Sherman's March · reception & legacy

How Sherman's March has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

An unlikely art-house hit in 1986 — a 2.5-hour first-person doc that won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at the 1987 U.S. Film Festival (soon to be Sundance) — it's since been fully canonised, entering the National Film Registry in 2000 as the founding text of the confessional personal documentary.

What's debated

The perennial fight: is McElwee's camera-as-diary self-absorption charming and profound, or is it exasperating navel-gazing — and is it fair to the women he films while courting?

Its footprint

Its full title — 'A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation' — is one of the most quoted subtitles in cinema, and the film's talk-to-the-camera DNA runs through everything from later first-person docs to the vlog era.

Where it stands

A doc-nerd essential and nonfiction-canon cornerstone — the 'you must see this' title of American autobiographical documentary.

Named by the director

Influences Ross McElwee has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

• Richard Leacock — McElwee's teacher at MIT, whom he has repeatedly credited as a formative influence on his observational, one-person shooting style.
• Ed Pincus — McElwee has cited his MIT mentor's diaristic filmmaking as the model that opened the door to turning the camera on his own life.