John Ford For Ever

Received but debatable wisdom says that on television the close-up is king. If this were true, then there would be no hope on the small screen for the man who belched one day: ‘I don’t want to see nose hairs on a forty foot screen!’ In fact, John Ford wasn’t very fond of close-ups. Or, what comes down to the same thing, of expository scenes. He shot very fast and it only took him twenty-eight days to make She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. That was in 1949, he was then his own producer and he did exactly as he liked. Forty-one years later the film ‘passes’ perfectly from the big to the small screen (TFI). Elementary, you say? Not quite.

One day Gilles Deleuze reminded the youngsters at FEMIS that their work as directors would consist in producing ‘blocks of movement-duration’. Now if Ford’s blocks are so consistantly perfect, it’s because they respect the most elementary of the golden numbers: they last only the time it takes a practised eye to see everything they contain. The time to see everything there is to see in the precise duration and the precise movement of an eye as disciplined in the art of looking as one of Ford’s horsemen in the art of riding a horse.

This principle is so simple that it allowed Ford to complicate and refine, indeed embellish things, while always bestowing a sense of timeless classicism. It isn’t the action that produces duration, it’s the perception of an ideal spectator, a scout seeing from afar everything there is to see (but nothing more).

A fast contemplative, that’s Ford’s paradox. It’s impossible to watch his films with a baleful eye, because then you see nothing (except stories about sentimental soldier boys). The eye has to be quick because in any and every image of a Ford film there’s likely to be a split second’s pure contemplation before the action starts. On leaving a shack or a shot, you see red clouds above a cemetary, a horse left to its own devices in the right-hand corner of the picture, the swarming blue of the cavalry, the distraught faces of two women: these are things you have to see right at the start of the shot, for there will be no ‘second time’ (alas for sluggish eyes).

Ford is one of the great artists of the cinema. Not only because of the way he lights and composes his shots, but more fundamentally because he films so fast that he makes two films at once: a film to evoke time (drawing the narrative out, out of fear of ending) and another to save the moment (the moment of the landscape, two seconds before the action). He’s the one who takes pleasure in spectacle coming first. There’s also no point here in looking for characters who stand before a beautiful landscape and say: ‘Oh! How beautiful!’ It’s not up to the character to nudge the spectator about what they should see. That’s what would be immoral.

All the more so because the characters have enough to keep them busy holding off retirement and the close of the story’s events. It’s a theme that begins with She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and which will keep on returning. Ford’s characters (soldiers included) are only ever the stooges of their convictions, and these will tend less and less to lead towards promised lands, even if they outline the horse’s silhouettes against the background hues of moonlight or a blazing sky. Of course, you find this image in She Wore. This patrol-parade, moving from left to right, is collective and endless.

But there is another, more mysterious movement that comes from the depth of this shot. And which rises always at the centre of the frame. As if this director who had built everything on his refusal of the close-up and the expository scene, on occasion let something come close to his characters. This is how you encounter a close-up in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. You see Nathan Brittles-John Wayne-Raymond Loyer speaking to his wife, who had been dead a long time and buried right there, explaining to her that he has six days left before retirement and he hasn’t made any decisions. Then, on the grave, there falls the shadow of a woman. Of course it’s just a harmless young girl, but for those who have learned to see Ford as he should be seen, this brief moment is scary. It’s the past coming back through the centre of the frame, without warning, ‘a la Ford’. There’s no need to say that when a frame no longer has edges, but a heart, the small screen welcomes it with all the respect which is its due.

Serge Daney

18 November 1988