Elsewhere, McElwee films old friends who starred in his earlier films, such as Charleen Swansea, a poetry 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 a brain tumour, and recalls how Adrian smuggled a small 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 a teenager, Adrian asks Ross a question: “Do you ever think about reversing the roles?” Without missing a beat, Ross hands Adrian the camera. “People don’t want to see a film about me,” he tells his son. “They want to see a film about what I see.” 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 a life 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 real world.
But for the great sadness contained within Remake, McElwee isn’t a trite or sensationalist filmmaker, still employing the lo-fi, intimate style which has found him admirers over the years. This film is a remarkable tribute to Adrian, poignant and precise, spliced together from clips and fragments like a moving 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 a father and filmmaker, and what sacrifices he made or asked others to make in the process. But it’s like Adrian told his father as a boy with a bucket 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. A tragedy as sudden and vast as burying a child 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 a way to process them into something profound and powerful that illustrates not a perfect relationship, but certainly the sort of true magic a camera can offer to remind us who we were, and the great beauty in seeing another person through the lens of true unconditional love.