Sherman’s March director McElwee revisits footage of his late son for this magnificently affecting film and meditation on making art
This new film from revered documentary-maker Ross McElwee is an extraordinary work, arguably his most audacious use yet of autobiographical material while at the same time being a coruscating self-criticism of that same technique. Think of it as an artistic ouroboros (a snake eating its own tail). Remake is all at once about creativity, shame, love and loss, revelling in the way film can capture a moment of truth and honesty, but tempered by the knowledge that once a subject knows they’re being filmed everything becomes a kind of performance. It’s a film that works on so many levels and at the same time is so simple and direct.
On that very simplest level, Remake starts out as a documentation of how Hollywood got in touch with McElwee and told him they wanted to make a fictionalised remake of his best-known film, Sherman’s March. Made in 1985 with a one-man crew (McElwee himself), Sherman’s March recorded the McElwee’s trip back to South Carolina where he grew up; there he films his family, old friends, and himself as he continually fails to establish romantic relationships with various women, all of it lavishly slathered with his own warm, softly southern-accented voiceover.
