Film Forum

U.S., 1986
Written and directed by Ross McElwee
Approx. 158 min.

Armed with a 16mm camera and a grant to make a documentary about the lingering aftermath of William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 march to the sea, Ross McElwee gets sidetracked. After his girlfriend breaks up with him, Ross shifts his attention from the historical to the personal, to the battlefield of modern love, and embarks on a sociological chronicle that documents the courting rites and rituals of the New South. A generous and humanistic portrait of several remarkable women that Ross meets along the way, Sherman’s March sketches its characters with novelistic sensitivity: Pat, an aspiring actress with a yen for Burt Reynolds; Claudia, a roller-skating interior designer; Jackie, the activist whose anti-nuclear advocacy dovetails with Ross’s deepest fears; and above all, Charleen Swansea, Ross’s mentor and a one-woman Greek chorus of unsolicited romantic counsel. A landmark of first-person filmmaking that presaged everything from Michael Moore to reality TV.

A MUSIC BOX FILMS RELEASE

Reviews

“The Mark Twain of documentarians... McElwee’s wit is surpassed only by his uncanny knack for observation.”
– Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

“Though McElwee’s timing with women is awful, he’s a filmmaker-anthropologist with a rare appreciation for the eccentric details of our edgy civilization. SHERMAN’S MARCH, which was made in 1981, is a timely memoir of the 80’s."
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times
 
“A master and pioneer of home movie epics, Ross McElwee makes films that are at once simple, intimate, and infinitely complex. While often starting with the anecdotal—a mundane thought or simple life event—his films have a tendency to digress infinitely through dry comedic musings that quickly veer into the metaphysical and meta-cinematic.”
– Joshua Bogatin, Screen Slate
 
“Many try to imitate but none can duplicate the documentary poetry of Ross McElwee... A homegrown, bighearted, quintessentially American documentarian.”
– Entertainment Weekly
 
“One of those rare filmmakers for whom the word visionary is appropriate.”
– The Boston Globe