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: #36459 in DVD
• Brand: Ff
• Released on: 2004-04-06
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, 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

A wonderful curve ball of a film
As the subtitle of this marvelous documentary (?) hints, this is a wildly improbable movie. There actually is little that one can say about the content of it, since its substance lies in its execution and collection of odd and bizarre moments, not in what it has to say. Ross McElwee obtains a grant to make a documentary about the lingering effects of Sherman's march through Georgia in the Civil War, but instead keeps getting sidetracked and obsessed by women he meets along the way. Occasionally it occurs to him that he ought to stop shooting film of the women he yearns for and start worrying about Sherman, but he never can quite force his attention in that direction. The movie may start off as a documentary on SHERMAN'S MARCH, but it morphs quite rapidly in the film's subtitle: AN IMPROBABLE SEARCH FOR LOVE.

I'm not quite sure that this film can truly be categorized as a documentary: it is more of a confessional, an exploration of the McElwee's desire for love. I think it will feel uncomfortably familiar for many of its viewers in a way that a fictional account of the search for love could never be.

I'll take this over reality TV anytime!
I saw this film for the first time with my wife, Andrea. Our reactions were mixed. I loved it. I was fascinated by the characters, and the by the not-so-subtle way in which the intellectual pursuits of a scholar are subordinated to his personal life and hang-ups. As an academic who is often painfully aware of the overlap between my life and my work it was refreshing to see this overlap admitted so openly -- even embraced to the point where it becomes the subject matter of the entire investigation.

My wife, on the other hand, was bothered by what she saw as Mr. McElwee's pretentiousness, and his "exploitation" of the women in the film. It is true that all of them were more or less willing participants -- and a commmon feature of each of them was that they were in some way entertainers who were interested in being seen -- still, she thought, the very fact that they revealed themselves and he could step back and observe and judge set up what she saw as an unequal situation. Having said that, she did admit that the film held an undeniable fascination for her.

As it turned out, we talked about the film on and off for the next few days, even comparing people we know and ourselves to the characters revealed there. That is, I think, one of the signs that the film was effective. In a time when most films, and certainly to my mind all of reality TV, are forgettable, this film is not. I think Mr. McElwee sets himself up to be vulnerable to the criticisms my wife suggests -- and does not shy away from them. As a character, and as narrator of his own story, he is neither hero nor villian but is a real person, and that is what makes his stories interesting.

I can't wait to see the other films he has made -- like Time Indefinite and, most recently, Bright Leaves that is currently in (selected) theatres.

Excellent surprise
This documentary was difficult to approach but well worth it. Some parts have a very voyeauristic feel to them, like reading someone else's love letters. It seems that the movie wasn't made for anyone but the filmmaker himself. The feelings he experiences are shown with a stark directness that, at first, make you uncomfortable because they come so close to things most of us have felt but will never offer up for such public consumption. His courage should be applauded.