They say that your whole life flashes before you on your deathbed, a moment where everything begins to make sense. That phenomenon is exactly what Remake by Ross McElwee feels like.
Screening ‘Out Of Competition’ at the Venice Film Festival, this 1 hour 54 minute documentary tells the story of a lifetime… Quite literally! McElwee, a veteran documentary filmmaker, has recorded his entire life since 1975 and his style of personal filmmaking, very much like Jonas Mekas, has made him somewhat of a cult icon in the documentary world.
What Is It?
The heart of McElwee’s work is always trying to make sense of the wilder world through his family life and Remake is perhaps his most personal venture yet. Spanning a heartbreaking sprawl of decades, revisiting past documentaries and home videos, McElwee attempts to understand the tragic death of his adult son, Adrian. We see his son grow up on camera and the problems that arise as he battles with mental health and addictions in later life. It is a painfully intimate portrayal of a life cut short.
Seeing Adrian change from a jovial little kid to an adult slumped in a great depression is harrowing and some of the most affecting cinema i have ever seen in my life. The last 30 minutes or so capture an unwaveringly raw reality that is both hard to watch and incredibly profound. I’m not much of a crier during films but Remake had me sobbing at least 4 different times and i had to take a breather after the screening.
Another focus of this film, albeit a smaller one, is the potential adaptation of McElwee’s breakthrough doc, Sherman’s March (1986) into a scripted feature film. Flushed with the nostalgia of his most successful film, McElwee revists all his old works and rewatches his life and younger years, in a way to understand what his son could possibly be feeling.
Time & Memory
A recurring theme through McElwee’s filmography is time and, more specifically, the role of time in memory. In Remake, this is not only shown in Adrians life but in the life of McElwee’s longtime friend and contributor, Charleen. A key figure in Sherman’s March (1986) and the focus of Charleen (1977), we see how Charleen used to be this great, magnetic woman who had an answer and saying for everything but has now become a shell of her former self due to dementia. She barely remembers McElwee but, more sadly, she doesn’t remember their adventures, the adventures that McElwee caught on camera. This really warps McElwee’s brain and send him into existential pondering; does life on camera truly capture reality? Does recording the present ultimately distort it? Has McElwee’s lifelong mission of documenting his life been worth it?
One Of The Greats
Remake is one of the most affecting films i have ever seen, it is a powerful meditation of love, loss, time and memory and whole those are all ultimately linked. We see the high peaks of a life, from McElwee and Adrian attending film premieres and adopting a little sister, to the very lows, addiction and depressions. McElwee crafts a documentary that attempts to answer the most human question of all time, how could we have done it different?
In my opinion, Ross McElwee is one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of all time and this film absolutely cements that.
Is filming life a way to preserve art, or a way to intrude on it?
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