[lbo-talk] Re: John Ford (was: Kael)

BklynMagus magcomm at ix.netcom.com
Mon Nov 27 16:08:33 PST 2006


Me: John Ford was loathe to discuss his work with interviewers. He was evasive and pooh-poohed any thought that he was an artist.

Dennis: But why? _____________________________________________________

I do not know. There are several good bios out that may give you a better idea.


> That has never been true of movies and surely never will be.

Good criticism is still needed otherwise you get poverty aesthetics like David Walsh's which never go beyond plot. One of my problems with Walsh is that he rarely talks about mise en scene, or the use of space, light or motion. If a film can be reduced to its plot, what is the sense of making the film? Can an opera be reduced to its plot? No, the most salient aspect of an opera is its music and singing -- without it there is no opera.

In the same way, without mise en scene, the play of light, editing, etc., there is no film. Admittedly, many viewers never delve any deeper into a film than its story, but the glory of Hitchcock is in the way he moves the camera, frames his actors in space, creates montage. What is the plot of NOTORIOUS? Guy sends gal he falls in love with off to sleep with another guy in order to learn secrets. But what of the sheer beauty of the crane-in from the ceiling to Ingrid Bergman's hand nervously clutching a key? As beautiful as a Strauss melody or Whitman verse.


> So I think there's more to this than Ford just not liking the
suggestion that he was making art.

There may very well be. I am not enough of a Fordian to give you an adequate answer.

Carrol:


> I haven't followed movie criticism particularly, but isn't the notion
of the "auteur" pretty much abandoned?

Not the last I heard. The auteur theory is still around undergoing changes and modifications and developments.

Doug:


> As he told it, the editors have a lot of influence over the final product,
but I doubt one in a thousand viewers ever thinks about that.

Editors have more control now in the age of coverage, but in the classical period there was usually only one camera set-up. Artists like Hitchcock, Ford, Mankiewicz, Wilder, Leisen also cut in the camera so that their films could be put together only one way. Ford used to throw his cap over the lens and Mankiewicz would hold up his clipboard.


> Often the director is absent when the film is edited, and only gets involved
when the process is near its conclusion.

Depends on the director. Spielberg, Scorsese, Altman, even Tony Scott are deeply involved in editing their films -- and have long-standing relationships with editors who know what the director wants.


> Seems like the whole auteur school was about trying to assimilate a
collaborative, and often highly corporate, process to received notions of the heroic artist.

Actually, it was an attempt to understand why a collaborative process such as filmmaking could come to bear the stamp of one individual so completely. No matter the collaborators, Hitchcock, Altman, Mankiewicz, Ford, Scorsese, Renoir, Bergman, Kurosawa etc always made films that were unmistakably theirs. You cannot watch a frame without knowing who has directed the film. If filmmaking is a corporate process, how did so many films come to bear such unique and identifiable markings?

Brian



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