| Ross McElwee | |
|---|---|
McElwee shooting a scene from Bright Leaves |
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| Born | 21 July 1947 (age 64) Charlotte, North Carolina, United States[1] |
| Occupation | Filmmaker, Professor |
| Website | |
| rossmcelwee.com stquayfilms.com | |
Ross McElwee (born July 21, 1947) is an American documentary filmmaker and cinematographer, and Harvard professor, known for his autobiographical films about his family and personal life, usually interwoven with an episodic journey of some sort. Many cultural aspects of his southern upbringing are present in his humorous and often self-deprecating films. Other themes include personal relationships, parody, failure, introspection, and historic parallelism. He is largely credited with having mainstreamed the cinéma vérité movement. He received the Career Award at the 2007 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.
McElwee is a 1971 graduate of Brown University, and received his MS from MIT in 1977.
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Ross McElwee grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, in a traditional Southern bourgeois family. His father was a well- respected surgeon, and appears often as a character in McElwee's early films. From an early age he nurtured an interest in writing. He later attended Brown University and graduated in 1971 with a degree in creative writing. A turning point in McElwee's life occurred when he undertook a self-discovery voyage to Brittany, France and began practicing photography. Soon after, he enrolled as a student at MIT's filmmaking program. 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."[2]
McElwee's career began in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina where he was a studio cameraman for local evening news, housewife helper shows, and "gospel hour" programs. Later, he freelanced, shooting films for documentarians D.A. Pennebaker followed by John Marshall, in Namibia. McElwee started filming and producing his own documentaries in 1976.
Ross McElwee has been teaching filmmaking at Harvard University since 1986 where he is a professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.
Ross McElwee has made eight feature-length documentaries as well as several shorter films. Most of his films were shot in his homeland of the American South, among them the critically acclaimed Sherman's March, Time Indefinite, Six O'Clock News, and Bright Leaves. Sherman's March won numerous awards, including Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. It was cited by the National Board of Film Critics as one of the five best films of 1986. Time Indefinite won best film award in several festivals and was distributed theatrically throughout the U.S. His latest film, Photographic Memory, was completed in 2011.
McElwee's films have been included in the festivals of Berlin, London, Vienna, Rotterdam, Florence, Sydney, and Cannes. Retrospectives include the Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; McElwee has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Film Institute. He has twice been awarded fellowships in filmmaking by the National Endowment for the Arts. Sherman's March was also chosen for preservation by the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000 as an "historically significant American motion picture."
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. In 2005, complete retrospectives of McElwee's films were presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the International Festival of Documentary Cinema in Lisbon. Photographic Memory, in competition at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, will have broken new ground in McElwee's contributions to Cinéma Vérité, not only in its fully digital process, but in its open development and production structure.