“We can’t go backwards, Dad.”
A young Adrian McElwee says this to his father, filmmaker Ross McElwee, while they’re catching crayfish together in the opening footage of Remake, his first project in 14years. Adrian’s talking about the way they have to move his homemade net through the water to yield the best catch, but the throwaway line, uttered sometime in the mid-90s and captured on agrainy video camera, takes on agreater significance in the context of his father’s film. Adrian died on Christmas Eve 2016 after consuming heroin laced with fentanyl, following along struggle with substance addiction and Bipolar disorder. He was 27years old. His father had been filming him sporadically for his documentaries for his entire life.“I look at this footage not only to remind myself you were alive,” McElwee narrates in voice over, addressing his son in the present,“But to convince myself that you’re gone.”
Since the beginning of his professional filmmaking career in 1979, McElwee has achieved acertain level of cult success, notably after the release of his 1986 documentary Sherman’s March, which won aSundance Grand Jury Prize and informs the title of his ninth film, in which aHollywood offer for the film to be remade – initially as acomedy film and later as asitcom – becomes atopic that drifts in and out over the years. The looming prospect of the remake leaves Ross conflicted about“selling out”, but Adrian is more optimistic, consistently frustrated by his father’s apparent resistance to making money. The recurring disconnect between father and son informs Remake, not just in their views on Ross’s career, but on addiction and recovery, filmmaking choices, and what Ross chooses to make public of his family life. But beyond the literal remake at hand, it’s clear this beautiful film, devastating in its honesty and clarity as though we’re looking right at the heart torn out of Ross McElwee’s chest, offers the filmmaker another type of do-over: achance to try and make sense of the senseless.
For documentarians who have made their own lives – and more specifically the lives of their loved ones – the subject of their art, there’s always alingering question of ethics and how much one shares in the name of filmmaking. McElwee confronts this directly, illustrating the ways he mined his relationships in the name of his career, perhaps none more so than with his son. An uncomfortable excerpt from the 2011 Venice Film Festival press conference for Photographic Memory shows Adrian speaking about the difficulty of watching himself on screen; aclip from that same film shows his father admonishing him for his substance abuse issues. Although McElwee’s irritation clearly comes from aplace of adoration and concern, there’s asense of voyeurism in watching such adeeply private conversation take place on the big screen, and given Adrian had been filmed from his birth, the power dynamic wasn’t really up for debate. Now, with distance, Ross reckons with the worry that in exposing his son’s vulnerabilities to the world, he managed to exacerbate them. This ethical question lingers throughout the film, and serves as aproto version of the parents who post videos of their children on social media from infancy. When you’re that close to the subject, how does afilmmaker know when to turn the camera off, or when to cut aclip from the edit? What does any of that matter to McElwee now, if it can’t bring Adrian back?
Elsewhere, McElwee films old friends who starred in his earlier films, such as Charleen Swansea, apoetry teacher and friend of Ezra Pound who now has dementia and can’t ever remember making Charleen or Sherman’s March with Ross.“Things just disappear,” Charleen says of her memories. She remarks that she thinks the camera he uses is an ugly piece of machinery, and that it amazes her the beauty he can create from it. He films his wife, Korean documentarian Hyun Kyung Kim, who does not show her face but is seen lovingly tending to their garden, and editing her own film on how the Korean War impacted three generations of her family. He documents his own surgery to remove abrain tumour, and recalls how Adrian smuggled asmall camera into the hospital because he thought being able to film everything again might help his dad recover faster. (It worked.) There is so much pain present in Remake, but there is so much love too – love that seems to radiate through the screen from McElwee’s footage of Adrian and his sister Mariah from birth to adulthood, from the interviews he conducts with his brother and sister to the self-shot footage of him marrying Hyun Kyung Kim, witnessed only by their justiciar.
As ateenager, Adrian asks Ross aquestion:“Do you ever think about reversing the roles?” Without missing abeat, Ross hands Adrian the camera.“People don’t want to see afilm about me,” he tells his son.“They want to see afilm about what Isee.” Of course Ross McElwee must be aware of the irony in this statement, because most of his films have been just as much about him as what he sees, and Remake is his most nakedly intimate and devastating work, the culmination of alife lived in public for the sake of art. He admits his own tunnel vision; how he’s still angry at himself for not noticing how bad things were for his son before it was too late, and that he still wonders if Adrian had come to believe he was the version of himself that existed in his father’s camera viewfinder rather than the one that lived in the realworld.
But for the great sadness contained within Remake, McElwee isn’t atrite or sensationalist filmmaker, still employing the lo-fi, intimate style which has found him admirers over the years. This film is aremarkable tribute to Adrian, poignant and precise, spliced together from clips and fragments like amoving family photo album, masterfully edited by the legendary Joe Bini, known for his collaborations with Lynne Ramsay, Laura Poitras and Werner Herzog. As well as his own footage, Ross includes video shot by his son – skits, skating tricks, music videos, and stunning skiing footage on the powder white mountain tops of Colorado. McElwee confronts the possibility and limitations of documentary while also reckoning with his own life (and limitations) as afather and filmmaker, and what sacrifices he made or asked others to make in the process. But it’s like Adrian told his father as aboy with abucket full of crayfish – time only marches forward, and as much as you can pick the past apart, analyse every frame and try to remake them into something you understand, sometimes clarity never comes. Atragedy as sudden and vast as burying achild as young and brilliant and brave as Adrian can’t be cut, or edited, or rephrased. All McElwee has are the images that Adrian left behind, and in Remake, he has found away to process them into something profound and powerful that illustrates not aperfect relationship, but certainly the sort of true magic acamera can offer to remind us who we were, and the great beauty in seeing another person through the lens of true unconditional love.