Sherman's March

For my first film reaction, I watched Sherman’s March by Ross McElwee. The first thing that I noticed was the fact that it played with my expectations. I knew what the film (roughly) was going to be about before I watched it, but I didn’t think that he would keep returning to his attempt to make a documentary about Sherman’s real march. It didn’t feel disconnected, however. He was a person that was distracted in his work, trying to go on, but feeling rather discouraged. The moment that demonstrated this was when he went to the sight of the church that Sherman burned down. He filmed himself walking around it, as if he was exploring it. In the voiceover during this part he was saying that he felt lost and confused. “I don’t seem to have a real life anymore.” And he felt that the only way he ever connected with women was from behind a camera.

The whole thing was a kind of journal entry of this point in his life. I really liked that too. I like to try to somehow understand why people act the way that they do. This film seemed to me to be doing that. Without his voiceover, I wouldn’t have had much sympathy for him in his search for a woman to make him happy. He wasn’t afraid to share his deeper thoughts.

The whole time, he was stopping to smell the roses. He was in no hurry to move on to the next shot, such as when he is with Claudia at the church. He puts in a shot of two choir boys goofing off. They have nothing to do with the story, McElwee is just taking a look at his surroundings and enjoying them.

The most confusing part about it though was the time. I couldn’t keep track of how much time had passed and sometimes it felt like he was just moving from woman to woman with no thought and care. It wasn’t until the very end that he says that a year has passed since his starting the film, but throughout, I sometimes couldn’t orient myself within the temporal world of the film.

The one comment that stuck out to me and that I feel boils the film down into one sentence is when his friend Charleen says to him, “This is not art, this is life.” The whole time she keeps pestering McElwee about the fact that he has lost touch with reality because he is always behind a camera. He even questions this himself while he is going out to visit various historical sites. This idea comes out the most when he is with his childhood sweetheart Karen. During one talk between the two of the them, I could just see through the process of filming her, he was in an internal battle. The fight between filming and capturing the emotion and beauty of the conflict between them and stopping the camera for the sake of personal moments. He kept turning the camera on and off.

I think that is the battle that we all fight: what is art and what is life? Should our life be art? Beautiful, symbolic, thought provoking, and pleasurable? Or should art be an almost separate part of our lives? This would leave room for the part where we do the dishes and earn a living and teach children how to tie their shoes. I don’t know if McElwee ever really figured it out, but I’m glad that he was able to provoke the question in the first place.