Product Description

The plot is simple. After his girlfriend leaves him, filmmaker Ross McElwee takes a voyage along the original route followed by General William Sherman -- but rather than cutting a swath of destruction designed to force the Confederate South into submission, as Sherman did, McElwee searches for love, camera in hand, "training his lens with phallic resolve on every accessible woman he meets." (Chicago Readers Circle)

SHERMAN'S MARCH was recently chosen for preservation by the Library of Congress National Film Registry as a "historically significant American motion picture." It has won best documentary awards at numerous film festivals including Sundance, has been cited by the National Board of Film Critics as one of the five best films of its year, was selected for a Cinéma du Réel retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and chosen as "One of the Top 20 Documentaries of All-Time" by the International Documentary Association.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33545 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-04-06
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 155 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Filmmaker Ross McElwee turns his cameras inward when his proposed documentary on Northern Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, perhaps the single most hated Union officer in the South, becomes a witty and unexpectedly engaging meditation upon his own ailing love life. As McElwee retraces Sherman's 19th-century march through the South, where his blazing trail left smoking ruins of Georgia's cities and towns in his wake, he can't seem to help but train his camera on a succession of Southern women he meets along the way, using the documentary as a sly method of meeting girls. (Aspiring filmmakers take note: it works surprisingly well.) Sherman's March evolves into an introspective meditation on love, happiness, the fear of nuclear holocaust, and the meaning of life. McElwee's light touch and relaxed, deadpan offscreen narration gives this genial documentary tour of his soul a rare kind of insight. --Sean Axmaker

Review
Mr. McElwee is an exceptionally comic film-making personality...he's a filmmaker-anthropologist with rare appreciation of the eccentric details of our edgy civilization. --New York Times

Review
A comic filmmaker with the rare ability to turn personal obsession into a delightful rueful and resonant American odyssey. --Newsweek

Customer Reviews

Possibly the worst movie ever made
Around the middle of Sherman's March, the boyfriend of a girl Ross McElwee is courting asks McElwee, "You sure you never had anybody hit you?" This is a question I wanted to ask him for the entire two and a half hours of watching his self-indulgent sniveling about how no one loves him. McElwee starts out making a documentary about Sherman's March to the Sea but ends up turning the camera on himself and his failed attempts at romance. McElwee does his own march through the South, but instead of using artillery to destroy buildings, his weapon is his camera--and it only destroys his own love life. The camera serves as a barrier between him and the people he is talking to, effectively killing any sense of relationship between them. This barrier effect is a comment on how people communicate in an age of technology and points out the failures of interacting through a machine. Though people are constantly telling him to turn off the camera because "this isn't art. It's life!" he insists on filming their intimate conversations--by doing which, he kills any trust that the women have for him, and they then refuse to talk to him because of the camera. Maybe if McElwee had kept his concentration on Sherman instead of on himself, he would have found someone to love him.

A Rare Gem
Wonderful documentary/romance. Sherman goes on a quest for romance and discovers much about relationships while meeting a wide spectrum of people.
Great insights to men, women and the southern psyche. I highly recommend this to all.

What a pleasure to watch hilarity in it's subtlest form . . . Southern Gothic by way of Poe and Ibsen with Stops at Abbott and
My once-friend Vivian told me about this movie long ago. She being a Southren princess I suspect had pretentions that remained unspoke. Nonetheless, while recently procrastinating, this movie watched I and was totally engaged. Watch as Charleen creeps from her position that one girl is absolutely for him (Ross), but being a Mormon, perhaps the girl that sleeps around is NOW for him. I suspect this whole movie was faked as a documentary, which makes it all that more brilliant. Watch in disbelief! It is is the modern version of "Freaks". A train wreck written by Faulkner in the happening.