Ross McELwee

"Time Indefinite," the name of Ross McElwee's latest documentary film, was taken from the words of a Jehovah's witness who came knocking at his parents' door in Charlotte, North Carolina several summers ago. In religious language, the term connotes an endless time spent on Earth to those who are not "saved"; but the phrase also describes the "indefinite' nature of documentary film making itself. Without script or multiple shots the documentary format relies on editing the shots into some cohesive story. This style uses a "catch as catch can" method to obtain material. To compound this difficulty, McElwee agonizes over the objectivity of the documentary genre. For this reason, it is no surprise McElwee only releases a film about every five to ten years.

Before his stints as Visiting Lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard, McElwee was educated at Brown and continued on to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the seventies McElwee was at MIT, which he says had "attempted to resurrect its image as an extension of the military industrial complex...by choosing to focus on the mechanical arts. They really urged us to take complete command and authorship of our own work...to actually become the cinematographer, become the sound technician, do the editing yourself." This sort of independence allows McElwee to record the daily events of his family and friends as a one-man team.

With the technology developed in the seventies, many film-makers are able to be "independent" in this sense. McElwee is unique because, unlike documentary filmmakers who concentrate on external phenomena, McElwee's main subject is himself. He conveys his own thoughts and feelings (voiced over), and the reactions of his friends and family, to events that involve him. He looks through the camera to show the audience exactly what he sees, hears and thinks.

By relying on his own life for inspiration, McElwee creates a modern version of material which used to be documented only in journals. His "visual essays," as he calls them, capture his surroundings with poignancy and humor, spiced with metaphysical ramblings. "Time Indefinite" continues the story of "Sherman's March," McElwee's 1986 film, which was originally intended to document the path General William Tecumseh Sherman took through the South in the Civil War. Instead McElwee wound up pursuing other interests, namely women.

In "Time Indefinite," we catch up with him at his annual family reunion in North Carolina announcing his engagement to his wife, Marilyn Levine. During the course of the film, McElwee's life unfolds to show several tragedies in succession. The film's tone changes from one of celebration to one of mourning for the death of several family members, before reverting to the celebratory tone of his maid's fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Explaining his penchant for autobiographical films, McElwee says, "I can get a kind of perspective on my own life that gives me more flexibility in shaping some sort of final film...With my own life the limitations are only imposed by myself." He adds, "It also takes care of the huge problem I have of invading other poeple's lives with the movie camera....It's kind of contained: you work it out with your own family, your own friends....It sometimes seems it's the only place where cameras haven't been--my own life." With his unique claim to the material, McElwee shapes the story, editing to convey the emotions he wants. He admits that he has an "obsession with filming"; he finds it "frightening and humorous at the same time. I don't exempt myself, I am as neurotically obsessed with it as anybody." He ends this soliloquy with the question that seems to epitomize his rationale for action: "Why not turn the camera in on yourself where no one else can go?"

Citing other documentary filmmakers, McElwee spoke about the latest trends. He said that while all documentaries rely on "questioning what's objective,....academically, documentaries have been expected to render an objective accounting of reality in some way." Although he doesn't think there is "as much experimentation in nonfiction films as there should be," McElwee believes that this "objective" concept of the documentary is changing. "People are branching out while still relying upon an experience in reality intersected with the camera." "First," he says there was the "movement of cinema verite with people like [Harvard professors] Robert Gardner and Alfred Guzetti." Gardner has explored the cultures of Africa and India while trying not to impose his presence onto the culture. Guzetti has made films about his own family.

McElwee continues to question, "what exactly is the nature of nonfiction versus fiction" in filmmaking. A true realist, McElwee describes documetary filmmaking ideally as the "objective presentation of visual images shot from reality." But he concedes, "I guess there's no strain of the purely objective anywhere in the film...That kind of objectivity, we all realize in this post-modern era, is an impossibility. You can't be objective." He cites Errol Morris, the make of "A Thin Blue Line" and "A Brief History of Time," as the most "noticeble" explorer of this question. Both of these films document men's lives: one is the story of someone wrongly accused, the other that of the scientific genius, Steven Hawkins. Both employ hindsight to reconstruct events.

"I think there's going to be a lot of interesting work done in the next decade by people just poking and pushing at this notion of documentary in all different kinds of ways." He finds evidence of this in the Fox television show "Cops." McElwee says the show "take[s] people who were actually involved in real criminal cases and then ask[s] them to play out what happened to them." Although he finds the show "ludicrous," McElwee syas, "it's an interesting questioning of what does constitute reality in terms of how we perceive it on television and film." He also looks forward to more of the films that are beginning to flood from the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe. While making the 1992 film on the Berlin Wall in collaboration with his wife, McElwee had the opportunity to see the reality these filmmakers document. "There's a strong documentary tradition in Eastern Europe that informs the fiction film making....A lot of it is hand-held work....They look to reality, in a way, for the groundwork....for their films, more so than American film makers do."

Whether in person or in his films, McElwee relates the malaise and tragedy so prevalent in our times and so endemic to the south, in a language of post-modern metaphysics mixed with dry humor. A native Southerner, form Charlotte, North Carolina, McElwee return to the South for the majority of his films. He admits that his "soul and film making reside in the South, at home." He chooses to live in Brookline, though, because there is a "collection of people in the Boston and Cambridge areas who are pressing at the margins of what it means to make documentary films." The presence of a great number of universities and the main offices of PBS explains why there is such a large number of documentary filmmakers in the Bosotn area. "Being up here provides me with the distance...and the resources I need," he says.

When asked about Harvard, McElwee responded, "I love teaching. I was here for six years in the early to mid '80s." He is now back as, "Visiting Lecturer, so called." He describes his students as "extremely bright, highly motivate" with "vivid imagination." These equalities are "juxtaposed with their relative inexperience with film-making" and that "most of them have never touched a piece of film." But they learn quickly, he says. When asked about Harvard'ts supposed lack of support for the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, McElwee responded: "In many ways how could you say that Harvard has been anything but incredibly supportive of the film department here? Students graduate form this place...then they go to graduate schools and they haven't nearly the access they have...here." This opinion and his mention of two other Harvard professors as models of documentary filmmaking indicate McElwee's enthusiasm of VES.

McElwee's position at Harvard allows him to alternate between filming and teaching. With a new wife and baby, Adrian, McElwee has found it difficult to make time for filming. He says that Adrian usually doesn't mind being filmed, but on occasion complains, "Put down the camera, Daddy. Be with me," which McElwee describes as a "heartbreaking" phrase. The older he gets the more he realizes "how hard life is," and the more "apologetic" he feels about invading people's privacy. He wonders if he should some day go outside of his own life and begin filming the lives of others. "It's something I'm coming to terms with,' he says. His 'film in progress" at the moment, "Six O'Clock News," is an "amalgam of the two approaches:" autobiography and external narrative. In it McElwee seeks to interview people he sees on the news, exploring what lies behind the "ten second news bite."