Ross McElwee

Hailed by some as a cinematic genius, a feminist voice and a true maverick of American cinema, dismissed by others as a voyeuristic fraud and the "world's worst director," Henry Jaglom obsessively confuses and abuses the line between life and art. Featuring scores of interviews (including Orson Welles, Dennis Hopper, Milos Forman and Peter Bogdanovich) and rare behind-the-scenes footage, this hilarious documentary explores the fascinating question of Who Is Henry Jaglom?

Documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee finds himself in frequent conflict with his son Adrian, a young adult who Ross believes is distracted by and addicted to the digital word. Thinking about his own youth, Ross travels to St. Quay-Portrieux in Brittany, France, which he visited and lived in for a time during his twenties. There he attempts to track down Maurice, a photographer who gave him his first job with a camera, and Maud, a woman he was once romantically involved with.

After documentarian Ross McElwee gets married, a series of misfortunes follow: his grandmother dies, his wife miscarries, and then his father dies less than a week later. Shaken by the sudden string of deaths, McElwee becomes depressed. After spending time with his friend and former high school poetry teacher, Charlene, he goes to meet his brother, a doctor. In a series of interviews, McElwee contemplates his morbid preoccupation with death and tries to figure out how to shake it off.

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.

Documentary film maker Ross McElwee returns to his family home in Charlotte NC. In filming his family, he captures a microcosm of Southern society.

The death of his son causes McElwee, an autobiographical filmmaker, to look back on his life’s work. He eventually turns to his archive of home movies. To what extent did his camera affect their relationship when Adrian was alive? To what extent does it define that relationship now that he is gone? Meanwhile, an effort to adapt McElwee’s first feature, Sherman’s March, into a work of fiction lurches along, giving the filmmaker another perspective from which to meditate on movie making and mortality.

Ross McElwee travels through the North Carolina tobacco belt in search of the ancient southern traditions associated with tobacco growing and use, while comparing his filmmaking to commercial cinema, represented by Bright Leaf, a melodrama directed by Michael Curtiz in 1950, starring Gary Cooper, apparently based on the life of his great-grandfather.

Filmmaker Ross McElwee trails characters whose stories have been fodder for television news and takes their tales of loss and longing further than the requisite sound bite. In the process, he examines how the medium works and exposes its limitations.

In 1986, Ross McElwee (Sherman's March) and Marilyn Levine were making a film about the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall, when the imposing structure was still very much intact as the world’s most visible symbol of hardline Communism and Cold War lore. They thought they were making a documentary on the community of tourists, soldiers, and West Berliners who lived in the seemingly eternal presence of the graffiti emblazoned eyesore. But in 1989, as the original film neared completion, the Wall came down, and McElwee and Levine returned to Berlin, this time to capture the radically different atmosphere of the reunified city.

In Charleen, documentarian Ross McElwee looks at the life of a North Carolina poet and teacher who acts as a muse to a motley crew of artists and musicians.

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