Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition

21. Documentary Film and the Discourse of Hysterical/Historical Narrative: Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March

Chapter 21 Documentary Film and the Discourse of Hysterical/ Historical Narrative Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March Lucy Fischer The film Sherman’s March (1985) takes its name from the events of 1864– 65 when Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman trekked through the South, crossing many geographical and political borders along the way. The opening of Ross McElwee’s film, with its momentary assumption of standard documentary conventions, presents us with a map of the region and the animated trajectory of Sherman’s infamous march to the sea. On this level, we might imagine the text as an historical epic in nonfiction form—and its initial voice-of-God narration, its display of archival photographs and its recitation of the “facts” do nothing to disappoint us. But within short order this grandiose prologue begins to unravel. McElwee is heard offscreen inquiring whether the sequence should be reshot (revealing its synthetic status), and the filmmaker is caught in a demeaning visual pose—sweeping the floor of a New York City loft. He then describes (in voice-over) how he had just begun to make a film about General Sherman when he stopped in New York to visit a girlfriend who proceeded to dump him. Devastated, he headed south “to see [his] family and try to begin [his] film.” With these revelations, Sherman’s March crosses the first of its own fluid borders—from the realm of historical into hysterical narrative. As we Sherman’s March 357 shall see, this “traversal” is only one of many, as the film skirts the boundaries of biography versus autobiography, fiction versus nonfiction, objectivity versus subjectivity, public versus private, classicism versus postmodernism , and cinema verité versus drama. Hence Sherman’s March is a highly self-reflexive documentary that consciously inscribes within its discourse an interrogation of the documentary form itself. In a confusion of self and other, the film almost immediately superimposes the life story of Ross McElwee (the ostensible man behind the movie camera) upon its profile of General Sherman (the hallowed figure upon the movie screen). Clearly we are to find the opposition of Sherman and McElwee one of droll incommensurability. Sherman is a Northern Civil War conqueror, a soldier who brought General Lee to his knees. He is a figure whose troops “raped and plundered” as he carved a “path of destruction” upon the military and civilian populations of the South. In other words, he is a “hero”—in the Western sense of the term. McElwee, by contrast, is a (then) unknown Southern artist who, pathetically, becomes derailed from his epic project through the humiliating pain of unrequited love. For the rest of the film, he stumbles around Sherman’s historic landscape—no longer documenting or dramatizing the general’s monumental journey so much as using it as a shameless alibi to pick up women. Though he received grant money to make a film about American history, it rapidly becomes a work about “Ladies of the South.” Ultimately, in McElwee’s eyes, the projects of love and war are not entirely unrelated. The subtitle of Sherman’s March is “A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South during the Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation”—a phrase that reminds us of the subtitle to Dr. Strangelove (1964): “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” He informs us that when his love life wanes, his war dreams wax. Hence we are not surprised to find a continual intercutting between sites of historic military battle and scenes of personal romantic strife—their routes hopelessly entangled . After he is rejected by Karen, he visits Sherman’s final battlefield and evokes symbolic castration by commenting on the soldiers’ amputated limbs. Similarly, when he visits a monument dedicated to the Confederate dead, an elderly matron reminds him that many of the fallen were so young that they had not yet had their first sweethearts. Ironically, Sherman’s March soon levels the differences between the war-torn Sherman and the lovelorn McElwee. In a postmodern gesture, the film fractures secure notions of the humanist subject—by merging identities and confusing biography and autobiography. Historian Robin Winks has noted that “The one person the historian cannot afford to have missing is himself” (61), but, clearly, McElwee takes this principle to dizzying 358 L U C Y F I S C H E R heights. He tells us that Sherman (like himself) had...