Time Indefinite

Director: Ross McElwee
Year: 1993
Country: USA
Running time: 117 mins
USA
Production Co.: Home Made Movies/Film Four/ZDF
Assistant editors: Andrea Lelievre, Claudia Gonson
Post-production supervisor: Jana Odette
Sound mix: Richard Bock

Festivals: Vancouver, 1993. Melbourne, Sydney, 1994
You leave this two-hour home-rnovie documentary amused, deeply touched and quietly philosophical...Time Indefinite goes South again. But this time McElwee comes marching home. In visits with his family - his ageing grandmother, work-driven father and brother, lifelong maid, Lucille, and others - he re-explores his family role. Long regarded as the McElwee oddball (in a family full of doctors and traditional women), the soft-spoken, bearded filmmaker examines his relationship with his relatives... During McElwee's filming of porch get-togethers, dinners, beach wanderings and whatever else takes his fancy, sundry questions arise, from existential to absurd. What worries him so much about babies, he wonders, as his brother proudly and repeatedly thrusts his newborn before McElwee's lens? Will he never shave that beard, his ailing grandmother wants to know. Why does his camera seem to lose battery power when his father's around? Why do Jehovah's Witnesses follow him around the country? Most significantly perhaps, is McElwee living his life or depicting it? ... McElwee has a significant announcement for the family at the beginning of Time Indefinite. He and Marilyn Levine, who is also a filmmaker, intend to get married. McElwee's standing in the family reaches an immediate, unprecedented high. The movie enjoys an early euphoria. McElwee (with characteristic trepidation) is actually going to join the world of people - those characters in front of his lens. But he still brings his camera to everything, from stag night with his filmmaking friends (who else?) to telling Grandma the good news. Minutes before the wedding ceremony, McElwee is still filming Marilyn... Time Indefinite becomes increasingly tempered with tragedy, ranging from the horror of a fisherman gleefully encouraging his son to stomp a caught, wriggling fish, to Charleen coming to grips with a searing family loss. Standing slightly apart from his life and the people in it, McElwee enters his existence in a profoundly stirring way. — Desson Howe, Washington Post