Place in John Ford Pt.2
Author’s note: I’m still trying to get used to this blog format so for now readers will have to start from the bottom. Things’ll get pretty confusing pretty fast if you don’t read the post on “Methodology and Auto-Ethnography” first to explain things. I’m trying to figure out a way to layout an essay that consists of multiple entries, but for now readers will just have to start with “Methodology and Auto-Ethnography” and on to “The Role of Place in John Ford Pt.1″ before reading the current entry. It may be confusing for now but I’ll figure something out.
The previous entry explored the cultural landscape of the Connemara region in Ireland as the ancestral home of the Feeney (Ford’s birth name) family.
Near the end of his life, Ford recalled that it was here, while visiting his family’s ancestral home as a boy, that he acquired his love of landscape and his eye for composition Joseph McBride Searching For John Ford (1)
The next entry will focus on the Irish emigrants’ feeling of exile (loss of place) and its expression in Ford’s films.
THE IRISH EXILE
Most immigrant groups experience some form of exile as a sudden collapse of any sense of home and place. There is something about the Irish experience however, that sets it apart.
The very act of voluntarily setting out to find new opportunity in foreign lands ran counter to an Irishmen’s Gaelic roots. The Old irish or gaelic language had no word for willingly departing the homeland, and up until the early twentieth century the only term for leaving was deorai- exile. Perhaps this accounts for the deep sense of loss that many of the oldest irish songs convey. They carry not only the desire for a country left behind, but also for a lost culture and way of life. Mick Maloney, Far From the Shamrock Shore (2)
With their long tradition of living close to their native hearth, reinforced by the conservative influence of the Catholic Religion, most Irishmen took such a radical step [emigration] with the greatest reluctance, regardless of how compelling their economic motives were for departure. described by historian Thomas A. Brown as “the most homesick of all immigrants” the Irish always felt a nostalgic longing for the land they had abandoned. That nostalgia was fueled by Irish emigrants ‘ sense of themselves as involuntary exiles, “driven out of Erin” by the endless hardship and sadness that they blamed on their English conquerers.(1)
For Irish-Americans, this sense of themselves as part of a diaspora “reflected a distinctive Irish world view” Miller observes in Emigrants and Exiles. That tragic sense “led Irish emigrants to interpret experience and adapt to American life in ways which were often alienating and sometimes dysfunctional, albeit traditional, expedient, and conducive to the survival of Irish identity.” The “exile motif” in Irish-American life has been a current running throughout “the ofttimes tortuous Irish efforts to resolve the tensions between tradition and modernity” (1)
The clash between tradition and modernity is a central theme underlying all of Ford’s work, exemplified in his romantic portraits of bygone days, his moumful elegies to their passing, and his obsession with the breakup of families caught in the wake of tumultuous social change. One of his favorite visual motifs is that of leave-taking: the loved one standing silently on a hillside watching someone walk or ride away forever. This endlessly recurring Fordian image had its roots in the primal leave-takings his parents made as they departed Spiddal in 1872.(1)
The Closing Scene of The Searchers may be one of the most famous departure scenes in Cinema. The original script had a much happier ending.
The shooting script’s ending of The Searchers ending in which a protective and almost motherly Ethan leads everyone home-shows that at some point during location work in Monument Valley, John Ford made the extraordinary decision to reverse that ending, and to film instead the far darker ending which we now have. “Our” ending of The Searchers, in other words, comes from Ford’s conscious, last-minute decision to sepa- rate Ethan sharply from all others: he violated the script in order to do it. Ford’s decision here brings to a culmination all his other decisions (first made in conjunction with Frank Nugent, then made by himself while actually filming) which bring into question Ethan’s conduct and Ethan’s character. We now know that Ford, in the very last moment of the movie, intentionally excluded Ethan from home. Arthur M. Eckstein The Searchers
Another famous departure scene from a film that’s full of the ”exile motif”.
In his essay “The Irish in John Ford’s Films,” the novelist and historian Thomas Flanagan writes, “Someone has suggested that Ford’s most Irish film is The Grapes of Wrath.” That may seem paradoxical in light of Ford’s many cinematic treatments of Ireland itself, but the spirit and themes of the Grapes of Wrath are very much in keeping with what the director called “my Irish tradition.” For as Flanagan notes, Grapes is about “poverty and exodus.” When Ford read John Steinbeck’s novel around the time of its publication in the spring of 1939, he was struck by the similarity between the book’s dispossessed Okies, “wandering on the roads to starve,” and the irish evicted by their landlords in the Great Famine… Ford’s powerful emotional response to the book stemmed from his atavistic memory of how his ancestors struggled to keep from starvation during “the Great Hunger” before leaving their homeland as part of the vast irish emigration to America. The westward journey of the Joad family from their former home in Oklahoma to an uncertain future in California, where they are treated as little better than animals, powerfully echoes the experience of Famine immigrants in coming to America. (1)
The one Ford film that explores the “Exile motif” more than any other is The Long Voyage Home. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any clips online. I’ll work on it and return to this section at a later date.
Of course, long before John Ford was making movies, the “exile motif” in Irish-American culture found its greatest expression in music. One of its earliest incarnations was in the Protestant Scotch-Irish tradition of balladry. Carried across the ocean in the 17th Century by indentured servants and preserved for centuries as they settled in Appalachia, the long unaccompanied vocal ballads sang of unrequited love and noblemen forced away into the ocean as the fiddle tunes and reels were gradually joined by the banjos and improvisations of another culture in exile- African-Americans. The music eventually evolved into the basis of modern American folk, bluegrass, blues and country music.
The second wave of mostly Catholic Irish immigrants brought their ballads, laments, reels, jigs and bar-room ditties to the industrial north after the potato famine of the 1840s. As they built the nations canals, railroad’s and roads they sang songs like Paddy Works on the Railway as well as laments such as Erin’s Green Shore . In contrast to the Scotch-Irish tradition in rural Appalachia, the Catholics in the industrial north adapted the agrarian ballad tradition to the realities of urban, industrial life by writing new songs such as No Irish Need Apply written in 1862 by John Poole. Just as the southern Scotch-Irish tradition slowly cross- pollinated with Afro-American influences so too did their Northern counterparts when they encountered another “tradition in exile” in the form of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. The two traditions with their shared “exile motif” formed the nucleus of what would eventually become known as “Tin Pan Alley”. With the advent of commercially distributed sheet music, and wax cylinders and 78Rpm records later on, the Jewish and Irish songwriters drew from their shared traditions of exile to compose nostalgic songs about loss of place amid pastoral evocations of “mother waiting at the gate” and “the green rolling hills of home.” Many of these songs, such as “Red River Valley” and “The Blue Bonnet” found their way onto the soundtrack of John Ford’s movies.
