September

ARCHETYPAL VIDEO PICK OF THE ISSUE

Sherman's March 

Written, Directed and Produced by Ross McElwee.  1986. 

     Here’s a little gem from 1986.  As the title indicates, this documentary ostensibly covers the military campaign that came to be known as Sherman’s March, or, one of the final, crippling blows dealt to the Confederate Army at the hand of the Northerners in the autumn of 1864.  It was Sherman’s army who plundered and burned Atlanta and then proceeded to the sea, laying to waste to all people and property, in the form of a 50 mile-wide path of destruction.  General William Tecumseh Sherman, a Union general who had actually lived in and esteemed the South prior to the war, was a complex man.

      An even more complex man, perhaps, is Ross McElwee, the hand-held camera operator, director and outright protagonist of this delightful film.  In a literal sense, the film begins with the director’s breaking up with his girlfriend in New York.  We never see her; we are only made privy to McElwee’s even-toned narration as we watch him negotiate the emptiness of a huge SoHo loft after the split.  And so, on a psychological level, the viewer might already know that this film is about the platoon of women McElwee will meet in his travels while attempting to document Sherman’s March.  What unfolds is McElwee’s March through the uncertain territory of anima projection, or the exteriorization of the soul-image of a woman that a man possesses within himself.  Turns out his family wants him to find that ‘special someone,’ too.

      On a mythological level, Sherman’s March is perhaps a modern manifestation of the trials undergone by Odysseus on his way home from the Trojan War.  With a thoroughly postmodern twist, McElwee, as Odysseus, participates in every moment of his sojourn through the device of his camera.  The Scylla and Cyclops appear in his Odyssey in permutated forms; a car that breaks down, a blind date with a women who turns out to be a fundamental Christian, etc ...  

        A must see for the documentary enthusiast and purveyor of the psychology between the genders, especially where cameras are concerned!

Mark Greene
September 2000

COPYRIGHT 2000 by Mark Greene.

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