John Ford

Já que o post anterior foi basicamente sobre John Ford, segue um perfil (profile) bem elaborado do diretor pelo crítico Richard A. Blake (integra o livro After Image, de autoria do próprio Blake).

By Richard A. Blake

John Ford has long been recognized as the most cinematic of America’s great directors. He had the eye of a painter and preferred to move his narrative forward in pictures rather than with words. These magnificent images, so filled with sacramental meaning, can be seductive, however. Their very beauty makes one hesitate to go beyond their surfaces to their spiritual meanings and to the imagination that created them. What gives Ford’s images their unique power is a spiritual vision that remains constant through five decades of filmmaking and over 120 films, and much of that vision comes from his Catholic background.

Ford’s Catholicism, the source of much of his strenght, also imposed some limitations on his perspective. His Catholic understanding of Church and family gave him an extraordinary sensitivity to the value of communion in human affairs. This may have been a liability in a world grown more accustomed to social fragmentation in the years since Ford’s career ended. To modern eyes, his films often appear naive and simplistic. In his world, good people acting in concert can resolve their differences, but as experience has shown in the last three decades this is not always the case. For John Ford, strong women found the root of their strenght in their families, and as a result he provides little room for a woman who is both strong and independent outside the home. For Ford, at least until his final years, questioning the policies of the United States government was as sacrilegious as questioning the authority of the hierarchy of the Church, and again, through the years the nation and the Church have learned the importance of public debate on complex issues.

To try to excuse Ford’s limitations as “being a child of his time” strikes me as a bit condescending. More profitable, I believe, is a critical strategy that appreciates the life experiences that colored Ford’s imagination and led him to view the world as he did. One need not endorse his viewpoint on each issue in order to respect him as an artist of extraordinary integrity. Unlike many lesser filmmakers of his day, he did have a coherent vision and was thoroughly honest in giving his audience a series of film that were true to that vision.

Captain Nathan Brittles, in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Legião Invencível, 1948), provides a perfect concluding remark for his study of John Ford: “Don’t apologize. It’s a sign of weakness.” Ford was not a weak man, and he has no need to apologize. He was a strong man, an artist, and a Catholic.