To look through the lens of Ross McElwee’s camera is to pass through a portal into his brain. His documentaries are like diary entries, his drawling, soft-spoken narration making wry observations about the world while he shows us intimate parts of his life: his family, his girlfriends, his children and the passage of time itself.
His latest, Remake, is more of a reverie, and watching it is like flipping through photo albums of the most painful years in someone’s life. McElwee spends years assembling his films: Here we see him go through a divorce, recover from a brain tumor, fall in love and remarry, and look on as an attempt to turn his breakout film Sherman’s March into a sitcom falls apart. And then McElwee’s son, Adrian, dies at 27 of a drug overdose.
Adrian is a constant presence in McElwee’s earlier work. He was born while McElwee was filming 1993’s Time Indefinite and became a pre-teen during the production of 2003’s Bright Leaves, about the McElwee family’s checkered history in the tobacco trade. By 2011’s Photographic Memory, Adrian is a sullen, directionless 20-something, his father behind the camera urging him to get his life together.
Remake interweaves scenes from those documentaries with footage McElwee shot in the decade leading up to Adrian’s death. He also includes material shot by Adrian, who was an aspiring filmmaker himself. McElwee edits these pieces together so that images from the ’70s and ’80s echo those from newer footage, Adrian as a child in sharp contrast to the man he would become. He also captures his no-nonsense friend Charleen, another regular in his films, as she slips into dementia and forgets who he is.
There’s a running theme in McElwee’s films of his loved ones, including Charleen, urging him to stop experiencing life through his camera’s viewfinder. Adrian often stepped in as his father’s boom mic operator or assistant director and accompanied him to glitzy film festivals. McElwee wonders aloud if this gave Adrian a false sense of what being a filmmaker is. Did making his son a subject of his own work lead to his demise? He points to a moment from 1997’s Six O’Clock News, in which young Adrian presents his painting of God, which eerily resembles a movie camera.
But because of McElwee’s ever-present camera, he has also preserved his son forever on videotape. There’s a moment in Remake when Adrian asks his dad why he doesn’t turn the camera on himself more often. People don’t want to see me, McElwee reasons; they want to see what I see. But, of course, McElwee’s films have always been about both things.
McElwee is trying to process something senseless, and he does it the only way he knows how: through film. Some of McElwee’s narration is directed at us, but occasionally he addresses his late son. In Adrian’s footage, he similarly talks to his dad in narration, and it’s like they’re able to have a conversation across time and in defiance of death.