Documentary Film Master to Speak at Williams, April 21

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 18, 2003 — Documentary film master Ross McElwee will give a lecture on “One Filmmaker’s Approach to Autobiography,” on Monday, April 21, at 7 p.m., in Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall.

The Washington Post has called Ross McElwee “Don Quixote with a camera.”

“There’s an air of emotional intimacy in McElwee’s films,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle, “and a note of constant surprise. Things seem to happen, and people spill forth great truths – as if a special filmmaker’s angel had sprinkled fairy dust on this shlumpy, bearded, self-effacing guy.”

McElwee explored his life and his family’s lives in “Sherman’s March,” which won the grand jury prize for documentaries at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival, and in “Time Indefinite.” In these films McElwee “explores family tragedies, looks for love, and ponders southern women, nuclear holocausts and Burt Reynolds.”

In another film “Six O’clock News,” McElwee tells a story of tragedy, but turns his camera away from looking inside to looking outside – interviewing people after hurricanes, murders, and earthquakes. “[I was] horrified at the state of the world, [by] the local news alone – much less the O.J. scale of news stories on the national news,” he said. “[That] was what I found frightening! Its barrage of violence and horror and cataclysm that came streaming through the screen as I sat there holding my infant son, watching.”

In his newest project, McElwee again turns back to his family. He is at work on a film about tobacco and North Carolina; his great grandfather, who was a tobacco farmer; and what happened to his family fortune.

“Each of these films explores new territory for me, but, over a 19-year span, members of my immediate family reappear,” he said. “This fact adds an additional dimension to my work, providing a record of both how much and how little my family has changed over time.”

McElwee grew up in North Carolina. He received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.S. in filmmaking from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied with documentarian Richard Leacock.

He is a visiting filmmaker at Harvard University and has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Published April 18, 2003