Word: fords
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ford's images, then, are images of idealization. The past is redefined and perfected through his magnificent camerawork and lighting, and through his sense of formal structure and geometric harmony. The result is a combination of memory and myth. How Green Was My Valley and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) are theoretically flashbacks told by men whose experience has been filtered through the traps of time and been idealized in the nostalgic mind. On a large scale, however, Ford does not recreate the past through memory, but creates the memories themselves. The Sun Shines Bright and My Darling...
...FORD'S DRAMATIC vision is simultaneously forthright and elusive, and the interest of these introductory notes is only to mention two characteristics which permeate all his films. First, Ford is a master at the sudden juxtaposition of emotional quantities. Serious scenes will turn into comic ones, then revert suddenly to introspection. The greatness of this is that Ford carries the audience with him totally; we are rarely conscious of these shifts and instead experience them without question or intellectual judgment. In Donovan's Reef (1963)--a good film for examining this--the mood of each scene in the second half...
...Even Ford's most tragic films (How Green Was My Valley, The Searchers (1956), 7 Women (1966)) are filled with Ford's characteristic singing, folk dancing, and comedy scenes which, as long as they occupy the screen, capture attention to the point of making us forget about the basic story. Ford knows the attentions and moods of people change easily--that purpose can (even must) be put aside for brief periods of time in favor of diversion. Incorporating this, his films inherently have a dimension of staggering realism. But Ford is no realist, and that dimension is infused into...
...Second, Ford abstracts and ennobles dramatic action by formalizing it. An archetypal Ford image from Stagecoach (1939) through 7 Women is the Full Shot of a vast plain or prairie with a horse soldier (or vehicle) traversing it in a rigidly straight line, as if kept to a defined path by invisible walls. To return to our last reel of Shark Island, when Mudd wakes up the cannoneers, they bolt into sitting position on their bunks in unison, as if a single string controlled them all; the sense of formation is carried through to the end when the prison commander...
...Donovan's Reef best reveals Ford's emotional range, The Sun Shines Bright (1953) is the most obvious choice to illustrate this ordering. The grouping of the townspeople around the levy in the first few shots suggests harmonies confirmed in the unified behavior of the lynch mob and the choir in front of the church. The scenes of Confederate and GAR veterans' meetings emphasize the auditorium corridors, the deliberateness of physical movement through them, and the relationship of the auditorium seats to the main speaker and the flags that surround him. The last reel of Sun Shines Bright contains...