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This chapter considers the historiographic philosophies of science fiction writer and memoirist Samuel Delany and documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee, especially their concern with the relation between fictional and factual accounts of the past. This chapter explores how their work productively skips in time and place to produce profound historical revelations about race and sexuality and the relation between history and the paternal.

A leading figure in personal documentary filmmaking, Ross McElwee transformed the growing urge to document his family and friends by developing a complex, sophisticated narrative voice and a remarkable facility with voice-over, in Backyard, Sherman’s March, and Time Indefinite. McElwee talks about his earliest forays into filmmaking; his years at the MIT Film Section and his experiences with his teachers Ed Pincus and Ricky Leacock; and his memories of working with ethnographic filmmaker John Marshall in Africa. And he candidly discusses the difficulties of being a personal filmmaker when your topic is your family and that family is disintegrating; and his most recent films, In Paraguay and Photographic Memory.

Romantic love, the heart of many fiction films, is rare in documentary films. This essay begins by explaining its absence and shows that, when it appears, romantic love is usually depicted unfavorably: pleasure turns into pain, possession into loss or a marriage of misery and make do. Then the focus turns to “Sherman’s March,” the documentary that best reveals romantic love in all its aspects, as we (the viewers) accompany Ross McElwee or, rather, his persona, in a quest for romantic love from one after another engaging and distinctive Southern woman. The analysis shows the film’s remarkable construction, sound track and voiceovers, its images and camera movements; and finds that, as it celebrates the women’s uniqueness, originality and style, the film is a droll tale of a search marked more by frustration and failure than success.

This is the first sustained interview with Alfred Guzzetti, who has made important contributions to personal documentary (e.g., Family Portrait Sittings), political documentary (e.g., Pictures from a Revolution, co-made with photographer Susan Meiselas and Richard P. Rogers), and avant-garde film and video (e.g., Air; the Language Lessons videos; Still Point), and has had significant influence on the careers of dozens of the filmmaking students he has taught during his decades at Harvard. Guzzetti talks about the early avant-garde film scene created by Fred Camper’s MIT Film Society, which brought avant-garde film to Cambridge; the “occupational hazard” of personal documentary (how, when families struggle, the films about those families become part of the struggle) and about the evolution of video technology and high-definition, which led to a remarkable body of video work during the 1990s and 2000s.