Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Sherman's March
1986 · Ross McElwee · Sherman's March on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for two different versions of McElwee's voice. (sound)
One voice talks inside scenes as they happen. A second, whispered voice-over, recorded later in darkened rooms, comments on and often undercuts the first.
Payoff: You are hearing a man argue with his own past self in real time.
Watch for mock-scholarly intertitles tracking Sherman's progress. (structure)
Cards report the general's military advance through Georgia while McElwee's own romantic search stalls out beside it, the two timelines running in ironic counterpoint.
Payoff: History marches forward on schedule. His own life very pointedly does not.
Watch the camera sit at hip or chest level, unsteady. (camera)
Because McElwee operates the camera himself while talking to people, the framing lags and drifts rather than composing a tidy image in advance.
Payoff: The imperfection reads as honesty. You can feel one person doing everything at once.
Watch Charleen interrupt him to scold him on camera. (staging)
His former teacher recurs across the film to tell him he hides behind the lens and to try to arrange his love life for him.
Payoff: One recurring character keeps saying out loud what the rest of the film only implies about him.
Watch for kudzu, monuments, and old historical markers. (setting)
Quieter, more contemplative shots of Southern landscape and Civil War-era markers recur between the conversations and courtships.
Payoff: The land keeps holding onto a history nobody on screen is actively discussing.
Once you have seen it
Watch him film instead of act in his own courtships. (structure)
Across the whole trip he records women rather than pursuing them, narrating afterward what he wishes he had done instead of doing it in the moment.
Payoff: The camera is both why he is present at all and his excuse for never having to do anything more. In the reading: the seer (voyant). The reading calls him a seer: someone who watches and endures rather than acts on what is in front of him.
Watch each stop connect to the next only by the road. (structure)
An actress, a linguist, a singer, a survivalist couple: the people he meets are linked by nothing but the order in which the route brought him to them.
Payoff: There was never going to be a destination here. The wandering itself is the whole shape of the film. In the reading: the voyage / balade. The reading calls this a voyage balade: a trip that transforms nothing, valuable for what it passes through rather than where it arrives.
Watch the survivalists rehearse for an apocalypse that never comes. (performance)
Like the actress rehearsing for a stardom that may never arrive, the survivalist couple performs a future for the camera that they are, in effect, telling into being.
Payoff: The film stays true about what happened when a camera showed up, even while everyone in front of it is performing a version of themselves. In the reading: fabulation (legending). The reading calls this fabulation: real people caught legending themselves in front of a camera, not lying, just building a version of a life.
Carry this in: Watch what the camera lets him avoid doing. It is his alibi and his only company.