“The Suspension of Time”
Filipe Martins (University of Porto)
The title of Ross McElwee’s most recent film, Remake, does not allow us to anticipate its main theme. In fact, as in some of his previous works, the title refers to a secondary narrative thread: in this case, the potential development of a fictional adaptation of his documentary Sherman’s March by a Hollywood studio. In Sherman’s March (1985), McElwee’s true focus had not exactly been General Sherman’s military campaign during the American Civil War, but rather the director’s own meandering in search of a new romantic partner while developing his autobiographical documentary. And in Remake (2025), the theme of the potential cinematic remake feels merely incidental. It is as if McElwee makes a point of setting the anchor somewhere on the periphery, far from the true thematic center, in order to emphasize the contingent and wandering tone of his cinematic tapestries.
Or perhaps the title is also intended to function as a kind of euphemism, because the film deals, in fact, with the most violent of themes: the death of a child. Remake orbits around the death of Adrian, the filmmaker’s son, whose image as a newborn was introduced in Time Indefinite (1993). For a spectator like me, reasonably familiar with McElwee’s work, the euphemism of the title intensified the impact of the tragic revelation delivered in the very first minutes. Learning of Adrian’s unexpected death was a profound shock to me, rarely felt in my experience with cinema. Immediately, the several decades of personal and family life that McElwee had documented so intimately in his previous films resonated differently, rewiring all the connections across his body of work.
Time Indefinite, which explored the director’s anxieties about fatherhood and death, suddenly assumed a disturbingly premonitory tone. Even more so than in Photographic Memory (2011), where the evolution of the father-son relationship occupies a central axis, it is in Time Indefinite (1993)—whose timeframe is almost entirely prior to Adrian’s birth—that the deepest resonance is felt. At a certain point in that film, as we watch a sequence featuring several shots of children’s graves in a Mexican cemetery, McElwee comments in voice-over: “I’m not exactly sure what fuels my hesitation on having kids… I know it’s absurd to worry about something happening to a child who has not even been conceived yet, but sometimes I think this might be part of my problem.” From this film onwards the camera begins to assert itself as a weapon to combat the inexorable flow of time, death, and the hollowing out of memory. McElwee continues: “I also find myself becoming more and more obsessed with death in general. It’s drawing a shadow on everything: life, work, family. The idea of family especially haunts me, and I keep thinking there must be some way to deal with this through my filming.” And, further on, he adds: “Over the last fifteen years, I edited and reedited this footage I shot of my family… Maybe I’ve been trying to preserve things in the present, somehow keep everyone alive in some sort of time indefinite.”
The insoluble problem that McElwee has consciously faced since Time Indefinite is that, on the one hand, the movie camera seems to function as a magnifying glass that allows one to expand time, returning each of its moments to the proximity of the present; but, on the other hand, the camera is also an instrument of distancing, a performative mechanism, a filter that refracts and defers the real, relegating it to a place where fiction and the representation of the past tend to blur.
In fact, the images captured by the lens help make reality more bearable at the cost of fictionalizing it. While McElwee films his own arm during a blood draw in Time Indefinite, he remarks: “If I watch it through a lens, it seems less real to me, more like I’m watching a movie.” But this capacity of the lens to exchange the real for the performativity of the real can turn into an unwanted renunciation, a kind of betrayal of reality that the passage of time, moreover, tends to amplify. McElwee expresses this frustration several times in his films. In Remake, referring to the footage of his son: “My fear now is that, by looking at this footage over and over again, things will slowly start shifting into making you seem like a fictional character. Someone who never existed except on film.”
Nevertheless, despite the impossible struggle against the vortex of time, McElwee continues to produce images. In Bright Leaves, reflecting on his compulsion to film his son, he comments: “I keep filming him as he gets older here – collecting more and more footage – as if the sheer weight of all of these accumulated images could somehow keep him from growing up so fast, slow the process down.” Naturally, the filmmaker knows this is a lost cause: “Of course, filming doesn’t slow anything down.” On the contrary, the accumulation of the archive might even produce an illustration of time’s disconcerting speed. The effect of juxtaposition between past and present described by Jaimie Baron as the “archive effect” tends, in fact, to emphasize temporal disparity and heighten the awareness of the entire ocean of time that has suddenly passed between two juxtaposed shots. This is what we may feel when, in Remake, McElwee retrieves old footage of people who participated in his earlier films and juxtaposes it with current footage of these same aged participants. Faced with these combined images, we may find ourselves wondering how time has passed so quickly.
Another way of relating images to time has to do with suspension. It involves a way of seeing whose effect is the crystallization of time, the eternalization of the moments time holds. Here, images do not necessarily betray the real; on the contrary, they can even increase its visibility, like magnifying lenses, even if (or precisely because) these images reach us through the performative filter of art.
McElwee films with the intention of suspending time, and he does so without any naïveté, because his gaze is, above all, aesthetic. In Time Indefinite, while presenting us with old footage of his parents, he describes: “For me, there is something about the images themselves. It is the way everything seems to shimmer in the light of that particular, ordinary Sunday morning. The way everything is in movement, the shadows, the light, the handheld camera… Everything is sort of quivering with the kind of life that would be very hard to reenact.” There is nothing naive or fallacious in the realization of this strange liveliness, of this profound sensoriality of the images. It is a very peculiar form of realism, a strictly aesthetic authenticity that only the poetic impulse truly knows how to grasp, yet this does not render such images any less anchored in the real.
Admittedly, the real appears to us irresistibly more whole in the present. In Remake, where the narration is addressed directly to his son, McElwee notes: “Looking at this now, you seem as alive as ever in a kind of half-life that now represents you. You’re alive here in this footage, but you’re no longer alive in the real world.” Ultimately, everything that is no longer in the present runs the growing risk of becoming unreal, nonexistent, fictional. But the “real world” McElwee refers to cannot be reduced to the criterion of presence, if only because, ultimately, the present is impossibly elusive. In truth, the real persists secretly in the recorded moments of the past, emancipated from the historical chronology of time itself, eternalized in a “time indefinite.” And, if we know how to look, it becomes possible to access and inhabit it through the aesthetic power of images. Such is, undoubtedly, a profound conviction of McElwee’s. Eternity—or “time indefinite”—is a time separated from actuality, the possibility of the real emancipated from the present.
In a passage in Bright Leaves (2003), McElwee muses in voice-over: “I sometimes imagine my son, years from now, when I’m no longer around, looking at what I’ve filmed. I can almost feel him looking back at me from some distant point in the future… through these images and reflections, through the film I’ll leave behind.” Such a scenario, unfortunately, will no longer come to pass. Yet, in one of the most memorable moments of Remake, McElwee reflects on a sequence of footage Adrian had captured while skiing. From Adrian’s own first-person perspective, we see him glide down an improvised path until he stops in a small clearing among the trees, alone somewhere in the middle of the mountain. McElwee comments: “When I saw this footage, it was suddenly like being able to inhabit your body.” For a few moments, we continue to see the surrounding scenery from the perspective of Adrian’s helmet as he catches his breath. We hear nothing else but his heavy breathing. McElwee’s narration continues: “When you were a little boy and while we were skiing together, we’d sometimes stop just to listen to how quiet it was. I wonder if that’s what you were doing here.” Gradually, we lend Adrian our body and he lends us his. We listen together to the surrounding silence and relive this eternalized moment.
“A Culmination”
Efrén Cuevas (University of Navarra)
Fifteen years after Photographic Memory (2011), Ross McElwee has released Remake (2026), a clear continuation of his previous work and, to a certain extent, a culmination of his career. McElwee offers us a narrative that spans approximately the past two decades of his life using his classic film diary structure, in which he draws on his personal experiences to also comment on the evolution of American society.
The film draws its title from Hollywood’s endeavors to adapt his influential documentary Sherman’s March (1986). This thread acts, in a way, like a MacGuffin, which gradually loses significance as the story of his son Adrian takes center stage. From the beginning, McElwee addresses Adrian in voiceover while we watch home movies featuring his son, creating a poignant dialogue between voice and image. McElwee informs us early in the film of his son’s death, which occurred in 2016 due to a fentanyl overdose. From that point on, the film becomes a portrayal of the filmmaker’s grief—a difficult process of coming to terms with his son’s death—which lends the film its most enduring characteristic.
McElwee constructs this film in his usual style, handling both camera and sound himself, filming scenes with an unhurried observational cadence, leaving room for life to unfold before the camera. One might think he is shooting home movies, since his subjects are everyday scenes and his protagonists are his family and friends. But they are being shot by a professional filmmaker and often end up becoming part of his films; thus, they possess an ambiguous nature, in that they are not intended solely for family viewing.
At the same time, McElwee observes these images from the present—as marked by the voiceover—projecting a retrospective gaze characteristic of the autobiographical perspective, which endows the images with a temporal dimension they would not have as a mere “diary”—a common feature of the autobiographical documentary cinema that McElwee has so masterfully cultivated. These “home movies” constitute, then, a valuable family archive, to which the filmmaker returns to find answers, to explore the motivations of his late son, and to try to bring him “back to life”—as he also stated in Time Indefinite (1993) regarding the footage he had filmed of his father in the past. Film’s mnemonic power thus comes to the forefront, while it is simultaneously called into question, in an unstable balance between life and death—the life present in those images and the death that cut short Adrian’s life when he was only 27 years old.
Memory also takes center stage in the unexpected montage sequences that appear in Remake. Unexpected because McElwee’s entire filmography had previously relied on that unique blend of observational visual style—with long takes and unobtrusive editing—and autobiographical perspective, conveyed through his voiceover narration. One might surmise that this new direction stems from the presence—also a first in his filmography—of a co-editor, Joe Bini. In one such sequence, McElwee uses medical resonance imaging that reveals a large tumor in his brain, for which he must undergo surgery, as a visual filter through which we see scenes from various periods featuring his children or his father. Once again, memory and death are in dialogue; once again, home movies serve as reliquaries of memory, as scholar Lourdes Esqueda so aptly put it. This theme resonates once more when he interviews his friend Charlene—a central character in many of his films—who can no longer remember those times because she suffers from Alzheimer’s.
McElwee gives shape to the portrait of his son using footage he has recorded over the years, conversations between the two that he also filmed, and footage shot by Adrian himself. At times, the film gives access to an intimacy within this father-son relationship that can make us feel like intruders, as when we hear the conversation between them in a bedroom in Colorado, with his son revealing openly his problems with drugs, which may make us question why it is being filmed. One could argue that this is a common strategy for McElwee, who builds his films from everyday scenes he has been recording over the years. But here one might wonder if it wouldn’t have been more appropriate to turn off the camera, as Charlene once urged him to do in Sherman’s March in a different context. Yet it is also true that Ross McElwee knows how to frame these more intimate scenes within a context that gives them meaning—a context built on respect, affection, and pain. This meaning transcends his son’s personal struggles, making them serve as a lens through which to observe U.S. society and, in particular, the opioid epidemic ravaging the country.
Remake can be read as a culmination of McElwee’s career, not only because he released this film at the age of 78 but also because it encapsulates, in a way, the filmmaker’s entire body of work—his themes, his characters, his concerns—viewed through his unique perspective and distinctive style. He explains this approach to his son in one scene, noting that he doesn’t appear much on screen because people aren’t interested in seeing him, but rather in seeing the world through his eyes. In this film, McElwee presents us with a condensed version of the world he has lived in for decades, permeated by the inconceivable pain of a father grappling with the loss of his son. And along the way, he revisits and delves deeper into the major themes of his filmography, resulting in a dense film with layers that accumulate and interact with one another. This film, then, appears to bring to a close—at least for now—a body of work that has left a profound mark on autobiographical cinema to date.
