Last Monday, Professor Pierre Lauret (Professor of Philosophy at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris), introduced and discussed John Ford's The Searchers, and the figure of the 'lonesome cowboy' in the person of John Wayne.
For those of you who have never seen the film, here is a brief plot summary:
"At the centre of the film is
Ethan Edwards, a bitter, ruthless and frustrated crusader engaged in a five-year quest to retrieve a niece kidnapped by the Comanches. Edwards is perhaps John Wayne's most accomplished characterisation, bringing to bear the icnonography which has made Wayne synonymous with the Western. Isolated by the violent individualism which defines his heroic status, Edwards is torn by the neurotic split inherent in the archetype: he belongs neither to the civilised community of settlers nor with the savages he fights on their behalf. A crusty, intolerant misantrope, he occasionally betrays a wellspring of emotion which again and again is sublimated in violent action and an insane hatred of the red man."
First of all, Professor Lauret started by talking about the
Western genre. For the American audience, it is part of the cultural values, and national identity.
The
greatness of Ford, Lauret continues, has always been debated. However he had a great
influence on the New Hollywood, and voted as the
7th best film of all time in the Sight & Sound CLASSIFICA.
We can consider Ford as a
visual poet, especially considering the
plastic splendor of his films' images. His love for the
Monument Valley is another key element in the film, also defining a
pattern in his auteur career.
Professor Lauret compared him to a
painter, a careful and precise one, who is concerned with
framing, camera angles, and depth of field (a painter's main preoccupations).
After the screening, he gave us a brief talk before answering questions from the audience. Firstly, he said he agree with what
Lindsay Anderson wrote about the film: its
narrative structure tends to weaken in some parts. However, this weakness is correlated to the
greatness of the film. The
tragedy in the film is inner to the characters, it is also an atypical film for how far Ford pushes Ethan's character making him slow the action scenes through his
racist "religion" and "morality".
Two elements in the film function together, but are opposed to each other: there is the treatment of the race issue in terms of sexual violation of the female characters, and, then, there is the
comic counterpart.
About the film's ending, and its
visual pattern quality, P. Lauret, said something similar to what I had previously written in my essay this film and authorship. John Ford quotes himself by using an apparently same ending in
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. However, there is a change in perspective, the image and its meaning are not the same. In that moment, Ford uses an
objective filming, there is no point of identification, he proposed an angle that raises a problematic reality, concerned with the film being
both epic and moral.
The real goal Ethan is pursuing is to
find peace of mind and soul. Another moment of contradiction is Ethan's desire for revenge, on one hand, and his obsession with finding Debbie, on the other. Here, P. L. mentioned an interesting fact: in the moment of Ethan's "redemption", when he decides not to kill Debbie, there used to be a sentence in the screenplay explaining the reason, in a very direct way, and without leaving any doubt. Because of Hollywood conventions, though, the sentence was eliminated also due to its immediacy, and impulsity.
Ethan, the tragic hero, discovers that he is not who he thought he was.
In the ending scene we do not know what the door closes on: and Ethan stays outside, there is a symbolic dimension in the scene defining
Ethan as an implacable loner.
If we compare
The Searchers with
The Man who Shot Liberty Valance.
This last one tells about a transition period the American history. The passage from the heroic to the democratic age. Ford demonstrates an equilibrium, in which he shows that democracy is better than the heroic age. Whereas there is no equilibrium in
The Searchers, always
confrontation. It is not a racist film, but it is about a racist character.
He did was not trying to make the film more realistic, by setting it in 1868, three years after the Civil War which tore the country apart. He mixed the creation of a work of art, and an historical document.
After being asked a question about Ford's interest in outsiders, and the possibility of Ethan to represent
Ford's alter-ego, P. L. said he was influenced by Murnau, and this expresses very well in the use of shadows: in the
symbolic shadow of Scar, the Indian, for example. There is a mirror relation between Ethan and Scar, a way through which Ford can express all the contradictions in himself.
Another question, asked about John Wayne's acting and his
conservativeness. Of course John Wayne probably was the most conservative man in the world. His acting, however, came from a huge experience of moving on the scene which helped him create a
musicality of speech connected to the action, and movements. He knew Ethan was his best role, and he really tried to feel the
character's obsessiveness. His silences throughout the film are accompanied by a very modern framing which highlights these moments' intensity.
A film fact I did not know about, brought up by someone in the audience, was the issue of redemption in the film: is there or isn't there? Considering that a film as
Taxi Driver has often been seen as a remake of
The Searchers, and it is, of course, a story about redemption.
The man sitting next to me made a comparison between Ethan and
Huckleberry Finn, the
isolation of the hero, the connection to the wilderness, two characters who
resist the domestication of the American society, and I considered this a very interesting starting point for a discussion.
To conclude, this was my first Philosophical Screen, and I chose to attend this one, not only because of the film, but also because of all the questions regarding John Ford's career, his ideas, his relationship to the studios, and, of course, his
dramatic hero, a probable
metaphor of the American society, and the American dream.
