The Role of Place in John Ford Part 1
John Ford and Place
“New England invented the west” said Jorge Luis Borges and though he was referring to “the ethical preoccupation” of protestant, North Americans to create a totalizing narrative of good triumphing over evil, he could have very well been referring to the mapping of the west as a physical landscape. The west acts as a blank canvas through which the dreams and mythos of the protestant forebears are projected in a national passion play.
The master shot of a classic western like Stagecoach will always follow the action from right to left, from east to west.
Such is the progression of place in American mythology and such was the progression of place in John Ford’s life. The place most commonly associated with John Ford, and his favored location for filming was Monument Valley in the Navajo reservation in Arizona. 11 of his most iconic films, all westerns, were shot there. From 1939s Stagecoach to his very last western Cheyenne Autumn in 1964. He became such a familiar figure there that the Navajo tribe gave him a special name, Natani Nez (Tall Leader/Soldier) and named his favorite promontory, “John Ford Point”. Yet, in as many films as it appears the valley is never mentioned by name and is never given the specific setting. In The Searchers the valley is supposed to be west Texas whereas in Stagecoach the setting is between southern Arizona and Lordsburg, NM (approximately 600 miles from monument valley). To truly understand the role of place in John Ford, one must reverse the mythological westward migration back to the Irish enclaves of Portland, Maine and further across the ocean to the Connemara region of Ireland.
Part 1. Connemara, Ireland
“ONE PARISH over” from America, as the saying goes, is the barren,windblown west coast of Ireland, the region of Connemara. I joumeyed there a few years ago[ ] in search of the [Ford]`family’s beginnings. All I knew was that his ancestors came fiom a village on Galway Bay called Spiddal, a dot on the map eight and a half miles outside the ancient port city of Galway, in the province of Connaught (contemporary spelling Connacht). Ford made The Quiet Man an hour or so northand inland from Spiddal, in the County Mayo town of Cong, whose terrain is gentler and more verdant than the rock-scarred, hilly landscape where his parents were raised. Near the end of his life, Ford recalled that it was here in Spiddal, while visiting his family’s ancestral home as a boy, that he acquired his love of’ landscape and his eye for composition…
, Ford told his grandson that the great feeling for scenery that permeates his work as a director was acquired when he visited Ireland as an adolescent. his father made frequent trips back home, and took John along when the boy was about eleven or twelve. Commuting through the Irish countryside for a few weeks while attending a school near his ancestral home, John became fully aware of the pictorial splendor of the landscape and it’s connections with the lives of ordinary people. As Orson Welles once said of him, “John Ford knows what the earth is made of.”
-Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (1)
Even after 4 years of meticulously retracing John Ford’s (then called John “Bull” Feeney”) footsteps in Portland, ME, it was only after I returned from my trip to Connemara that I realized the region’s significance to Ford’s ancestry. We drove through on our way from Galway to the coastal town of Clifden and our guide insisted that we stop at a friends cottage in what he described as “the most beautiful place on earth!”.
Approaching Connemara
Cottages made of stone and mortar
We followed a rutted road for about 3 miles
A friend who was law student at the University of Galway lived in this one room cottage with her two girls in a loft. According to her the English landlords would grant squatters rights to anyone who could build a house in 24 hours.
Drying the Peat for burning
It reminded me of a log cabin, only there were no logs. In fact, since there’s no wood they have to burn peat moss in the stove.
At the time I commented that the region looks more like the American West than anywhere in Europe. It didn’t occur to me until later how
much the region influenced John Ford’s visual style. Connemara maps onto Monument Valley.
Scene from Cheyenne Autumn
Scene from The Searchers
Spiddal and other towns in Connaught were settled after Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan armies rampaged through Ireland in the middle of the seven-teenth century slaughtering much of the population as they conquered the land. In the aftermath, Cromwell’s soldiers and supporters were awarded thebest of the Catholic landholdings ¢&lSt of the river Shannon, while, as RobertKee recounted in his history of Ireland, the dispossessed “were transplanted beyond the Shannon to the more barren province of Connaught. And with this worst humiliation of the Irish Catholic landowners until then- their banishment to a remote corner of their own country in the beautiful sad lands of the west-what came to be known as “the curse of Cromwell” was complete…
When you visit this alluring yet forbidding terrain, studded as it is with rocks rising up every few yards out of it’s rolling hills, you immediately understand why so many people eventually had to depart for more fertile and hospitable lands. As inspiring as the picturesque qualities of the landscape were to the young John Feeney on his boyhood visits, they didn’t put food on his fathers table.though not without it’s aspects of grimness, Ford’s cinematic vision of Ireland is infused with a deep sense of romanticism, so extravagant in it’s emotional fervor that it could only have come from a first-generation American (1).
