NZIFF Review: Remake

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Written by Ricky Lai |  Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai on IG & Letterboxd | Columnist

Remake

dir. Ross McElwee

United States, 114 minutes

‘You can see the lettering in the mud.’

Some folks just can’t put down the camera. Earlier in the week before seeing Ross McElwee’s meta-documentary Remake, I caught Brydie O’Connor’s Barbara Forever, a feature on American avant-garde pioneer of queer cinema, Barbara Hammer. Hammer was essentially an archivist, dedicating her life’s work to building a library of lost lesbian histories. Two things struck me. One was Hammer’s persistence of using the camera as much as possible, often to document her personal life to the chagrin of spouse, Florrie Burke, who on the contrary, didn’t like being shown on camera too much. Perhaps it was to protect their intimacy. The other was how Hammer exhibited her body on celluloid to document her life after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. In A Horse is Not a Metaphor (2008), she merges images of the hospital spaces where she receives chemotherapy treatment with footage of herself riding on horseback through various American foothills. The message is clear: she’s not just alive, but also still living.

There was a sacrificial element to Hammer’s persistent use of the camera, volunteering herself (and thus her intimacy) to sear her likeness into celluloid and thus make herself immortal. Even now that she’s passed on, she’s also still riding that horse. Hammer’s egotistic compulsion towards the camera has been, in the long term, vindicated by her cause. Meanwhile, ‘nice Southern boy’ Ross McElwee surmises, early on in his latest documentary Remake, that his incessant need to film everything in his life may have put a strain on the relationship between himself and his family. I am unsure if he has diagnosed the exact issue,  but his willingness to immortalise grudging aspects of his personal life in features on the festival circuit unnerves me. I am, after all, some guy in a seat at one of those festivals, implored to watch McElwee get personal. Very, very personal.

Forty years ago, in Sherman’s March (1985), an epic video diary through the Deep South of America, McElwee’s initial adventure to trace the Civil War General’s trail of ‘scorched earth’ inadvertently digressed into an Odyssey of interviews with women (some ex-girlfriends, others new crushes) whom the filmmaker was falling in love with, and subsequently being rejected by. McElwee doesn’t film himself as much as others, and when he does, he is awkwardly monologuing history facts in the General’s uniform. He ultimately knows everybody else has more interesting things to say. But just because he doesn’t ‘show himself’ doesn’t mean his footage isn’t also a lucid reflection of himself and his preoccupations. In Remake, McElwee receives a call from an L.A. executive producer to adapt Sherman’s March into a narrative feature, and the irony that this project eventually derails off-course would be extremely funny were the causing circumstances not emphatically tragic. McElwee’s son, Adrian, whose erratic behaviour as a teenager was documented in Photographic Memory (2011), became addicted to drugs as a young adult and eventually overdosed at the age of 27. In the wake of this, Remake evolves into a non-linear examination of the milestones McElwee captured with his son over the course of his life, drawing parallels and contrasts between footage of child and adult Adrian alike. Through the editing process, he helplessly exerts control over a life-long archive of memories. This father isn’t just trying to convince himself that his son is gone, but also trying to prove that he was alive.

While McElwee is mining his own past for inspiration, he revisits places and people from Sherman’s March, some of whom have moved on and some of whom are still here. I’d assume that every viewer’s favourite character in Sherman’s March winds up being Charleen, a close friend and poetry teacher (and ray of sunshine) who scolds McElwee about his camera-consumed compulsions and how they are stopping him from engaging meaningfully with the women in his life. ‘This is not art! This is life!’ Sis, as they say, clocked that tea. During her revisit in Remake, she still thinks the camera is a revolting, obstructive device. However, she doesn’t remember filming anything with McElwee. She doesn’t even remember teaching poetry. She does, of course, remember McElwee – and she remembers making him laugh. I cried quite hard at this part.

A key insight surfaces when Photographic Memory premieres at the 68th Venice Film Festival, and Adrian expresses, at the press conference, surprise and discomfort about his on-screen depiction. But he acknowledges its place as reinforcement of the film’s narrative: ‘[...] but it does help bring back the entire theme of the film and help strengthen it. [...], But I’m also very tired.’ I highlight this because a reflexive pattern emerges when Adrian, an aspiring filmmaker himself, begins using a camera to log a video diary during his addiction recovery. Through this, one can’t help but feel invited to infer what either Ross’s or Adrian McElwee’s use of the camera says about how they look at one another. During the year leading up to Adrian’s death, McElwee is documenting less and less of his personal life, and prior to visiting his son in rehab, he opts not to bring the camera – but Adrian insists. We get to watch the last remaining clips of Adrian McElwee living: performing a vape trick at Thanksgiving, and sitting in the audience at a Handel concert. I couldn’t help but think about Barbara Hammer on the horse, asserting as a cancer patient that she isn’t just alive, but still living.

In case it wasn’t clear yet, I found Remake to be an extremely uncomfortable watch. There’s no question that it is a sad film, but our capacity for sympathy is challenged by the sheer proximity to McElwee’s personal life and therefore his own sense of intimacy. One perceives a widening gap between the footage and memories McElwee is entitled to process, and the meanings we are entitled to glean from those images. Because McElwee’s gaze reveals as much about himself as it does his son, Remake becomes an intense concentration of his methods as a filmmaker, father and overall human being; an atoning self-exhibition driven by an insurmountable grief, perhaps in some distant hope that the world will critique him as much as he does himself. At worst, we are asked to scrutinise him personally so that we can revere him artistically; critics can soon laud Remake with shallow praise, calling it ‘raw’ and ‘unflinching’ as they do any other banal memoir on grief. But because I understand every human being’s circumstances to be complex and beyond simple analysis, I resist this urge to pick him apart, because given my mere parasocial bond with McElwee, how could I? Near the end we get to try and read the washed-out red ink of a half-legible letter Adrian wrote to himself before his overdose, trailing off into blush smudges. To each audience member, their own, but I found it impossible to really feel anything by this point; landlocked by images and sounds I shouldn’t be seeing. Almost as if a reflexive irony, and certainly out of some instinctive self-defence, I found my own mind drifting off to think about losses, grievances, regrets, self-perceived flaws of my own. I wondered how I would feel about documenting myself to this extent, and how those whom I would likely be documenting might feel about it. I wondered about my own personal boundaries, and the line before which it would be ‘too much’ to keep the camera rolling. I wondered how I would feel if somebody close to me publicised a record of my last moments before dying. I wondered why I like filmmaking, and why I like watching others’ films – all films a personal reflection anyway – and why Remake felt too far too close to embrace. I wondered if McElwee had achieved what he set out to do by making me think about all of this.

During McElwee’s revisits to the landscape of Sherman’s March, he stops by the plot of land where his family is buried. His mother’s grave is mysteriously nowhere to be seen. With some help from a friend, he digs up the lawn where grass has patched over the plaque. Its stone letters have left legible imprints in the mud. They dust off the stone, restoring its place in the cemetery. One infers that Ross McElwee is one of a few people left, besides his siblings, who could’ve noticed this – remembered to notice it – and done something about it. For better or worse, his compulsion towards the camera has a similar motivation. Near the end of Remake, he disclaims a worry that the more he obsesses over video memories of Adrian, the less real his image will become, rendering somebody real into fiction. Whenever you walk through cemeteries, you will notice many well-preserved graves, and also others which have worn away over time after progressively infrequent visits. Some, like that of McElwee’s mother, will too be overgrown by the land it occupies. While we’re on Earth, we can do as much as we can to materially preserve the people who are gone, but our existence is not strictly corporeal, and sometimes our remains are simply memories that will narrow into vapour over time. McElwee, knowing deep down that this is true, struggles to come to terms with it, and ultimately sacrifices himself to the camera.