Landscapes of the Self. The Cinema of Ross McElwee

Abstract

Ross McElwee’s innovative work negotiates its genre identity from a marginal land. Straddled between filmic diaries, performative documentary and home movies, his work falls into a genre that is difficult to place. Just as with the other analyses of this book, we are banking on film essay as the most appropriate label for describing the work of this landscape artist of the self hailing from the American south. It is not Monet’s pictorial impressionism. The intellectual mirror of McElwee could be a Michel de Montaigne essay transformed into images.