I’ve seen Ross McElwee’s documentary Six o’Clock News (1996) twice, on video about eight months apart, and each time there was a moment roughly halfway through when I felt that he was finally about to turn a corner as a filmmaker. This Boston-based North Carolinian is known as an independent autobiographer, yet what I’ve come to appreciate most in his work are those moments when autobiography leads him away from himself to other people.
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As a chronicler of the new south in all its baroque craziness and contradictory charm, McElwee’s persona in Sherman’s March was a necessary tool, but as a subject in its own right I doubt it could have sustained 155 minutes. This isn’t because McElwee lacks baroque craziness and contradictory charm, but because he tends to wear these attributes on his sleeve as proof of his universality. If Time Indefinite–which charts the death of his father, his marriage, and the birth of his son–seemed to reveal McElwee as a lightweight after the endless suggestiveness of Sherman’s March, it might have been because the closer his rambling methodology gets to ordinary experience the less he has to say. If his principal bid for our interest is how homespun he is, it would be more fun to listen to his eccentric neighbors or wait for Charleen to come back.
Some of the ruminations put me in mind of the semicrazed letters and notations scribbled by Moses Herzog in Saul Bellow’s novel, one of which is an apt, unattributed saying from the 18th century: “Grief, Sir, is a species of idleness.” They hover on the edge of profundity, the way practically all ruminations on human disasters do, barely touching on issues of religious faith, meaning, coherence, and mortality. But after a while, it becomes apparent that the grief belongs only to the victims and the idleness belongs only to McElwee in search of material–their grief is a species of his idleness. Like Herzog, he doesn’t know what to do, so he turns on the TV–and the news on TV gets him sufficiently involved with the world to make a few gestures. Whereas Herzog writes a letter, McElwee tracks down, befriends, and films a fresh disaster victim, then moves on–another chapter in his autobiography completed.
But these and other victims in the film are generally too busy attending to their lives to ruminate much on the meaning of their fates, so McElwee has to wait around for them to deliver these conclusions on camera, befriending them in the process. He even accompanies Im and Pena to church, and when he goes with Pena and finds himself observing a praying woman he doesn’t know, I start wondering if his obtrusiveness is any different from that of the TV crews. I’m reminded of Orson Welles’s suggestion in an interview that filming the act of prayer was potentially as obscene as filming the act of sex; here it functions as a mechanism for pumping meaning into a movie that has nothing to do with the woman, which makes it feel immensely exploitative.
