Remake

The ever-increasing availability of audiovisual apparatuses for personal use has arguably had a significant impact on non-fiction filmmaking. Combined with much easier access to analogue material through digitization, many people today end up building what can be called an extensive “archive of the self”. The arthouse landscape now abounds with auto-ethnography-inclined essayistic works. Meanwhile, the principle of representation for the sake of representation often becomes a mere excuse to disguise the filmmaker’s formal and aesthetic shortcomings – because, supposedly, everyone deserves to be seen, and everyone’s story deserves to be heard.

In first-person non-fiction, the filmmaker simultaneously occupies the positions of both observing subject and observed object. The self-as-object is typically approached as a fractured, multiplied, or conflicted entity – fragmented by internal tensions or by external forces, the latter almost always reflected through the direct or indirect influences of loved ones, close friends or family. While this schematic breakdown of one prominent branch of contemporary non-fiction can be applied to countless films, Ross McElwee's newest film Remake stands out as peculiar and rather anomalous case. While one of the main reasons is McElwee's idiosyncratic style, which predates the internet- and social media-driven personal turn – even paving the way for it – the key distinction stems from Remake itself, which, through a gut-wrenching personal story, questions cinema’s capacity to establish deep emotional connections and to represent them. Although it features a side plot revolving around a now-shelved Hollywood remake of his seminal Sherman’s March (1996) – hence the title – the film is predominantly about McElwee's late son Adrian, who suffered from bipolar disorder and dependency issues, and who passed away in 2016 due to a drug overdose.

Grief, love, regret – Remake pulsates with emotions so strong that attempting to name them only diminishes both the intensity and sensitivity with which McElwee traverses them. Like other members of his friends and family, Adrian had appeared in several of McElwee’s films, among them Photographic Memory (2011), his previous film, which focused on his increasingly conflictual and difficult relationship with Adrian. Not to mention the lengthy home movies McElwee – and later, Adrian himself – shot; his son had literally grown up “on camera”. This was where all his insecurities and doubts originated: the possibility that the camera itself might have been the real culprit, that his obsessive habit of filming shaped his son’s personality.

Through this mnemonic collage, we witness him returning to those “scenes of the crime”, as if trying to determine the precise points and ways in which he may have altered the course of his son’s life – and, in parallel, how he could not but might have done so differently. McElwee’s soft, poignant, and shaky voice accompanies us from beginning to end, addressing sometimes the audience, sometimes Adrian, and – deep down – himself, in the form of an introspective soliloquy. Although he primarily questions his position as a father, husband, friend, and artist, his meditations on the impact of his working methods on his way of living remain lucid, and the sense of guilt seems to have faded into phantom pains. Compared to many examples of personal non-fiction film, Remake stands out in McElwee’s exploration of the converging and diverging lines between a person and their projected selves through images – and how, in some cases, these two can intertwine, like in Adrian’s – until it becomes impossible to untangle them. However, as Adrian grows up and begins using the camera himself, his vision creates a counterpoint to McElwee’s images, pushing the filmmaker to perceive Adrian as an individual rather than as a projection of his own idea of him. Perhaps the most striking part of the film is experiencing this shift through McElwee’s gaze, when it feels as if a veil is lifted and another facet of Adrian emerges – not without a touch of deception and sadness for the viewer, since the precious “wonder boy” as painted by his father appears to be little different from an average, angsty American teenager. All these Adrians – imaginary, fictive and idealized – coexist, none more real than the others.

If McElwee believes he has irrevocably altered his son’s life, it undoubtedly goes both ways, as the film – consciously or not – reveals how Adrian, through his untimely passing, has transformed the very system of signifiers, words, and gestures in his father’s cinema. McElwee’s meticulous archival excavations summon these retrospective meanings: something Adrian once said to the camera, the colours of his clothes, a song he listens to, a toy he abandoned at the corner of the frame – each detail now resonating like a premonition. With every recovered image, another version of the film seems to be written; with each recollection of Adrian, the plot thickens, yet the ending always remains the same.