In my last entry I explored the Irish-American experience of exile and its prevalence as a theme in the films of John Ford .  In this entry I’ll explore how John Ford’s childhood in Portland, Maine reflects the Irish immigrants experience as they established themselves in American cities.

Ford’s emotional identification with his family’s Irish past helps account for his ambivalence toward his hometown of Portland. He always felt like an outsider there, a mick interloper in a hidebound bastion of WASP history and culture. “l love Portland; I don’t even know if they like me,” he told a friend in later years. Although john “Bull” Feeney had to leave home and change his name to make his mark in the world, Portland also marked him indelibly, helping shape him into the artist he would become. Joseph McBride Searching For John Ford (All quoted selections are taken from this source)

John Ford was born John Martin Feeney on February 1st 1894 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.  His family lived in a rented farmhouse by the ocean until they moved to a tenement at 23 Sheridan St. on Munjoy Hill. Note: I’ll return to Ford’s experience in Cape Elizabeth and his cottage on Peak’s Island in my next entry on Landscape and the Ocean.

The Portland Observatory stands at the peak of Munjoy Hill, in the heart of the old lrish-American neighborhood in the city’s East End. From the red wooden tower, 242 feet above sea level. an observer commands a godlike view of the ships passing through Casco Bay along the narrow three-mile peninsula of hometown poet Henry Vladsworth Longfellow’s “city by the sea.” Through a telescope one can study details of the islands in Casco Bay the mountain peaks beyond, and the Atlantic Ocean four miles to the east.

The Portland Observatory on Munjoy Hill

Casco Bay as seen from the Portland Observatory

Young John Feeney [Ford] spent many hours here in quiet contemplation of the sea, absorbing the unfolding visual panorama of fishing boats, commercial vessels, and navy battle cruisers, imagining the human dramas taking place on these distant ships. Atop the observatory, flags would be raised to signal ships approaching Portland harbor. In the immigrant dwelling clustered around the observatory, local historian Edwand H. Elwell wrote in 1876, “[M]any an eye has been gladdened by the flag thrown out on one of its three Hag-sta$, indicating the approach of some long-absent ship; and many a storm-tossed vessel has been saved fiom wreck by the succor sent out through timely intelligence Brom this watch-tower.” The nineteenth-century homes and apartment building that still dominate Munjoy Hill often have a “widow’s walk,” a small fenced-in porch on the roofiop. These platforms are eloquent reminders of the days when the wives of sailors would wait anxiously behind the railing for their husbands’ return. Ford’s films contain many such scenes of waiting women, wives of frontiersrnen and soldiers and seafaring men, posed silently in doorways, on rooftops and porches, on docks and desert bluffs.

Opening scene of "The Searchers"

Many of the Irish emigrated to Portland on those ships from Liverpool, taking up steerage space that later would be filled with Canadian lumber. Others migrated fiom earlier stopping-off points in Canada and Boston. As in other cities of the eastern United States, the waves of Irish washing ashore during the mid-nineteenth century were mostly relegated to menial jobs in Portland, loading and unloading ships, digging ditches, sweeping streets, stringing electrical wires and laying gas mains, cleaning hotel rooms, and serving as domestics in private households.

On Munjoy Hill the Irish families lived stacked atop other families in three-story wooden apartment buildings, one family to each floor. Many of these “cheap tenement-houses” were (and in some cases remain) comfortable enough dwellings, however modest their appearance. Spacious enough to accommodate the typically large Irish families, these were not the teeming, unsanitary tenements of the larger eastern cities such as New York and Boston. These were the sturdy well-kept homes of upwardly mobile people who, suffering the scorn of being called “shanty Irish,” aspired to the middle-class gentility that eventually would transform them into “lace-curtain” Irish.

Portland’s lrish lived in close proximity with members of other minority groups, including jews, Italians, French-Canadians, and the “colored people” who, Elwell observed, “have always had a proclivity for Munjoy’s Hill.” There were some frictions between those groups, particularly between the Irish and the French-Canadians, whose expedient political partnership fractured in the early 1900s. Youths fiom both camps ofien faced off in street fights. In Ford’s memory, however, he and his fellow members of the Portland underclass tended to share a sense of brotherhood. African-Americans “lived with us,” he said. “They didn’t live in barrios. Our next-door neighbors were black. There was no difference, no racial feeling, no prejudice.” Ford also remembered attending Jewish synagogues several times in his boyhood and acting as a Shabbas goy, a gentile hired to perform tasks forbidden to Orthodox jews on the Sabbath and High Holy Days. From those experiences and his friendships with Jewish families, he picked up a smattering of Yiddish. Ford’s account of the harmony among ethnic groups during his childhood in Portland may have been somewhat exaggerated in retrospect, but there can be no doubt that he was induenced in a positive way by growing up in such a multiethnic environment. The degree of attention he pays in his films to African-Americans and members of other minority groups was highly unusual for a Hollywood director of his dayg and even if his portrayals of those groups are still a subject of controversy, they generally were respectful.

While Ford was growing up in Portland, the city was still deeply divided between the working class immigrants communities (Irish, Italian, Jewish, Afro-American, Franco-American) on the East End (Munjoy Hill)  and the wealthier Yankee Protestants who inhabited the victorian mansions of the West End.  The resulting conflicts became embedded in every film Ford ever made and became as quintecentially Fordian as the visual mastery that he is famous for.

Certainly the Irish and other minority groups in Portland had a common bond in recognizing that the worst discrimination they experienced came from members of the Yankee establishment who served as arbiters of the city’s social, economic, and geographical boundaries. Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 novel The Last Hurrah is still the best fictional portrait of the Irish-Americans of New England. In the book, the aging mayor offers a historical narrative of how Boston’s Yankee power structure began to change. On a smaller scale, Frank Skeffington’s story also describes what happened in Portland: “A hundred years ago the loyal sons and daughters of the first white inhabitants went to bed one lovely evening, and by the time they woke up and rubbed their eyes, their charming old city was swollen to three times its size. The savages had arrived. Not the Indians; far worse. It was the Irish. They had arrived and they wanted in. Even worse than that, they got in.”(1)

This conflict between the Protestant elite and the Irish underdog can be observed as a theme in nearly all of Ford’s 140 or so films.  The theme is strongest however, in Ford’s own adaptation of Edwin O’Connor’s “The Last Hurrah” starring Spencer Tracy as the amicable and charming Mayor Skeffington and John Carradine (in his usual typecast role) as the stuffy blue-blooded, Brahmin. Amos Force.

In most cases however, Ford employed the theme as comedic tension.  With the character of the affable, drunken, Irishmen (usually played by Barry Fitzgerrald, Victor Mclaglen or Thomas Mitchell) as the “Clown”  engaging the stuffy, Protestant “Fool”  (usually portrayed by John Carradine).

The theme is easily recognizable in this scene from “Stagecoach”  

These Irish manifestations of the Shakespearean “clown” (whose comic relief often obscures a deeper wisdom) usually set the stage for a typical slapstick fight scene and almost always have some sort of proclivity for alcohol.  In this scene from “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” Victor Mclaglen portrays the character in classic form.

Generally a Ford character’s drinking is treated with indulgent humor. The director stages drunken brawls as good-natured, almost balletic rituals of male bonding and communal celebration. Francis Ford spends most of his time as a character actor in his brothers movies in a state of inebriation, playing what Andrew Sarris describes as “a fearsomely fraternal projection of the director’s Irish irascibility amid a drunken devotion to the cause of some almost forgotten campaign.” The last word Frank’s “Brother Feeney” character utters onscreen, in The Sun Shines Bright, is “Refeshments!” There are rare instances in Ford movies when drinking reveals a characters fatal lack of self-discipline, as in The Informer when McI.aglen’s Gypo Nolan informs on his comrade and then blows the blood money on a drunken spree. But Ford usually goes out of his way to ridicule Prohibitionists, such as the starchy Ladies’ Anti-Liquor League with their Grand Lemonade and Strawberry Festival in The Sun Shines Bright or Margaret Leighton’s hysterically repressed New England Protestant missionary in 7 Women (“Take that . . . bottle away!”).

The Women's Temperance League in "Stagecoach"

Not Surprisingly, Ford’s identification with alcohol and the “Irish Rebel” also has its roots in his childhood in Portland. Ford’s father, John Feeney Sr. owned a saloon on India Street and quickly became a community leader in his own right.

Feeney’s Saloon operated at several other locations over the years near the downtown wharves, including 517 Fore Street [Now the location of the John Ford Statue], 196 Federal Street, and 14 India Street. The latter establishment was run by both john Feeney and his eldest son, Patrick, a confirmed teetotaler who eventually took over the family business when his father retired. The senior Feeney was a regular but moderate drinker, confining his alcohol consumption to a couple of sacramental shots of whiskey before dinner. Ford claimed not to remember a single instance of seeing his father intoxicated. Abby Peeney abstained altogether, and like other respectable women of her day; would not have dreamed of entering a saloon. She also forbade her son john to do so. Yet she seems to have accepted her husband’s profession without complaint or disapproval, as a practical necessity of life.

Portland’s saloons were euphemistically listed in the city directory as“restaurants” or “dining rooms,” even though at Feeney’s there wasn’t much more to eat than a bowl of beans. Liquor could be consumed on the premises or taken home as “package goods.” These establishments served as neighborhood gathering houses where the men could unwind alter a long day on the docks and share their grievances, hopes, and reminiscences. British sailors from the Liverpool ships were cordially welcomed customers at Feeney’s as well, and buckets of beer were carried Eom the saloon by bellhops to the traveling men and prostitutes who liequented nearby hotels. The Irish saloonkeeper in those days was an arbiter of neighborhood disputes, an intermediary between political classes, and a dispenser of political patronage. John Feeney would meet newly arriving immigrants at the ships, help them fill out their citizenship papers, and instruct them how to vote.

Feeney also presided over party caucuses at the saloon. The natural next stop for a ward boss was to run for office himself; but unlike Joseph Kennedy; who became a Massachusetts state legislator, the amiable, softhearted John Feeney never was interested in that kind of power, preferring to exercise his paternalistic influence behind the scenes.(1)

Most famously exemplified by New York City’s “Tammany Hall” political machine, the Democratic Party counted on working-class, Irish immigrants as it’s political base.  The protestant Brahmins that made up the backbone of the Republican Party often used prohibition as a cover for anti-Irish discrimination.  The city of Portland was no exception.

A strongly Republican state from the Civil War onward, Maine, like Massachusetts, tried to use the Prohibition movement as a means of turning back the tide of immigrant political power, concentrated in the rival Democratic Party. Not surprisingly Irish-American saloonkeepers like John Feeney or his Boston coeval Patrick Joseph Kennedy (grandfather of the first Irish Catholic president of the United States) not only tended to be staunch Democrats, but often wielded political power from their saloons as party wand bosses. lf John Feeney had been asked why he became involved in politics, he would have replied as Mayor Skeffington does in O’Connor’s Last Hurrah: “[T]he main reason I went into politics was because it was the quickest way out of the cellar and up the ladder …. it was only when we gained a measure of political control that our people were able to come up for a little fresh air.”(1)

Ford’s identification with the politics of his Irish forebears resulted in something more than a simple allegiance to the Democratic Party.

On a deeper level, Ford’s iiequent portrayal of his protagonists as noble outlaws, acting for society in ways society itself cannot see, owes much to the romantic tradition of the Irish rebel as political savior and martyr.

From Harry Carey’s Cheyenne Harry in silent films to John Wayne’s Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, and Wayne’s Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford expresses his most heartfelt admiration for lawbreakers who selflessly act on society`s behalf despite their ostracism by supposedly “decent” folks. Since Ford always paid tribute to his father’s influence and always treated him with the most sincere devotion, he must have grown up believing his father was more of a genuine force for social good than were the puritanical moralists who relegated him to outlaw status. Living under British occupation for hundreds of years caused widespread disrespect among the Irish for the rule of law and made the words “Irish” and “rebel” synonymous. Even though Fords position in American society was deeply ambiguous, his self-image as an Irish rebel was an integral part of his persona. His friend and colleague Robert Parrish described Ford as “a cop hater by religion, by belief,” words that would have brought a warm glow to the heart of his lrish saloonkeeper father. ”lf there is any single thing that explains either of us,” John Ford once said to Eugene O’Neill, “it’s that we’re Irish.”

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.

“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).

It wasn’t too difficult for me to choose the first theme for the Place and Cinema project.  Those who know me, know that my obsession with John Ford ate up a good portion of my last 4 years.  Yet, I’ve never written an essay on Ford.  So, it wasn’t long after I came up with the idea for the project that I found myself falling into my old academic writing habits and woke up with a pile of books on the floor, a sketchy introduction and a separate page full of transcribed quotes from various sources that make my point better than I can in my own writing, but to which I am obligated under expository writing convention to break up into pieces.  Then I asked myself before chopping up these perfectly succinct quotations, “why am I doing this?”.  It’s not like I have to!

I came to the realization at some point this morning that nobody, besides a few college professors, has ever read my expository writing.  And why would they?  I don’t talk like that in everyday life.  The writers voice that most people know me through (in e-mails, old Myspace blog entries, Facebook updates and comments) is the informal, mundane tone that I feel most comfortable using in everyday conversation.

A couple months ago, Rachel Miller introduced me to a book by Jani Scandura called Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression . Described as “”Part history, part ethnography, part self-reflection, and part psychogeography,” the author shifts narrative gears from first person journal entries, to full page quotations from other authors with her original notes scrawled on the margins, to mini-essays on the history of trash, while constantly shifting narrative perspective.  This unique approach is perfectly suited to the digital realities that define nearly every facet of modern life.    I came to the realization that the traditional expository approach is ill-suited for the digital format in which most writing takes place.  There’s no need to cite sources in a bibliography when you can just hyperlink to the author or publisher.  Why limit oneself to a single narrative perspective when the very nature of the web demands multiple diversions, pathways and media formats.

With that in mind I decided to approach this particular text with three distinct narrative voices, which will be distinguishable by font style (once I figure out how to enable different fonts in WordPress).  The first voice will be in the first person “blog vernacular”.  That is the informal style in which I feel most comfortable writing blog entries, e-mails, texts, posts etc…  and will appear as it does now in the “Bold” font setting.   I will use this style when describing things as they directly relate to my life, such as a first hand account of a place or a photograph that I took.

The second “voice” will be a more “serious” voice, in which I hope to explore broader theoretical concepts and will appear as the “default” font setting. 

The third “voice” will be in the italic font setting and will signify direct quotes from other sources.  Some of which may contain entire passages if need be.

The Place and Cinema project will be an ongoing analysis of the role of Place in film and video in many incarnations.

Each entry will choose a specific place as its theme and will analyse a variety of artistic encounters in the form of ethnographic, documentary, and feature films or video.  For example, the entry on New  Orleans can include the work of Werner Herzog (Bad Lietenant), Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law) Alan Lomax (The Land Where the Blues Began) and David Simon (Treme).  In  some cases the place may be so identified with a particluar director (such as Monument Valley and John Ford) that the entire entry will be devoted to the work of one artist in particular.  Some entries may be in the form of a detailed essay while others may take a simpler format of lists, weblinks, photo collections, video clips or even original video projects.

The following is a list of themes and the works associated with specific places.  The list will certainly change and some entries will be more detailed than others.  Suggestions and collaborative submissions are strongly encouraged!

Monument Valley

• John Ford
• Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West)

Los Angeles

• Billy Wilder
• David Lynch

Berlin

• Billy Wilder (One, Two Three)
• Rainer Fassbinder (Berlin Alexanderplatz)
• Wim Wenders (Wings Over Berlin)

New Orleans

• Werner Herzog (post Katrina) Bad Lieutenant
• Jim Jarmusch (pre Katrina) Down By Law
• Alan Lomax (The Land Where the Blues Began)
• David Simon (Treme)

New York

• Woody Allen
• Harmony Korine (Kids)
• Martin Scorsese

Boston

• Martin Scorsese
• Troy Duffy (Boondocks Saints)

Ireland

• John Ford (The Quiet Man, The Informer)
• Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday)

Paris

• Jean Luc Godard
• Agnes Varda
• Vincente Minnelli (An American in Paris)

Chicago

• John Hughes

Las Vegas

• Ocean’s 11 (remake and original)
• Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas)

Austin

• Richard Linklater
• The Devil and Daniel Johnston

Vermont

• David Mamet

Appalachia

• Harmony Korine (Gummo)
• Appalshop filmmakers (Stranger With a Camera)
• Alan Lomax (Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old)
• John Cohen (That High Lonesome Sound, End of an Old Song)
• John Sayles (Matewan)
• Rory Kennedy (American Hollow)
• Barbara Koppel (Harlan County USA)
• John Boorman (Deliverance)

-andrew

]]> http://andrewjawitz.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/new-al-hawkes-film-trailer/feed/ 1 andrewjawitz