states at the movie’s beginning. There’s a sense of regret, or at least an uncertainty, as to whether it was all worth it.
That’s a question only he can answer for himself, if any such answer can be reached. For my part, I’m grateful for McElwee’s passion for observation and self-reflection, and his skill for finding meaning in those life moments small and momentous.
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