Ross McElwee | |
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Born | |
Occupation | Filmmaker, Professor |
Website | rossmcelwee |
Ross McElwee is an American documentary filmmaker known for his autobiographical films about his family and personal life, usually interwoven with an episodic journey that intersects with larger political or philosophical issues. His humorous and often self-deprecating films refer to cultural aspects of his Southern upbringing. He received the Career Award at the 2007 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.
Ross McElwee grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, in a traditional Southern family. [2] His father was a surgeon and appears often as a figure in McElwee's early films. McElwee later attended Brown University, where he studied under novelist John Hawkes, [3] and graduated in 1971 with a degree in creative writing. While at Brown, he also cross-registered in still photography courses at Rhode Island School of Design. [4]
After graduating, McElwee lived for a year in Brittany, France, where he worked for a while as a wedding photographer's assistant. Upon returning to the US, he was admitted into MIT's new graduate filmmaking program and graduated in 1977 with an M.S. While at MIT, he studied under documentarians Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus, both pioneers of the cinéma vérité movement, with whom he refined his first-person narrative approach. "It was a new way of making films, to eliminate the film crew. You lose some technical polish, but it's much more intimate and less intimidating to your subjects. It allows you to shoot with the autonomy and flexibility of a photojournalist." [5]
McElwee's film career began in his hometown, Charlotte, North Carolina, where he found summer employment as a studio cameraman for local evening news, housewife helper shows, and "gospel hour" programs. [6] Later, he freelanced as second cameraman for documentarians D.A. Pennebaker, and later for John Marshall in Namibia. McElwee started filming and producing his own documentaries in 1976. [7]
McElwee began teaching filmmaking at Harvard University in 1986; as of July 2022 [update] he was a professor of the practice of filmmaking in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. [8]
McElwee has made ten feature-length documentaries and several shorter films. [9] Most of his films were shot in his homeland, the American South, among them Sherman's March (1986), Time Indefinite , Six O'Clock News , and Bright Leaves . [10] He collaborated with his wife, Marilyn Levine, [11] on Something to do with the Wall. [12] His 2011 film, Photographic Memory , breaks new ground in its fully digital process and in its open development and production structure.[ original research? ]
Sherman's March won numerous awards, including Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. [13] It was cited by the National Board of Film Critics as one of the five best films of 1986. [14] Time Indefinite won a best film award in several festivals and was distributed theatrically throughout the U.S. Six O'Clock News premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast nationally over PBS' Frontline . [15]
McElwee's films have been included in the festivals of Cannes, Berlin, London, Venice, Vienna, Rotterdam, Florence, and Sydney. [16] Retrospectives include the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. Retrospectives have also been held in Paris, Tehran, Moscow, Seoul, Lisbon, and Quito. McElwee has received fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Film Institute. [17] He has twice been awarded fellowships in filmmaking by the National Endowment for the Arts. Sherman's March was chosen for preservation by the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000 as an "historically significant American motion picture". [18]
McElwee's film Bright Leaves premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight, and was nominated for Best Documentary of 2004 by both the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America. . [19]
In Paraguay premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2008. [20] McElwee returned to Venice in 2011 to present the premier of Photographic Memory. [21]
Sherman's March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation is a 1986 documentary film written and directed by Ross McElwee. It was awarded the Grand Jury prize at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival. and in 2000, was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry.
Kenneth Lauren Burns is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities, and distributed by PBS.
Charleen is a 1977 observational documentary film directed and shot by Ross McElwee, about his friend and former poetry teacher, Charleen Swansea.
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality. It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema: mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences between terms expressing similar concepts. Direct Cinema is largely concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a cinematic truth.
Jean Rouch was a French filmmaker and anthropologist.
Les Nouvelles Egotistes is a grouping of documentary filmmakers who make films where they themselves are featured. This is against the grain of more traditional documentary film which is mainly voyeuristic observation.
Bright Leaves is a 2003 United States/United Kingdom documentary film by independent filmmaker Ross McElwee about the association his family had with the tobacco industry. Bright Leaves had its world premiere at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.
Richard Franklin was an Australian film director.
Thomas Furneaux Lennon is a documentary filmmaker. He was born in Washington D.C. and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1968.
Greg Barker is an American filmmaker and producer. In 2011, The New York Times described Barker as “a filmmaker of artistic and political consequence.”
Stanley Earl Nelson Jr. is an American documentary filmmaker and a MacArthur Fellow known as a director, writer and producer of documentaries examining African-American history and experiences. He is a recipient of the 2013 National Humanities Medal from President Obama. He has won three Primetime Emmy Awards.
Rodman Flender is an American actor, writer, director and producer.
David Grubin is an American documentary filmmaker.
Jeanne Jordan is an American independent director, producer and editor. She was nominated for an Academy Award and has received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival among many other awards.
Steven Ascher is an American independent director, producer and writer. He was nominated for an Academy Award and has received the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival among many other awards. His book The Filmmaker’s Handbook is a bestselling text.
Photographic Memory is a 2011 documentary film by independent filmmaker Ross McElwee about a voyage back to the roots of his involvement with the camera.
David E. Fanning is a South African American journalist and filmmaker. He was the executive producer of the investigative documentary series Frontline since its first season in 1983 to his retirement in 2015. He has won eight Emmy Awards and in 2013 received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in honor of his work.
Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a 2018 American documentary film about the lives of black people in Hale County, Alabama. It is directed by RaMell Ross and produced by RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes, Su Kim, and is Ross's first nonfiction feature. The documentary is the winner of 2018 Sundance Film Festival award for U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Creative Vision, 2018 Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Cinema Eye Honors Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. After its theatrical run, it aired on the PBS series Independent Lens and eventually won a 2020 Peabody Award.
David MacDougall is an American-Australian visual anthropologist, academic, and documentary filmmaker, who is known for his ethnographic film work in Africa, Australia, Europe and India. For much of his career he co-produced and co-directed films with his wife, fellow filmmaker Judith MacDougall. In 1972, his first film, To Live with Herds was awarded the Grand Prix "Venezia Genti" at the Venice Film Festival. He has lived in Australia since 1975, and is currently a professor in the Research School of Humanities & the Arts at Australian National University.
William Rothman is an American film theorist and critic. Since receiving his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1974, he has authored numerous books, including Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1982), The “I” of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History and Aesthetic (1988), and Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy (2019). He was "part of a modern wave of thinkers to apply questions of philosophy to the medium of movies" during the 1980s, and his work contributed to the emergence of the sub-discipline that has come to be known as “film-philosophy.” Rothman has also written on aspects of film theory and on the writings of Stanley Cavell, an American philosopher who made film a major focus of his work. He is currently Professor of Cinematic Arts in the School of Communication at the University of Miami.