Watching the filmed work of noted and celebrated directors is not something new to my viewing pleasure, my not so viewing pleasure, or my viewing displeasure. One of the first films I ever watched, for example, was a film of Alfred Hitchcock’s of whom my recently departed father was a fan and who allowed my sister and me to watch the film because he thought we would like it. We did and his allowing to watch The Birds set my sister and me on a film watching life course that has lasts to this day. Both of us remain inveterate film watchers.
Sometime in my teens my film watching became more oriented to directors than to genres and stars. My sister, on the other hand, remains more oriented in her avid film watching to genre—the Western—and stars—John Wayne in particular—than mine. No doubt this was because my sister and I grew up in an era when Hollywood, Hollywood film stars, and certain Hollywood genres ruled the roost. Westerns, film Westerns and television Westerns, were still a big deal in the sixties when my sister Cindy and I came of film watching age in the mid-1960s and Hollywood stars were the biggest draw in bringing bodies into cinemas all across North America.
I soon learned, however, particularly after I left for college—a defining moment in my relationship with my sister and in my life—where I gravitated toward others who were also film heads or cinephiles and took a few film classes, and learned that the work of certain directors was worth seeking out. I learned, for example, not only that Hitchcock’s film work beyond The Birds, was interesting in general and worth seeking out, but also that the film work of Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Joseph Mankiewicz, and a host of European art cinema directors like Ingmar Bergman, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and others like John Ford and Gillian Armstrong were worth paying attention to as well. I came of intellectual age, in part, in the age where the film director, well a few film directors, were regarded as auteurs, as authors of a film, after all. As you can see by my film festival format I still feel the same way though today though I do realise that performers like the Marx Brothers and even writers and music might be auteurs too.
Stimulated by my recent auteurist film watching festivals I decided to pick up several monographs on film auteurs to read. So, after I rewatched Stagecoach and listened to the commentaries on the Criterion and Warner Brothers DVD’s I owned by noted scholars Jim Kitses, author of the highly regarded monograph Horizons West, and Scott Eyman, who wrote a highly regarded biography of Ford, I picked up and read Edward Buscombe’s excellent BFI monograph on John Ford’s film Stagecoach (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics, 1992). I am glad I did.
Buscombe’s monograph on Stagecoach is almost everything one could hope for in a brief work on a film classic. In between summarising the film and exploring the meaning of the film and its mise-en-scene Buscombe tells us about the life, career, and film strategies of John Ford. He explores the history of the Western in its literary and film forms. He tells us about the production aspects of the film. He tells us about the promotion campaign for the film. He tells us how much the film earned upon release. He writes about the casting of the film. He tells us about the themes of Ford’s Westerns, of which there are many, and of his film work in general (I am particularly fond of Ford's pokes at moral guardians like the temperance league). He tells us about Ford’s use of folk and folk like tunes in his films, tunes that sometimes provided themes for the characters in his films. He tells us something about the historical and cultural contexts the film draws on from both the past and from the 1939 and thereabouts present of the film. He tells us something about the contemporary and historical reception of the film. Buscombe’s Stagecoach is thus everything an excellent guide to a classic film should be and can be.
Watching Stagecoach and reading Buscombe’s outstanding monograph on the film foregrounded for me something I have sensed for some time, namely, that how we watch films and how we view or see them changes with time, age, and education. I was, for example, in my younger film watching days, raised on nationalist and Texas nationalist robbery. Then the Vietnam War came along and nutted me with reality forcing me to become much more sceptical and critical than I was before of the American nationalist and Texas nationalist ideologies I had been socialised for conformity into. I began, as a consequence, to look at America or American films differently than in the naive way I used to. The American Westerns I grew up enjoying as pure entertainments I suddenly realised were, in many cases, the embodiment of an American manifest destiny ideology, the embodiment of the American White man’s burden ideology, the embodiment of the ideology of American chivalric masculinity, and the embodiment of the American fear of the wild savage whoever that wild savage happened to be—commies when I was a young lad. Today I am no longer embedded within such nationalist religious bubbles and I am, as a consequence, much more critical of the cultural fabric woven into American films and American genre films like the Western and its ancestors.
As a consequence I no longer watch an American film, an American Western, or a John Ford film the way I used to. That doesn’t mean I no longer have an aesthetic appreciation for certain Westerns. Like Buscombe I recognise the qualities of Ford and his work including Ford's wonderful eye for composition, the wonderful ambiguity Ford felt, on occasion, toward America and the myths and myth making at the heart of the imagined American nationalist politically and ideologically correct enterprise, Ford’s limited use of close-ups to make narrative points, his emphasis on the gestures of his actors for expressing meanings in his films, and Ford’s use of comedy amidst drama and tragedy for effect, something that Ford drew from Shakespeare and something that I think, particularly in retrospect from the vantage point of 2020s, is not as successful as I thought it was when I was much younger.
As I have grown older I have become much more choosy about the films and television programmes I like and watch. I still like. the work of Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut, Joss Whedon’s Buffy and Firefly—both of which meld tonal variations much more successfully than Ford—and the films Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and WR: Mysteries of the Organism. I am, however, less and less enamoured of the films of Ford—too much stereotyped and caricatures farce, too much sentimentality (I prefer the sentimentality of a Capra to a Ford)—though I still have fond memories of his Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, Rio Grande, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and Howard Hawks, the subject of an upcoming film festival which will undoubtedly result in more re-evaluations, than I was when I was younger. I have come to realise that my notions of who is in the pantheon of film authors and the films I really like changes, just as does life in general.
No comments:
Post a Comment