Ross McElwee, the affable, soft-spoken southern gentleman who bares all in his autobiographical documentaries, has often chronicled personal pain. In his groundbreaking work, “Sherman’s March” (1986), we see a budding young filmmaker’s lost loves and unrealized yearnings. In his latest, “Remake,” he wrestles with the tragic death of his son in 2016.
The two complementary films begin an extended run at the Coolidge Corner Theatre this week to commemorate the newly remastered 4K, 40th anniversary rerelease of “Sherman’s March,” as well as the release of “Remake.” To kick off the run Thursday night, McElwee will be in conversation with fellow Cantabrigian filmmaker and Harvard professor, Robb Moss, following a screening of “Sherman’s March.”
McElwee’s films are intoxicating in their quiet, observant demeanor — revelations that wash over you sans any didactic ice-bucket deluge. Their subtle, lingering resonance is not far off from the hypnotic vexations that became the signature of fellow Cambridge filmmaker Frederick Wiseman throughout his impressive body of work. Their styles and approaches, however, are vastly different: the recently deceased Wiseman gave you fly-on-the-wall direct cinema, whereas McElwee’s more immediately accessible chronicles provide you with in-the-moment perspectives that, in their intimacy, feel genuinely honest and self-deprecating — especially given the filmmaker’s willingness to expose his vulnerabilities.
Nearly all of McElwee’s 10 feature-length films are deeply self-referential and play off previous works. He made “Sherman’s March” about a decade before he first married, and “Remake” about nine years after the death of his son, Adrian, who succumbed to fentanyl addiction at 27. In both films, McElwee set out with one agenda and ended up with a film about something else. “Sherman’s March” began as a chronicle of the titular Union general’s military campaign through the South; then the camera flipped onto McElwee and turned to his romantic life and future hopes. In “Remake,” he started turning “Sherman’s March” into a fictional feature but the death of his son changed the focus of his lens. “I allow the footage to guide me to the structure of what the film should be,” McElwee said in a conversation with Cambridge Day.
“Remake” pulls footage from a number of McElwee’s previous films; his son and family are subjects of “Time Indefinite” (1993), “In Paraguay” (2008) and “Photographic Memory” (2011). We see the young Adrian looking adoringly at his father, interested in his dad’s profession and as the subject of McElwee’s camera and probing questions. “Remake” shows footage Adrian shot on his own as an aspiring filmmaker (posing as a film festival hotshot when on the circuit tour with McElwee) and talking candidly with his dad about addiction.
Grief is palpable throughout the film, and you can see McElwee processing it frame by frame. “I was devastated when my son died,” he said matter-of-factly during our interview. “You never truly come to terms with it. You never fully accept it. But somehow you learn to keep moving forward.”
In the film, McElwee asks a lot of deep questions — mostly of himself — and often speaks directly to Adrian. “I didn’t really see how I could continue to be a filmmaker,” he intones in his smooth Southern accent early in the film. Later he offers, “Making [‘Remake’] was a way of keeping Adrian alive.”
“Remake” was a long-running project. McElwee agreed in 2008 to give a producer the rights to “Sherman’s March” — signing over the rights was shot by Adrian. In 2016, Adrian died. Along that path, McElwee touches on his divorce from Adrian’s mother, Marilyn Levine, and marriage to Hyun Kyung Kim at Cambridge City Hall.
“You show your first wedding, and talk about how that feels like a fiction now,” McElwee says in dulcet voice-over in the film, reflecting on how time changes the context of images. “I think any of us who look back on even photographs — still photographs on the wall — that changes over time,” he said in our conversation. “Especially if someone in the photograph ends up dying, passing on, the photograph totally changes.”
A quirky caveat of “Remake” is that Kim, a vibrant persona, wouldn’t let her face be filmed. We see a lot of her feet and hands.
McElwee was born in Charlotte, N.C., but has long been part of the Boston/Cambridge filmmaking scene. He attended Brown University with designs to be a journalist and/or writer, and met Moss as a fellow graduate student studying filmmaking at MIT. The two would become teaching colleagues in Harvard’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and share similar approaches to documentary filmmaking — the autobiographical lens and regular revisiting of the past and past films.
As for what’s next for McElwee, he said he’s focused now on supporting the release of “Remake,” which he described as a movie about “movies and mortality.” His question on that theme: “Is this what I really want to do exclusively? Give people a reason to walk out of the theater feeling very depressed?”
“Remake” does take on melancholy tones at times, but it’s driven by McElwee’s affable introspection, while being insightful and emotionally cathartic, and ends with a cheeky note of whimsy.
“Remake” and the reissue of “Sherman’s March” open Friday in Brookline, with possible future Cambridge screenings.
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