{"id":776500,"date":"2026-07-02T23:10:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T23:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/776500\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T23:10:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T23:10:09","slug":"operation-restoration-shermans-march","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/776500\/","title":{"rendered":"Operation Restoration: Sherman’s March"},"content":{"rendered":"

Documentarian Ross McElwee was in his mid-thirties when he picked up a camera to work on what would eventually become his breakthrough 1986 Sundance hit, Sherman\u2019s March. It was like few films at that time: a cin\u00e9ma v\u00e9rit\u00e9 documentary focused on the director that followed his narrated version of events as he merged his flailing love life, his interest in revisiting Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman\u2019s path through the South, and his anxieties about nuclear war into one cohesive narrative. However disparate those ideas seem, in McElwee\u2019s creative narrative, one flows into another like a stream-of-consciousness confessional, decades before phone cameras were in every pocket and social media made it popular to talk through your thoughts. Like a forerunner to How To With John Wilson<\/a>, McElwee\u2019s idiosyncratic exploration of the larger world through his specific lens feels both unique and universal. For its 40th anniversary, Sherman\u2019s March is returning to theaters with a gorgeous 4K restoration that keeps the 16mm grain intact with McElwee\u2019s rookie mistakes incorporated into the film.<\/p>\n

After studying with documentary legends like Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus at MIT and working for D.A. Pennebaker, McElwee steeped his approach in the practice of observational documentary filmmaking. However, with Sherman\u2019s March, an indie hit long unavailable in anything more than a modest standard definition format DVD, the director became the story. \u201cI did a short film called Backyard previous to this, which was a kind of test case,\u201d McElwee tells The A.V. Club. \u201cBack then there weren\u2019t many filmmakers who were putting themselves into their documentaries as subjects themselves along with everybody else who was being filmed. All of that was kind of an experiment and I wasn\u2019t sure how that was going to play out, but I did have an instinct that as a documentarian, it was best to try to capture what you could as it unfolded without directing it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

For McElwee, the experiment meant breaking with tradition. \u201cThe big difference was that I put myself in the film as well and also gave it a written narration, which of course, the true pioneers of cin\u00e9ma v\u00e9rit\u00e9 would never do,\u201d he said. \u201cFrederick Wiseman<\/a> never narrated his films, and they stand as an amazing monumental work because of his rigor about how he made the movies. That rigor is totally absent from my filmmaking. It\u2019s whatever seems to work at the time that I\u2019m willing to embrace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sherman\u2019s March begins with McElwee returning home after the end of his latest relationship in Boston. His family arranges a picnic and, at the behest of his sister, they encourage him to get back out there. With a half-formed idea about retracing General Sherman\u2019s March To The Sea, McElwee turns his camera to the South, both to its history and to its dating pool, looking for love and meaning in the nuclear age.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s Pat, a lively girl-next-door and aspiring actress who dreams of Burt Reynolds, not of settling for just any good old Southern boy. When he\u2019s getting his car fixed, McElwee meets Claudia, a religious mom, and later ventures out to the rural wonderland a linguist named Wini calls home. As his road trip continues, his friend Charleen introduces him to a Mormon singer named Dee Dee, but McElwee\u2019s attention soon follows a hot rocker named Joy, before trying his luck again with a former flame, Karen. As his series of romantic prospects fizzle out, McElwee muses directly to the camera on various topics including love, faith, family, nuclear anxieties, and of course, General Sherman. Today, his conversational diary-like entries could fit in alongside any number of creators sharing their day-in-the-life observations in an endless feed, but this was a groundbreaking formal move in a documentary field that almost never saw the director in front of the camera, let alone got to be privy to his love life. Even though McElwee starts the project from a place of heartbreak and worry, the tone remains mostly upbeat, enamored with each new person that greets McElwee\u2019s camera and amused by the ironies of life, such as when one of his former dates calls her boyfriend over to help him with his car.<\/p>\n

Revisiting Sherman\u2019s March for its restoration, McElwee notices that much has changed since he started filming in the early 1980s. \u201cBack then it was possible to get the kinds of material or the kinds of scenes that you can\u2019t possibly hope to get now with the same approach,\u201d he says. \u201cI did no location scouting. I did not do pre-interviews for anything. In fact, there are no formal interviews in the whole film. It\u2019s really a matter of just drifting around with the camera, following my instincts and responding to people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like in John Wilson\u2019s series, each person who steps in front of McElwee\u2019s camera adjusts to speaking to him through the lens, candidly sharing secrets or passing thoughts. Some conversations between the director and his dates get deep and emotional, some reveal early on that their personalities or goals clash, and their time together will be short. McElwee\u2019s narration, although calmly recited, holds onto the hopes of romantic sparks and captures his crestfallen reaction when those hopes are dashed and his romantic interests move on without him. Even if he only appears briefly to talk to the camera or in a mirror holding his camera, the way he uses the camera to view the world tells the story.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow,\u201d McElwee explains, \u201cthe other side of the equation is that people, at least down South, were so much more relaxed about being filmed. That\u2019s just not true anymore over the entire United States, including the South. The internet has changed things tremendously. I see it in the students, their frustrations with trying to make films and discovering that often people change their mind about being filmed partway through a project, and they have to start over on some totally different topic, mainly because people start thinking about how this will be perceived when it\u2019s seen online. The political environment has changed a lot for the worse, in my opinion, and people were simply more relaxed and seemed to be enjoying their lives more as I filmed in the South, which is also where I\u2019m from. Everybody\u2019s so self-conscious about how they\u2019ll appear on film and with good reason. I think they\u2019re wary of cameras.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the major players to emerge from the succession of would-be dates is McElwee\u2019s former teacher-turned-confidant, Charleen Swansea. The subject of his 1980 graduate thesis, Charleen appears in a number of McElwee\u2019s movies. She\u2019s a star of her own, a source of comic relief against McElwee\u2019s insecurities, chiding him for being \u201ccamera shy in a reverse way.\u201d She\u2019s unafraid of making dirty jokes and scolding McElwee for filming everything. \u201cThis is not art! This is life!\u201d she tells him after trying to get him to put the camera down. She\u2019s the life of the party, doling out unsolicited romantic advice and support.<\/p>\n

Most of McElwee\u2019s movies center on people like her, subjects he knows and loves, giving each film a deeply personal touch that feels at home in the digital age. Sherman\u2019s March is also the key to Remake, the new film he\u2019s releasing on July 10. Remake traces the attempt to give Sherman\u2019s March a Hollywood makeover and reexamines the director\u2019s films after the death of his son, Adrian. Charleen features prominently in the new film, from her scenes in Sherman\u2019s March and his earlier movies. \u201cWithout Charleen and without the humor that\u2019s implicit in the notion of trying to turn Sherman\u2019s March, a documentary, into a Hollywood fiction film, Remake would be unbearable watching [sic], because it\u2019s just so tragically sad,\u201d McElwee says. \u201cThere\u2019s a writer named Christian Metz who\u2019s written a lot about movies. One of the things he writes about is how the absence of someone on screen, the absence becomes a presence. What he means by that is that nobody lives forever\u2026 The Lumiere brothers were very dedicated to filming their own families and similar things. But by now, all of those people are dead, and yet there they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

McElwee\u2019s idiosyncratic, first-person approach to documentary storytelling set him apart from his peers and challenged the nonfiction field to allow for different modes of personal storytelling. In today\u2019s tell-all internet age, his work may seem tame, but there\u2019s an artistry to the way McElwee explores his musings and insecurities, from his romantic shortcomings to his sleepless nights. He leads his audience through these many threads, weaving them together to make a full, complicated picture. With his camera, his calm presence allows his dates to open up and become themselves, relating to him\u2014and by proxy, his audience\u2014in a way many viewers hadn\u2019t seen in a time before the heyday of dating reality shows. Sherman\u2019s March may be a time capsule of the 1980s South and a pre-internet age, but it also foretold the ease with which everyday people could film themselves talking about themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Documentarian Ross McElwee was in his mid-thirties when he picked up a camera to work on what would…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":776501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-776500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/776501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}