The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Brilliant … Sherman’s March was a revelation when I first saw it in 1987. I had never seen anything like it … Each woman [McElwee] meets along his way is more astonishing than the last.”

Anne Makepeace, Documentary Magazine

A film that collapses the boundaries between documentary and fiction, filmmaker and subject, and the camera’s viewfinder as window and mirror, Sherman’s March has defined Ross McElwee’s career and continues to influence countless artists today, from Kim Longinotto (Shinjuku Boys) to Nathan Fielder (The Rehearsal). ​“A meditation on the possibility of romantic love in the South during an era of nuclear weapons proliferation,” the film is a picaresque that, in McElwee’s modest and vulnerable yet calculated voiceover, is introduced as an attempt to chronicle William Tecumseh Sherman’s scorched-earth Civil War campaign. The project’s large scope is welcome, McElwee adds, because he hasn’t yet gotten over a breakup. One subject engulfs the other as he meets a series of women; though he shifts his commentary to courtship rituals, the film is most accurately about McElwee’s state of mind as he attempts to portray—and understand—brief encounters and lifelong relationship patterns.

“A classic … [The] droll observations accumulate into something more compelling than a self-portrait … McElwee never pretends that he’s interested in his subjects as some kind of impartial documentarian—which is how we know that his curiosity about their lives is sincere.”

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, A.V. Club