BACKYARD

ROSS McELWEE
1984 (40 MIN) 16MM

In between two years at MIT's graduate filmmaking program, McElwee went home to Charlotte, NC to spend the summer. He was initially interested in two documentary possibilities, and began filming them as separate projects. The first was to have been about Clyde Cathy, a black bee-keeper who worked for his father as a yardman. He knew that Clyde had some mystical notions about bees, and was interested in filming him as he worked around the McElwee family's house, and also as he worked with his bee hives. The second film was to have been about the relationship between McElwee's father and brother, Tom, who was preparing to go off to New Orleans for his first year of medical school. He thought this might be a long-term project, in which he would film Tom off and on over the four years it would take him to get his medical degree. Ross assumed he would eventually come back to Charlotte and practice with his father, and that this would provide wonderful closure. But the two films wanted to meld, and he could not keep them apart. What seemed to hold them together, thematically, was the location - the family's backyard - and Ross pretty much restricted his filming to the yard and a few other locations in the neighborhood.

So Backyard became about insecurity, denial, anger, compromise, acquiescence - in short, all those warm feelings that can make going home to visit the family such a memorable experience. Backyard is about a politely enforced Carolina style of apartheid where blacks clean up after whites in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the hospital operating room. It's about the tensions arising from the expectations of a physician father for his two sons, one a medical student and the other a filmmaker. And it's about a mother's death, a death that's never been discussed in the family. Backyard is more about what's not said than what's said, what's not done than what's done.

 

 

ROSS McELWEE

Ross McElwee grew up in North Carolina. He graduated from Brown University and later from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a MS in filmmaking in a program headed by documentarians Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus. His career began in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina where he was a studio cameraman for local evening news, housewife helper shows, and "gospel hour" programs Later, he freelanced, shooting films for documentarians D.A. Pennebaker and then John Marshall, in Namibia. McElwee started producing and directing documentaries in 1976.

Ross McElwee has made seven feature-length documentaries as well as several shorter films. Most of his films were shot in his homeland of the American South, among them the critically acclaimed Sherman's March, Time Indefinite, Six O'Clock News, and Bright Leaves. Sherman's March won numerous awards, including Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. It was cited by the National Board of Film Critics as one of the five best films of 1986. Time Indefinite won best film award in several festivals and was distributed theatrically throughout the U.S. Six O'Clock News won Best Documentary at the Hawaii International Film Festival. These three films were broadcast in the U.S. over PBS and nationally in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia.

McElwee's films have been included in the festivals of Berlin, London, Vienna, Rotterdam, Florence, Sydney, and Wellington. Retrospectives include the Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; and États généraux du film documentaire in Lussas, France. McElwee has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Film Institute, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. He has twice been awarded fellowships in filmmaking by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000, Sherman's March was selected for a Cinéma du Réel retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and four of his films were featured in a selection of western documentaries shown for the first time in Tehran, Iran. Sherman's March was also chosen for preservation by the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000 as an "historically significant American motion picture."

McElwee's newest film, Bright Leaves premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight before being distributed theatrically in Europe and the United States. Bright Leaves was nominated for Best Documentary of 2004 by both the Director's Guild of America and the Writer's Guild of America. In 2005, complete retrospectives of McElwee's films were presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the International Festival of Documentary Cinema in Lisbon.

Ross McElwee has been teaching filmmaking at Harvard University since 1986, where he is a professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. 

 

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