'Sherman's March'

So, in the middle of "Sherman's March," the filmmaker Ross McElwee captures a Southern woman around 1981 discussing the Civil War. During this little diatribe, the woman states that slavery, in essence, should be voluntary.

She notes: If a person wants to be a slave, then they should be allowed to.

Hmm. Where does the "I want to be a slave!" line start? Also, the term "slave" pretty much reeks of involuntary labor and subservience.

Why wasn't a two-and-a-half hour documentary made about this woman?

****
Otherwise, I thoroughly enjoyed this film. Basically, McElwee wants to make a documentary about General William Sherman's "March to the Sea" -- a campaign that devastated the South during the American Civil War. Instead, he gets dumped days before starting and decides (or maybe the spirit of the film decided for him) to instead document the lives, attitudes and feelings surrounding love and relationships in the American South in the early 1980s.

What's most fascinating as McElwee visits former loves, girls he's being set up with and chicks he meets along Sherman's path toward Columbia, South Carolina, is the fact that we, the viewer, have no idea the state, length or any real details about what's going on.

Was McElwee essentially shacking up with these chicks? Making babies? Was it purely platonic the entire time? How involved was he in these girls' lives? How the hell did he come upon girl after girl that wanted anything to do with him only for him to eventually leave? How long were these trysts? Weeks? Months? Days?

We don't know any of these details. So that makes McElwee either a cad or extremely inept toward relating to womankind.