Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Sherman's March
1986 · Ross McElwee · Sherman's March on Sightlines
A man sits in a dark room, turns the camera on himself, and whispers. He isn't addressing an audience so much as keeping himself company at three in the morning. He talks about a woman he met a few stops back. He talks about General Sherman. Underneath both, he is talking about the bomb. That whisper is Ross McElwee's invention, and nearly everything the film understands is already inside it.
The premise is a joke he never drops. McElwee had a plan: retrace Sherman's 1864 scorched-earth march through Georgia and the Carolinas, a campaign still lodged in Southern memory like shrapnel. Then his girlfriend left him on the eve of shooting. He drove the route anyway, alone, running a 16mm camera and his own synchronous sound at once, and ended up filming the women he met along it. Every so often a mock-scholarly intertitle reports Sherman's progress toward the sea while McElwee makes none of his own. The gag works every time. Tilt it slightly and it becomes a theory of cinema.
Deleuze split film into two regimes. In the first, the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting exists to carry that chain from perception to act to consequence. Its grandest version he called the large form: a whole situation bears down on a man until one decisive act transforms it. Sherman is that man. He looked at the Confederacy and burned it, and the country was different afterward. McElwee has the same map, the same roads, a stated objective, and no capacity whatever to act on what he sees. He meets a woman. He films her. He narrates, afterward, in the dark, what he wishes he had done.
Deleuze called this failure the crisis of the action-image: a character who can no longer react adequately to what he perceives. What replaces the actor is the voyant, the seer, someone who watches and endures instead. Usually this is a solemn condition, Rossellini's woman stranded on the volcano. McElwee makes it funny, because his camera is both the reason he is present and the reason he never has to do anything. It is an alibi he can carry.
Why insist on this vocabulary for a shaggy personal documentary? Because the usual description, a film about Sherman that accidentally becomes a film about its maker, makes the collapse sound like luck. It wasn't. The whole thing is engineered around the gap between a route designed for decisive action and a man incapable of it. That structure has a name in Deleuze: the voyage-balade, the trip that transforms nothing, which Italian neorealism and the New Wave used to replace the quest. McElwee built the documentary version, with a real itinerary and real roads. The people are correspondingly scattered: an aspiring actress, a linguist, a singer, a survivalist couple, his old teacher Charleen, linked by nothing but the road and the order in which he met them. The causality is slack on purpose.
Then the film stops for the land. Kudzu swallowing ground, historical markers, monuments, the residue of a fire nobody alive saw. These are what Deleuze called opsigns, pure optical situations, images you can't do anything with except look at them. More precisely they are stratigraphic images: an emptied landscape with an absent past speaking over it. Straub and Huillet did that with Roman ruins and a voice from antiquity. McElwee does it in available light off the shoulder of a state highway, with his own insomniac murmur supplying the dead.
Past those images sits something no camera can pan to. Deleuze distinguished the relative out-of-field, the room next door, from the absolute out-of-field, a presence that can't be located in space at all. The film's absurd full subtitle promises a meditation on romantic love "during an era of nuclear weapons proliferation," and the survivalist couple rehearsing for the end of the world make the dread literal, but the bomb is never the subject. It's the weather. Sherman's fire and the coming fire occupy the same unfilmable slot, one behind the film and one ahead of it, which is why the historical thread never hardens into a history lesson.
The two McElwees are the formal key. There's the one inside the scenes, talking, holding the camera, and there's the one who recorded the voice-over later and keeps undercutting him. Deleuze described modern cinema arriving at a point where sound and image stop serving each other and become two separate wholes that touch only across a gap. Here the gap is where the comedy lives, and the ethics too, since the later voice knows things the earlier one didn't. Meanwhile the camera's presence is registered constantly: a shadow, a reflection, the frame tilting when he reacts, and above all people addressing the lens as they address him. Deleuze's term for an image that perceives someone perceiving is the dicisign. This may be its purest documentary case.
Which raises the question the film can't stop worrying. Is any of it true? Deleuze's answer, worked out from Rouch and Perrault, was that a real person placed in front of a camera begins legending themselves. Fabulation, not lying. The actress rehearses for a Hollywood that may never call. The survivalists rehearse for an apocalypse that hasn't come. McElwee's own on-screen persona, hesitant and decent and comically passive, is a construction assembled in the edit out of material in which nothing was faked. That is what Deleuze meant by the powers of the false: not deception, but truth produced rather than recorded. The photographic contract Bazin described, the image carrying the credential of having been there, isn't broken. It's relocated. The film is scrupulously true about what happened when one man with a camera showed up.
Everything here was handed to him and then turned around. Primary built the lightweight sync rig that let one person shoot and record at the same time. Don't Look Back proved a single operator could stay close to one subject for a whole film. Grey Gardens showed subjects performing to filmmakers they can see. Chronicle of a Summer put the filmmakers on camera and argued the ethics of it out loud. David Holzman's Diary invented the conceit as fiction, a man narrating his romantic life to his own lens. And Ed Pincus, McElwee's MIT teacher, had already filmed his own marriage for years in Diaries and handed his student the method whole. What McElwee adds is the whisper and the length: two and a half hours of accretion, dead time held instead of cut, so that the shagginess performs the aimlessness it's describing. He turned confessional first-person nonfiction from a stunt into a form with a shape, and the hinge he built is the one most personal documentary has walked through since.
Charleen keeps erupting into the film to scold him for hiding behind the camera and to try to fix his love life. She's right, the film knows she's right, and it keeps shooting. Watch it again for what the camera does when nothing is happening, and for the second when a woman notices it's still running. Then decide whether that machine is what keeps him out of his own life or the only way he can stand to be in it. He never answers. The question is the film.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The mock-quest structure: McElwee retraces Sherman's decisive 1864 campaign with mock-scholarly intertitles charting the general's military progress against his own romantic non-progress; his on-screen persona is 'hesitant, decent, comically passive, forever narrating his failures.'
- the seer (voyant) — McElwee is present at every encounter as operator rather than agent — camera at hip or chest level, panning toward whoever speaks — and the film's arc is his 'progress -- or lack thereof' in acting on anything he perceives.
- the voyage / balade — The film is organized as a series of 'stops' along Sherman's route, each associated with a woman, and both quests (retrace Sherman, find love) 'fail in illuminating ways'; the trip transforms nothing.
- dispersive situation — An aspiring actress, a linguist, a singer, a survivalist couple, Charleen Swansea, women who flirt, tolerate or flee — a sprawl of encounters shot over a long stretch, linked by the route rather than by cause.
- weak links — A narrative that 'advances by accretion and association rather than by plot,' cut from hours of contingent footage into recurring motifs and running gags instead of a causal chain.
- pure optical and sound situations — The contemplative inserts that interrupt the courtship material: Southern landscapes, monuments, kudzu-choked ground, historical markers, the residue of Sherman's campaign — images with no available action attached.
- the stratigraphic (archaeological) image — Emptied Southern ground and historical markers spoken over by the essayistic voice-over's Sherman material — 'the residue of Sherman's campaign' as a landscape carrying an invisible past.
- out-of-field (absolute) — The subtitle's 'era of nuclear weapons proliferation' as the film's emotional weather, made concrete only by the survivalist couple preparing for apocalypse; the annihilation is never in frame and cannot be located in space.
- audiovisual disjunction — The two-layered voice: the 'live' McElwee inside scenes and the whispered, insomniac voice-over recorded after the fact, threaded through to editorialize and 'frequently undercut him'; plus intertitles reporting Sherman's advance over images of romantic stalling.
- dicisign — The filmmaker's presence registered in shadows, reflections, and the tilt of the frame when he reacts, with subjects addressing the lens as they address him — the camera perceiving people who perceive it.
- fabulation (legending) — Real people caught mid-self-invention: the aspiring actress rehearsing and dreaming of Hollywood, the survivalist couple preparing for nuclear apocalypse, and subjects who 'perform for it, or resist it, or use it.'
- powers of the false — McElwee's on-screen 'performance' described as 'a genuine construction, a persona shaped in the edit even though everything in it is real' — truth produced by the cut rather than merely recorded.
- the gest — Charleen Swansea erupting periodically to scold McElwee for hiding behind the camera and to try to arrange his love life — a posture that exposes the filmmaker/subject relation the film is built on.
- dead time (temps mort) — The roughly two-and-a-half-hour running time as an explicit formal choice: 'the film's shagginess and duration enact the aimlessness and repetition of its maker's search.'