Sherman’s March

Boredom and a little bit of loneliness will drive a man to do certain insane things, sometimes embarrassing things. In my case, these things are not entirely embarrassing, more so just inconvenient and expensive side quests.

As was the case on July 24th, 2026. Having been sniped by an Instagram ad for a showing of Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March at Film Forum theatre in New York City, looped a trip into the city with a pre-existing Facebook Marketplace pickup. Maybe the algorithm latched on to my road trip fueled re-dedication to Ken Burn’s The Civil War, or maybe YouTube shared that fact that I had watched all of Shelby Foote’s raw interview footage while driving across the nation with Meta’s data crushers. Regardless, it worked. I went.

The film ostensibly began as a documentary to trace the lingering effects of Sherman’s march through the South in 1864 and 1865. It actually turned into a cinema verite of McElwee confronting his own loneliness in life during his own tour through the South of the 1980s. He films various women that he seeks to wed or live with or use to make something out of himself, his documentary, and perhaps please his family. I am still not sure what to make of it entirely, and maybe he did not either.

“William Faulkner, in Intruder in the Dust, says that for every Southern boy, it’s always in his reach to imagine it being 1:00 on an early July day in 1863. The guns are laid. The troops are lined up. The flags are already out of their cases and ready to be unfurled. But it hasn’t happened yet. And he can go back to the time before the war was going to be lost. And he can always have that moment for himself.” – Shelby Foote

I like to imagine that when McElwee originally set out to trace Sherman’s March he thought he would find the scene Faulkner describes, of a South in which every man, woman, boy, and girl imagine that they too can go back to the high water mark of the Confederacy. That the wrongs thrust upon them by the Federals could be righted with the right narrative and just enough embellishment. That he would find a South still suspicious of red haired gentlemen, one that still speaks of Sherman’s neckties, and wonders aloud at what it was like before his Army came though.

What followed was not this. What I saw in that dark New York theatre was McElwee assuming Sherman’s March as allegory for his point in life at the time. That he, aloof in life and unsure of what to do next with himself, waged a total war on himself, on the women he met, on his dignity, while tearing through the south.

The item that sticks with me most from this movie is really how comfortable people are in front of McElwee’s hulking camera. It helps to capture the time remarkably well, or, as I did not live through this time, what I imagine is an accurate depiction of the times.

It’s the late 1980s. Home videos and such are just starting to become a thing, recording technology is becoming accessible for many people but not all people. Everyone, even though they are speaking to McElwee through his huge shoulder mounted camera, is relatively at ease and seems themselves in front of the lens. There’s an inherent trust even in these recorded interactions that you don’t see today. In modern candid clips, similar to McElwee’s type of filming, I feel like there’s a general unease or lack of authenticity in the clips. Hell, the closest thing I could think of would be people’s old Snapchat memories. I suppose it’s because the ubiquity of cameras now and the knowledge that the material generated at the other end of that lens can go anywhere. Maybe I’m just imagining things.

Anyways, should’ve finished this post earlier but now I’ve sat on it for a month and forgot what I had to say.