American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn by Scott MacDonald

Author:Scott MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780520275621
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2013-06-30T22:00:00+00:00

ON THE ROAD AGAIN: SIX O’CLOCK NEWS

By the completion of Time Indefinite McElwee had mastered all aspects of the approach that has continued to characterize his work—his complex narration, his deft amalgam of deadpan humor with poignancy and pain, his reliance on subjective camera, and his use of his friend Charleen, his family, and himself as characters—and in recent decades has deployed this approach in several features, the first of which was Six O’Clock News (1996). While Six O’Clock News does in fact begin with the “gerbil shot” with which Time Indefinite ends (it also concludes with a sequence focusing on Adrian, three years later), the film is not really about Adrian’s growing up but rather the ways in which being married and becoming a father of a young child have affected McElwee’s life—most obviously the fact that “since the baby’s been born, we’re home a lot more now and we’ve ended up watching more TV than we used to, especially the local news.” Of course, the preponderance of television news stories, especially local news stories in larger cities, reflect an “if it bleeds, it leads” assumption about what the public will watch; and from the beginning of Six O’Clock News McElwee uses excerpts of horrific stories, filmed off television screens, as a motif and as the motivation for a new set of filmmaking adventures.

Like Time Indefinite, Six O’Clock News begins by creating a context for McElwee’s autobiographical approach that functions simultaneously as background for any viewer unfamiliar with his earlier work and as a reconfirmation of the cinematically intimate relationship he has created with those familiar with his earlier films. The first of the film’s many brief montages of horrific news stories ends with brief coverage of the damage hurricane Hugo has done to the Isle of Palms off the coast near Charleston, South Carolina, where Charleen Swansea lives. After presenting an excerpt from Charleen, McElwee documents his trip to South Carolina to be with Swansea as she confronts and deals with the damage to her new home. It turns out that, while many homes on the island, including many in her neighborhood, have been leveled, her home has been damaged but not destroyed. Even her papers are intact; she can continue to work as a teacher and editor.

McElwee returns to Cambridge, where the film’s introduction of his approach continues: he records his neighbor and landlord, Barry, who is obsessed with taping episodes of Twilight Zone and other similar fantasy TV series; and McElwee is taped by a local television crew interested in “this guy, meaning me, who was always filming his own life.” McElwee meets Debbie Shapiro and her crew with camera running, and their conversation provides first-time McElwee viewers with some sense of his thinking as well as a demonstration of how television news reporters restage reality to suit their needs: the scene of the news crew arriving at McElwee’s apartment is repeated three times. McElwee, in voice-over, wonders, “Is it any less real that they’re filming

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