become identified with specific places. San Francisco has been a center for surreal forms of avant-garde cinema. For a time, New York (and subsequently Buffalo/Toronto) was identified with what had come to be called 'structural filmmaking.' And for three decades, cinema verite has found a home in Boston. Many of the leading verite filmmakersRicky Leacock, the Maysles Brothers, Frederick Wiseman, Ed Pincushave had and continue to have crucial ties with Boston. Over the years, the cinema verite procedure (a hand-carried 16mm rig, hand-carried tape- recording equipment for synch sound, a one- or two-person crew) has been articulated in a variety of forms within a continually developing history. For a time, the assumption of a number of the prime movers of cinema verite was that the value of the procedure was precisely its ability to capture events without the intrusion of the filmmaker: the filmmaker's persona, either in a visual embodiment or in narration, was to be avoided at all costs.
By the seventies, however, a reaction to this position was occurring: men and women (Ed Pincus, Martha Coolidge, Amalie Rothschild, Alfred Guzzetti, others) were carrying 16mm cameras and tape recorders into their domestic environments to see what they could discover. Even within this more personalized kind of cinema verite, a good bit of articulation has been possible. One of the most interesting recent developments has occurred in a series of films by Ross McElwee, a native of
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Charlotte, North Carolina, who studied filmmaking at MIT with Leacock and Pincus, and has taught at Harvard. Since arriving at MIT, McElwee has completed
(1978), an extended portrait of Charleen Swansea, a friend and ex-teacher whose home became a haven for young painters, writers, and musicians'a place like no other in the South I'd ever seen';
(1978, co-made with Michel Negroponte), a portrait of three residents of Cape Canaveral, Florida: Mary Bubb, a local newspaper reporter who had witnessed sixteen hundred consecutive launches, 'Papa' John Murphy, an ex- maintenance man turned motorcycle gang guru, and Willy Womak, small-time construction company owner and clown-host for a local kids show;
(1981, also co-made with Negroponte), a portrait of an Iranian exile, tortured under the Shah's regime, living in the United States during the hostage crisis;
(1982), McElwee's portrait of his home in Charlotte;
(1985), a record of McElwee's travels in the South, and the women he meets along the route General Sherman took during the Civil War; and
(1990, co-made with Marilyn Levine), a meditation on the Berlin Wall.
In
McElwee's presence within the situations he records is, for the most part, similar to our sense of the filmmaker's presence in many earlier domestic cinema verite films: the world recorded simply surrounds the filmmaker and camera, and it's obvious that the people filmed are very aware of the camera's intrusion into their lives. But in some instances McElwee goes further: he introduces himself as a character within the imagery; we see him as we hear him comment about himself and his life. And just as important, he sometimes takes conversational actions that revise his relationships with the people he's talking with
. In other words, the camera is not simply recording McElwee's domestic life, it is witnessing changes in his life made possible, in part, by the camera's presence.
In
this more complex presence is the central catalyst for the film. We get to know McElwee's (or McElwee's filmic persona's) hopes, concerns, nightmares; and we are behind the camera with McElwee as he uses the filmmaking process to forge new relationships and to revise previously important relationships. As is true in many literary first-person narratives, McElwee's approach in
is simultaneously very revealing and somewhat mysterious: the candidness of the scenes is frequently startling, but the more the filmand McElwee-as-narratorreveals, the more we realize that there are many aspects of the relationships he is recording that we are not privy to. We cannot help but wonder about the narrator as we experience things with him.
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McElwee's films are also portraits of the contemporary South.
and
expose the complexity of Southern race relations from the inside, with a subtlety, a directness, and a humanity we rarely see in film or anywhere else. The oppression of black people is often obvious in the films, but so is the diversity of experiences blacks and whites share in this part of the nation where the races have lived longer and more intimately together than anywhere else on this continent.
McElwee and I talked on February 14, 1987, and subsequently fleshed out the interview by exchanging tapes.
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Could you talk about your educational background and about how you got into filmmaking?
When I was in high school and then in college as an undergraduate, creative writing was what I wanted to do. For a couple of semesters I worked with novelist John Hawkes, who teaches at Brown. Then during my last year in college I took still photography courses at the Rhode Island School of Design. I met students there who were making a film, and watched them work on the moviola. That got me thinking about the process of putting a film together. I went to student screenings at RISD, and I guess that's when I first thought about filmmaking as something an ordinary mortal could do. Also when I was in college, I saw
[1967], Richard Leacock's film about the 1960 Humphrey-Kennedy race in Minnesota, and Wiseman's
