Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation is a 1986 cinéma vérité documentary film written and directed by Ross McElwee. It was awarded the Grand Jury prize at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival, and was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry in 2000.
Background
McElwee initially planned to make a film about the effects of General William Tecumseh Sherman's Civil War campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas, the Georgia portion of which is commonly called his "March to the Sea". A romantic breakup that the director experienced before filming made it difficult for him to separate personal from professional concerns, however, shifting his focus to create a more personal story about the women in his life, romance, and religion. Other themes include the threat of nuclear war amidst the Cold War and the legacy and complexity of Sherman's own life.
The film follows a repetitive narrative pattern; McElwee becomes enamored with various women, eventually developing feelings for each of his subjects, only to have his romantic hopes dashed. McElwee has said that it follows a personal essay form existing between fiction and nonfiction.
Production
McElwee called his previous film Backyard "a sketch for Sherman's March, an experiment in how I could approach the bigger film". He called the former film "cruder" because I was just learning to shoot as a one-person crew. I was just getting over that odd sense of camera shyness in reverse. It takes a while to summon the gumption to shoot people you know well, to be able to face them and talk to them as you're filming. Also, I was using a Nagra 4, a very large tape recorder: it weighs 20 pounds and I carried it slung over my shoulder. For Sherman's March, I used a miniature Nagra SN, a very highly developed piece of recording equipment that could fit on my belt. This technological improvement made shooting much easier.
Initially, McElwee thought the film would be a "synthesis of Backyard and Space Coast," but the day after filming the Scottish games, his sister said—somewhat seriously, somewhat joking—'You should use the camera as a way to meet women.' She's sincerely upset about my having ended my relationship with my girlfriend, and she's looking for ways to get me back on my feet. ...[A]t the point when she gave me her advice about how to use the camera, I experienced a minor epiphany.
McElwee set out to film Sherman's March with just a $9,000 grant (), and began conducting mostly impromptu interviews. "Pretty much I always walked in on them," he said, characterizing his methods. "I guess what my conversations have that conventional interviews don't is a serendipitous quality, and emotional charge that has something to do with the personal connection between the subject and the film-maker. I never came with a list of questions." The film ultimately cost $75,000 () to complete.
Principal photography lasted about five months, and McElwee estimated that he shot about 25 hours of footage: I was almost always ready to shoot. I kept the camera within reaching distance, sometimes balanced on my shoulder ... Even between major portraits, when I was on the road, I was totally open to filming whatever might happen in a gas station or in a restaurant, or wherever. So in one sense you can count all that time as 'filming time.'
Reception
In 1985, Jay Carr of The Boston Globe called McElwee a "Tarheel Woody Allen" and the film "like a series of variations on loneliness, funny and sad" but "never self-pitying," "sustain[ing] its loopy absurdist tone, reveling in the post-Civil War ironies of the misunderstood Sherman, identifying with them."
In a "NYT Critics' Pick" review of the documentary, Vincent Canby called McElwee a "film maker-anthropologist with a rare appreciation for the eccentric details of our edgy civilization"; the film, "which was made in 1981, is a timely memoir of the 80's. It's also a very cheerful recollection of the kind of self-searching, home-movie documentaries that Jim McBride, the director, and L. M. Kit Carson, the writer and actor, satirized so brilliantly in their fiction film, David Holzman's Diary.