Sherman's March

Sherman's March (1986)

An improbable search for love

Documentarian Ross McElwee originally set out to make a travelogue of sorts tracing General William T. Sherman's infamous scorched-earth march through the Confederacy in the latter stages of the Civil War. Instead, haunted by a recent breakup with a girlfriend, McElwee ends up documenting his progress -- or lack thereof -- in starting a new relationship. His journey then becomes one of self-reflection and self-discovery rather than a historical/sociological exploration.

Date of release
1986-09-05
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (46)
Runtime
2h 38m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Ross McElwee

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: South Carolina
  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary

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 a Grand Jury prize at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival, and was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry in 2000.

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.

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. ...

McElwee set out to film Sherman's March with just a $9,000 grant (equivalent to $26,942 in 2025), 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.

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."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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