A Doorway into the Work of John Ford
The Western is, perhaps, the oldest and most consistent genre in American film history. In 1903, Edwin S. Porter introduced and immortalized the generic form of the Western when he made his revolutionary short film, The Great Train Robbery. The film’s success preceded decades of Classical American hits that would evidently share structural similarities and narrative equilibrium which would come to define the Western, what would soon become the country’s most popular genre. In fact, from the turn of the century until the mid-60s, the Western encompassed almost a fifth of all feature Hollywood films. The genre was known for its exploration of the expansive American West, detailing the narrative ideas of romantic individualism, the great outdoors, lawlessness versus order, and an endless push and pull between classist ideals and natural sentimentalism.
Why was the Western so popular? To put it simply, the Western elicits the spectator’s wonder of the unexplored; it inspires an inherent human curiosity of what’s beyond our societal outreach. The geographical extremities, the indigenous people, the lawlessness, the danger — all unfamiliar and romantic. The Western is an adventure we would love to endure within the security of our dreams or, of course, within the sanctity of the cinema. Many of Classical Hollywood’s most celebrated artists attempted to tackle the Western. Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, and George Stevens are all examples of directors who masterfully explored the genre during its heyday, but none did so quiet as artfully and consistently as the Western’s most famous persona, John Ford.
What made John Ford so significant was the way he was able to utilize such a familiar narrative structure under a context and form with which he would continuously shift. In Ford’s Westerns, the philosophical ideals of Western expansionism manifested through innovative and fluctuating ways while the narrative structure and thematic motifs remained constant. In a Ford film, you could often expect a loner to wander into town, change the perspective of those around him, solve a conflict, and finally depart to continue the peripatetic lifestyle of a reclusive nomad. However, the audience’s perspective of the loner, the loner’s perspective on the world, his ideals and the ideals of the West were all continuously changing elements in Ford’s cinema, making each film unique.
One constant image Ford used to visualize the boundary between classical society and the unruliness of nature was the structure of a doorway. Perhaps the most notable image of any Ford film is the last shot from The Searchers. An instantly recognizable shot in which Ethan Edwards (who was played by Ford’s most utilized loner, John Wayne) comes to terms with the idea that he may never fully understand the comfortable, humane and familial qualities of any form of civilized society. In Edward’s most contemplative moment, he hesitates in the doorway of the familial abode — a choice between accepting the civility embraced by his fellow travelers or embracing the isolation and abandon that comes with life in the wild west. Of course, Edwards chooses the latter. While this final scene in The Searchers has been immortalized in Ford’s picturesque imagery, the doorway repeats throughout his oeuvre to signify the polarity between the explored and the unknown.
In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Appleyard takes Hallie Stoddard to visit what remains of the late Tom Doniphon’s (again, Wayne as a loner) burnt home. One side of the house is preserved — the side that Hallie and Tom could have shared together. Structured, secure, civilized. The other side of the home, the burnt down ruins of Tom and Hallie’s could-have-been marriage, are just the old pillars of ruin. Within the ruin of the burnt down extension, in true John Ford fashion, the desert rose monopolizes nearly every square inch. It’s understood; Doniphon and Hallie were inevitably different. Hallie is the pillars of civility and Doniphon, the desert rose.
For our own productions, we take a lot of influence from the directors we love. As the geographical wonders of the unexplored regions of our Earth are becoming less and less common and the technological advancements of our culture are becoming more significant, the sci-fi film is slowly replacing the Western as the go-to genre for discovery and human progress. In Wonder, our latest video for Adtran, we use the doorway motif to examine the unfamiliarity that remains within the discoveries of the “internet of things.” In homage to Ford, we would like to use the concept of the doorway to wonder. To wonder…what’s next?
