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Ross McElwee's cinematic genius achieves full expression in Time
Indefinite . The film stunningly captures what it means to be a
contemplative being conscious of mortality and the fragility of human
happiness.
In the film, McElwee takes us on a cinematic journey, trying "to document
little moments" from his life. These moments are varied enough to include
family reunions, discussions with his film teacher about male/female
relationships, visits with his dying grandmother, the making of his wedding
invitations, and even his future wife's appointment with a gynecologist. These
moments also include his reflections on his past, as when he recalls some of
his childhood questions: "Do fish go to heaven? Is their heaven an aquarium?
And if it is, then who cleans it?"
Although McElwee has a wellspring of humor, as evidenced by the Woody
Allen-esque musings on fish-heaven, he is also willing to expose the viewer to
the pain and sadness of life. McElwee is unafraid to show old age in all its
unexalted reality or to discuss death in all its tragedy. At times death seems
a very obsession: Having just observed that he's spent six out of his thirty
rolls of film on a children's cemetery in Mexico, he wonders whether death must
then be on his mind twenty percent of the time. Later, he ruefully observes
that his deceased father's socks are still rolled up and ready to worn,
implying that material possessions, ironically enough, can outlast the people
who were supposed to use them.
McElwee has a keen cinematic eye for the existentially absurd. At one point,
he decides that he must visit his father's house in order to reconcile himself
to his father's permanent departure. While in the house, he muses incessantly
on death before being interrupted by a bee infestation, which forces him to
call a fumigation company called "Killo." Another absurdist scene, which
recurs repeatedly, depicts the gardener Melvin trying with annoyed perseverance
to start an uncooperative lawn mower. As he bends down again and again to pull
the starting cable, with the motor only half-starting each time, I could not
help thinking of Sisyphus on the rock struggling pointlessly to complete his
pointless task. McElwee suggests that filmmaking is also absurd, as when he
reveals that his family never even viewed the films they took so much time to
make.
Another theme that pervades the movie is the ambiguous relationship between art and
life. In one comical scene, McElwee films his blind date, to whom his friend
Charlene has introduced him. Charlene, impatient with Ross's insistence on
filming everything, agitatedly reminds him, "This is life--not art!" For
McElwee the dilemma is for a time resolved with the birth of his son, which
birth serves as a sudden and powerful affirmation of life and its intuitively
felt interconnectedness. Not only does this affirmation counterbalance the
implicit loneliness in Time Indefinite , but it imposes a certain
urgency on practical survival that momentarily shakes his detached and
contemplative posture as a philosophical filmmaker.
McElwee's "characters" are probably more intriguing than any that could be
dreamed up by a screenwriter. Charlene, for example, is a unique composite of
Southern sensibilities and self-reflective angst and insight. She also appears
in Sherman's March , which more than Time Indefinite captures
the great variety of personalities and characteristics one can find in just one
section of America. The subjects of Sherman's March are refreshingly
authentic and yet, in some ways, more fictional than real: a Hollywood-bound
actress, a group of black auto mechanics, a traveling singer, a fanatic group
of armed libertarians establishing a rural settlement, and a linguistics
scholar living on two-person island.
The cinematography of Time Indefinite is captivating, original, and
almost always memorable. At several points, McElwee includes the breathtaking
view of the ocean from below a pier--a view he describes as "an exotic
cathedral." During another unforgettable scene, McElwee fills the screen with
an image of a dying fish's mouth gasping desperately for oxygen, as McElwee
disturbingly notes that he himself is the last living thing that the fish will
ever see.
As technology hastens the pace of life and reduces the average attention span,
McElwee's approach to filmmaking is refreshing and resensitizing, for he
focuses on his subject matter with thoughtfulness and care. Paradoxically,
then, McElwee puts his inventive approach to filmmaking to the time-honored
service of rendering the landscape of humanity with variousness and richness.
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