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2001.
25

STUDIES AND RESEARCH

The Visible and the Invisible in John Ford’s Films

Dissecting a number of films, the author of the article concludes that in John Ford’s films many crucial events for the action sequence are not visible. For example, the key battle in Drums Along the Mohawk, 1939, is not shown, but recounted by the hero (Henry Fonda); the hero’s (John Wayne) showdown with his brother’s killers in Postal Carriage is ’shown in off’; the final tragedy of a whole squad, including a number of characters, in the movie Fort Apache (1948) cannot be seen since it is covered in smoke. When in The Searchers (1956) the Indian chief dies, we can only see his legs, while the massacre of the hero’s family is not shown. In Ford’s last film Seven Women (1966), he does not show the murder of the only male member of the family, while the act of hero’s (Anne Bancroft) suicide is faded-out.

These examples offer a conclusion that Ford was not inclined to showing situations of strong dramatic tension. To find reasons for that and establish the nature of invisible in Ford’s movies, the author analyses what (and how) Ford shows in the rich repertoire of visible within the film image. She, thus, establishes that Ford was preoccupied with the relation of the individual with the community and with the presentation of the community itself through its rituals. These presentations often included long sequences with long shots. Camera was basically static while the objects (characters) in the frame were moving.

Also, he often used long shots with characters in various shot scales. With their duration and the setting and moving of characters, these shots often emphasized duration. The emotional tension was not achieved with acting (which was subtle, face expressions barely changed) or speech, but with the dynamics of characters’ motions. One could observe a continuity of space that often went beyond the screen and was only suggested. This was in accordance with Ford’s spatial reductions. Ford’s movies contained series of shots, ’blank views’, based on close shots and close-ups that consistently suggested the existence of something off the screen. In relation to Ford’s tendency to spatially reduce substantially important situations, we could conclude that Ford left much off the screen, even when it seems that we have obtained all the necessary information.

Since long duration of certain scenes suggests the tendency towards the ’stretching’ of time and the emphasis on time as such, we could say that suggesting what is out of reach of the camera reflects a wish to accentuate wide spaces, to ’stretch’ the space itself. Focusing on time corresponds to the indicated presence of the invisible. Finally, continual dialectic of the visible and the invisible suggests a spatial continuity as a counterpoint to temporal continuity, the invisible as a spatial equivalent to timelessness.



Bruno Kragiæ

Movement Illusion in Film — Myths and Explanations
Conspiracy as a Genre
Animation Film Viewpoint on "Film Realism"

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