The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 32

32 THE BOSTON GLOBE WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1985 TELEVISION I ED SIICEL -s ill Wiiiii 1 5 5 i.sf B-: IsiT-T-ffM fc Broadcast journalism loses a pro were switching among the stations on a remote control at 6 or 1 1, you'd stop at Channel 4 when Kauff was on the air. You knew that whatever story he was covering, it would be treated with dignity, professionalism and as much thoroughness as time would allow. If you were watching on three monitors, as critics and those in broadcast Journalism are wont to do. you'd most often turn down the sound on Channels 5 In many cities in the United States, writing about local news is not usually considered one of the great joys and challenges of a television critic's Job. To a much greater extent than with national news, there is a blur between information and entertainment that can make an hour's newscast seem more like a game show than a Journalistic enterprise.

And yet, Boston is blessed with three commercial it y0 4 i Si lli i I and 7 and turn it up on Channel 4. There weren't many better than Kauff. In his eulogy at Kauff funeral on Sunday, John Hennlng mentioned how the editors at WBZ, when confronted with a complex story, would say, "Give it to Kauff." Untangling a difficult story was a Kauff specialty, so was making it intelligible to a mass audience in two or three minutes. Channel 4 news director Stan Hopkins hailed Kauff "straightforward, direct, no-nonsense approach, an ability to communicate and put stories in perspective that was really unique." He also recalled how Kauff would fight him stations that take news relatively seriously and that, for the most part, have been spurred on by the competition among themselves to provide journalism rather than infotainment. Such isn't always the case, of course.

The close ratings race among the three stations often results in enough silliness to deter the serious news viewer. The mandates of fast pacing often deprive stories of depth and context. But each station also has a stable of serious journalists, those whose priorities are telling a story and telling it well. Broadcast journalism in Boston now has one fewer representative in that category w-'i it Vv Jt si on stories that he didnt think measured up to his standards and "that he performed at such a high level that I always felt he was due answers or explanations." I never had the opportunity to meet Kauff or to praise him in print before today. That was my loss.

Now, because of a tragic accident no one will have that opportunity in the future. That is New England's loss. Dennis Kauff. who died last Friday DENNIS KAUFF at the age of 32, allegedly the victim of a drunk driver. Whether covering the Mondale campaign or Cambodian refugees in Thailand, Kauff exhibited a dual passion for journalism and politics matched by few' other reporters in Boston, a fact that came across clearly from the numbers of his colleagues at his funeral Sunday, not only from WBZ, but from Channels 7, 5, 56, 2, the Globe and the Herald.

If you i Landing a punch for history Filmmaker Ross McElwee at work in Cambridge. GLOBE STAFF PHOTO BY WENDY MAEDA McElwee's close encounters CHAMPION. Joe Louis, Black Hero in White America, by Chris Medd. Scrlbner's. 330 pp.

$18.95. Illustrated. By Robert Taylor Globe Staff The classic account of Rocky Marciano's knockout of Joe Louis was written by A.J. Liebling in the New Yorker. "The blonde said, 'You're so cold.

I hate you, Joe Louis especially after the second Schmeling fight when Louis stood for the United States versus Nazi Germany became a hero to black and white America. Yet, as Chris Mead points out in this carefully researched, perceptive and highly readable social chronicle, "White Americans may have admired and liked Joe Louis in the abstract, but they still denied the mass of blacks any chance for equal participation in American life." To blacks, however, the symbolic importance of Louis, a black man who beat white athletes in direct competition before a national audience, was incalculable. Upper-class and well-educated He had noticed a blonde woman BOOK Irztx I ml mil mutt r1 I LIVES III mi ARTS By Jay Can-Globe Staff When he was growing up in Charlotte. N.C., Cambridge-based filmmaker Ross McElwee, 38, remembers a sofa his grandmother refused to throw out. It was pierced with Union saber slashes, a Civil War artifact.

"There's a notion of relic-hoarding in the South," McElwee says. "Sherman Is much better remembered in the South than in the North. You still hear about him constantly. On a wall in my office, I have a newspa- watching the fight with her date: tall blonde was bawling, and pretty soon she began to boo. The fellow who brought her was horrified.

"'Rocky didn't do he said. 'He didn't foul him. What you JOE LOUIS cess. He swears he won't be the protagonist of his next one. The film never did help him as his sister theorized it would, but he did stay with the music teacher he met at the end of it for a year before she moved to California for a teaching job.

Now he has met someone new, from Connecticut. They've been seeing each other for a year and a half. "I would not advise filmmaking as a way to enhance your social status," McElwee says. "AH it does is spend your money Still, he adds, he, stays in touch with some of the women in "Sherman's March." the actress who fantasizes about Burt Reynolds wrote me a Valentine card," McElwee recalls. "It said: 'I am in California.

I'm in love. I met a director who makes real She underlined the word 'real'!" "I had to do housewife-helper shows how to do grits casseroles. Also gospel hours rows of women in pink with beehive hairdos." After a stint with "Bill Moyers' Journal" for PBS, McElwee earned a master's degree in film at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978, started making films, and free-lanced as a cameraman and editor to support his habit. In 1981. he simultaneously began filming "Sherman's March" and lecturing about film at Harvard University.

Most of the photography was completed in seven months in 1981. The reason the film McElwee's seventh took until now to complete was money. Six grants paid the $75,000 tab mostly processing costs. McElwee says he also needed to distance himself from the film periodically during the editing pro 'From Greece with love vfor Christmas per ad for a construction company BOSTON SHOW Sale! Coming Nov. 15-16-17 Sat.

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Washable, of course. There's no demoralizing, bulky feel about Tranquility. It's natural-fit protection. blacks no doubt would have preferred as racial symbol a George Washington Carver or a W. E.

B. DuBols rather than the unlettered Joseph Louis Barrow. America, however, usually gets the kind of heroes the time demands, and in the 1930s blacks were effectively barred from US society. Even FDR, who had a smattering of token black advisers, refused to lobby for a federal antilynching law (he feared the South would filibuster it, and he would thereafter be unable to pass his legislative program). Virtually invisible in the unions, the press or the skilled workforce, blacks could attain prominence only in a brutal sport such as boxing.

Louis' managers deliberately dissociated him from the memory of the scandal-stained Jack Johnson. Joe was to be portrayed as a model of middle-class virtue. (In fact, he was a gregarious man, as careless in his private life as he was disciplined in the ring.) Clearly if he didn't play the stoic, the Depression-era sports press was eager to vilify him. One of the most interesting aspects of Mead's research is his presentation of the pervasive racism of the '30s sports pages. To Grantland Rice, Louis was an animal, "a bushmaster," "a Brown Cobra," and, more hackneyed, a black panther stalking its prey.

Others saw him as a mechanism, an implacable destroyer. Paul Gallico wrote: "I felt myself strongly ridden by the Impression that here was a mean man, a truly savage person, a man on whom civilization rested no more securely than a shawl thrown over one's shoulders, that, in short, here was perhaps for the first time in many generations the perfect prizefighter. I had the feeling that I was in the room with a wild animal." The white press could not gainsay Joe's skein of victories, however, and in addition to the biographical element, Mead examines every Louis contest, blow by blow. The boxing fan will find these Indispensable; but the problem is that time doesn't accommodate itself to print. The most exciting two minutes and four seconds In boxing history, the first round of the second Schmeling fight, for instance, requires nearly six long-breathed pages if you're writing, "Schmeling backed two steps away, and Louis followed.

Louis jabbed, popping Schmeling's greased hair up, jabbed again, and dropped his shoulder for a left hook that landed to Schmeling's face." Small matter. Although the author understandably downplays Louis' melancholy post-pugilistic career, since it's the unimportant phase of his life, the story Mead tells is more than the biography of a champion. Joe Louis became an agent for social change, a figure whose cultural significance outweighed even his feats in the ring. that says, Sherman burned the South. We're reconstructing People there are even talking about 'Sherman's Second March' the people moving to the Sun Belt." But a funny thing happened on the way to McElwee's new film, "Sherman's March." It changed from a documentary meditation to a comic roundelay, in dryly ironic style, about McElwee's disastrous encounters with Southern women.

It took a while for McElwee to decide how to describe his film. 'Documentary' implies propaganda or something didactic. People have been grappling with terms lately. The French call it 'direct cinema. Americans like to call it cinema verite.

I'm calling it a nonfiction film. I'm afraid its depictions of the encounters with each of the women are all too true. I didn't anticipate that it was going to be autobiographical. Was it scripted or acted? In no way." McElwee knew some of the women from childhood. The others he began filming as soon as he met them.

"The obvious danger in putting yourself in a film was in yielding to self-indulgence, solipsism or self-pity. It's like looking into a mirror and trying to see what you look like when you're not looking into a mirror. It took me a long while to get my bearings, once I realized what the film was about. I realized I should try to evoke myself as a character, but I'm not an actor. It became an experiment in bouncing my appearance in front of the camera off the reality as I was filming it.

At times it induced a kind of schizophrenia that wasn't very healthy." McElwee comes from a family of Southern doctors. (Born in New York City, where his father was doing his residency, he recalls attending kindergarten on the roof of New York Hospital.) They've accepted his filmmaking career, McElwee says, and have been supportive. McElwee caught the filmmaking bug while attending classes at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. "It was there I saw films first being made, by students with upright movieolas very imposing pieces of machinery. It became apparent that people like me could actually make films." Then McElwee traveled to France, Iran and India, working as a wedding photographer's assistant.

"At the Cinema Francaise, when I saw Orson Welles' 'Touch of the opening shots were so dazzling! At that point 1 said, 'This Is what I want to He returned to America and got a Job a a TV ramcraman In Charlotte. A Tarheel Woody Allen leads 'Sherman's March' SHERMAN'S MARCH Directed, written and filmed by Ross McElwee. At the ICA Cinema, Institute of Contemporary Art, 955 1 Boylston tonight through Sunday and Nov. 20-24 at 7 p.m. Unrated.

By Jay Carr Globe Staff In 1981 Ross McElwee began filming a documentary about the lingering effects of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating march through the South in 1864. But Mc- Elwee was sidetracked by some personal devas- MOV1E tation his relationship with a woman in New REVIEW York went down in flames. Bummed out and lonely, he went home to Charlotte, N.C., and made a different film, the ruefully comic "Sherman's March," about his largely unsuccessful attempts to connect with women. McElwee genuflects to Sherman, but, like a Tarheel Woody Allen, he mostly charts his own career as the strikeout king of the Caro-linas. Remember the scene in "Annie Hall" when Allen looks glumly at Diane Keaton and compares their relationship to a dead shark? McElwee happens on a similar epiphany a huge plastic rhinoceros and films it after a nonstart romance with an old flame.

Images linking love to devastation, malfunction or llfelessness march hand in hand through the film, especially when McElwee has to call on a romantic rival to start his dead car, causing him to crawl out of town humiliated as well as defeated. "I've begun having my dreams about nuclear war again," he tells his camera after another solitary night. Every time he threatens to subside into listless narcissism, along comes another extravagant Southern woman who keeps him busy, either by wanting him or rejecting him. His family thinks all he needs to do is marry a nice Southern girl and every-t thing will turn out fine. It's not a view he shares, despite a fusillade of matchmaking.

Charleen, an exuberant friend and former 1 teacher and the film's richest character introduces him to Deedee, a guitar-playing teacher at a genteel girls' school in Charleston. Deedee, a Mormon who stockpiles food and water In her garage, wants any man she marries to be something of a priest, bringing God into their home. McElwee, laconic and ironk flees. Ringing in his ears are Charleen's words: "That's the trouble with you you don't know the difference betweeen sex and death." A He's accused of hiding behind his camera, but whenever he makes a move it ends in disaster. Pat, an actress, fantasizes about a love match with Burt Reynolds.

Claudia, a designer, throws in with rifle-toting survivalists in a snazzy mountaintop fortress, Joy, a singer who works parking lots and motel lounges, takes off for New York. Wlnni. a linguist, double-talks him on an island, then chooses Its only other Inhabitant, a placid fellow named Mike. The film's recurring image is of McElwee in bed. alone.

It soon becomes clear that all these women are living in their own fantasies, also alone, whether their daydreams are bourgeois or artistic. Eventually the film seems a series of variations on loneliness, funny and sad. Sometimes you wish McElwee had edited his 2Vi hours of material more rigorously, but if the film sometimes droops, It's never self-pitying. Desultory as ''Sherman's March" sometimes becomes, McElwee sustains its loopy absurdist tone, reveling in the post-Civil War ironies of the misunderstood Sherman, identifying with them. "Sherman's March" Is a latter-day "Sorrows of Young Werther" and then some.

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