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 |
