Remake: A heartbreaking exploration of the slippage between documentary and fiction
Filmmaker Ross McElwee distills his grief over the loss of his child into a powerful memory archive of home movies, clips from previous films, and footage shot by his late son, Adrian.
Remake opens with a sprightly hand-drawn animation of a squid leaping out of the ocean, dolphin-like, in front of a palm-crested island. Near the end of the film, we discover it is from a flip-book drawn by the filmmaker Ross McElwee’s son Adrian as a child. The simple cartoon takes us back to the roots of cinema in the discovery of how still images can be animated – literally, made alive. The film that follows movingly explores an aspect of motion pictures that was remarked on as soon as the Lumière Brothers first presented their cinématographe in 1895: that in these projected images, people would continue moving, breathing, laughing – and, eventually, speaking – after their deaths.
Adrian McElwee died from a fentanyl overdose, one individual among the devastating toll from the opioid epidemic spawned by corporate greed and governmental negligence. But his image remained in countless home movies McElwee had shot over the years, which track his son’s evolution from a radiant, creative, loving little boy to a deeply troubled young man. Meanwhile, Adrian had been documenting his own life in what ultimately became an attempt to grapple with his addiction. In all this footage, which the filmmaker began engaging with even as he still found it too painful to watch, Adrian is “gone but not gone”, existing in a ghostly cinematic “half-life”.
McElwee has made a celebrated body of work out of compulsively documenting his life and, especially, his family. Evidently, he passed this filming gene to his son, though their styles and goals – about which they spar on camera – are radically different. In his breakthrough, the cult favourite Sherman’s March (1986), McElwee is confronted about his need to hide behind a camera, mediating every experience through its lens. In one of the most famous moments, excerpted in Remake, the delightfully irrepressible Charleen Swansea, his friend and former poetry teacher, yells at Ross to put down his camera as she introduces him to a potential mate: “This is not art, this is life!”
Charleen is one of several people featured in Sherman’s March who reappear, decades older, in Remake. A subplot in the new film follows a protracted attempt by some Hollywood producers to remake Sherman’s March – a historical investigation turned comic meditation on the hunt for love – as a fiction feature or television series. Though they seem well-meaning, this is a spectacularly bad idea, since the documentary’s irresistible charm comes from the sense that, for all its structural grace and thematic unity, it is being shaped by what happens, carried along by the meandering, unpredictable tides of real life.
Though it is ultimately fruitless, the project provides not only a title for the new film but a theme running through it: the idea of documentary becoming fiction. In McElwee’s work, this has nothing to do with the kind of curation and burnishing of lives now common on social media, but with the inherent divergence between ephemeral reality and unchanging documentation. A couple may divorce, but in the video of their wedding they still promise to stay together until death. Is the recording now a lie?
The urge to capture pictures of everything is now so ubiquitous, I couldn’t help wishing that, as one of the most influential and thoughtful exponents of first-person filmmaking, McElwee had dug a little deeper into why he feels compelled to film both mundane daily life and the most intimate and charged conversations. He seems bewildered when some of his family resist being filmed – though Adrian, far from complaining about being exploited by his father’s work, asserts at one point that his parents should have made him a child star. However, in a sweet irony, McElwee – who in Sherman’s March engaged with a succession of women whose comfort with the camera verged on exhibitionism – winds up happily married to a woman (Korean filmmaker Hyun Kyung Kim) who refuses to allow him to film her face.
While McElwee explores the slippage between documentary and fiction, he largely conflates film and memory, as most of us do at this point. (He also explored this subject in his previous feature, Photographic Memory, 2011.) At several points in Remake – when he depicts moving out of the house after separating from his ex-wife, and when he evokes his surgery to remove a brain tumour – brief clips of home movies are loosed in flurries, suggesting the scraps of memory dislodged from a family home and from the folds of the cranium. Wini Wood, another participant in Sherman’s March whom he revisits, says that that beloved film has become a “memory archive”, activating her sensory recollections of experiences; that the movie “functions as memory”. But there is also the risk that photographic records distort experiences. When he watches Adrian’s GoPro footage of skiing in Colorado, McElwee exults that it is “like being in your body, seeing through your eyes”, but to me nothing could be further from human vision and embodiment than the too-sharp, too-bright, oddly displaced fish-eye effect of this technology. And for all their soft, nostalgic patina, his own celluloid images are, equally, not what a human eye saw but what a machine impartially captured.
The fact that objects and filmed images remain after people are gone is both bitter and consoling, a paradox that McElwee distils in several haunting images: a faint reflection in the cracked screen of his son’s iPhone; a blurred and partly illegible message in red pen; turf being peeled from the top of his mother’s headstone, the dirt and roots imprinted with her name. In one memorable shot, recording a trick performed by Adrian, vape smoke pours on to a table top, crawling in wraith-like tendrils, and a finger writes in the fading vapour.
Needless to say, Remake is terribly sad; around the death at the centre are other motifs of disappointment and decline. For me, one of the most painful moments was a scene in which the older, fading Charleen reveals that she has no memory of her scenes in Sherman’s March – moments, like when she hilariously berates McElwee for his lack of passion, that are joyously emblazoned in the minds of everyone who has seen the film. “Things just disappear,” she says. Yet, despite its subjects, Remake is never a downer or tough to watch. It is animated by love.
► Remake is in UK cinemas 25 September.