ANGELS GAMBOL
WHERE THEY WILL:
JOHN FORD'S INDIANS
John Ford’s last film, 7 Women (1965), is about Christian missionaries in China, and to some Chinese it is an offensive film. The white characters show contempt for the Chinese and use racist terms; the story’s details contradict historical fact; its Chinese speak the wrong languages; and its Mongolian bandits are played by a Ukrainian (Mike Mazurki) and a black (Woody Strode).
What can be said in Ford’s defense?
Primarily, it can be said that Ford did not intend an authentic China. His China is fantasy, like Kipling’s India, a background for the whites’ story. Its authenticity is token and suggestive, not a moral imperative. As is the case with most art.
Authenticity as a moral imperative is a recent obsession. It was accorded relatively little importance, during most of the last hundred thousand years, even (and especially) by historians. Authenticity was thought unachieveable. And for good reason. The past, after all, does not exist, except in our individual imaginations, and no two of us can imagine even yesterday in the same way. Thus what we call “history” is what we ourselves create, our story. History is not written by the hand of God, nor by Nature (and dialectical materialism has no hand). The past’s only relevance is what it means to us today. This is why Renaissance paintings of the Crucifixion or Nativity set biblical events in contemporary contexts, with medieval villages in the background, and angels gamboling where they will.
History—in prose, verse, picture or object—once had no illusion that it was anything but myth. Nor did it aspire to be. Only recently has it been primping itself as a science; always before, myth was its highest aspiration.
To the Chinese offended by 7 Women, however, such arguments are confirmation of Ford’s racism, his cultural centrism. Ford is therefore not the myth we want today. And do we not have every right to choose our myths? By such choice human reality is created.
Yes. Yet the question now comes: Is not racism or centrism inherent in any profoundly human utterance? Who of us can claim to be pure? Is it not impossible, no matter how hard we try to speak for the whole human race, to shed our family, tribe, language, religion and cultural tastes? Is it not impossible to shed our self? And if what we speak will have any truth at all, do we not first of all have to speak the truth we know most intimately: the truth of our self?
Isn’t great art always conscious of the limits of understanding? If art is so often—one might even argue, always—religious, is it not because it stares at what it cannot see?
There is a moment in 7 Women when a white missionary preaches to Chinese children. We see their faces staring back with total incomprehension. The movie’s theme is people—white and yellow, white and white, yellow and yellow—staring at each other uncomprehendingly. In rare instants, an I-thou moment breaks through.
We can trace a similar theme through the highpoints of most of Ford’s hundred-and-more films: characters staring into space, after people who have gone, or are leaving, or are right in front of them. They are beautiful images, compelling. Always there is alternation of community and privacy—and the intolerance, the racism, the non-recognition of our neighbor.
Probably (although I cannot judge) Ford’s depictions are superficially accurate; he read a great deal, spoke some Navajo, and, partly because he provided good jobs, had been adopted into a tribe with a Navajo name, Naat’aani Nez—“Tall Leader.” But, if the depictions are accurate, so what? We have seen letter-perfect depictions on television for decades of Palestinians, Japanese, and Reaganities, of pro-choicers and pro-lifers, and all these decades of accuracy have not contributed much to understanding, have not therefore really given us faithful renderings, have not permitted us to see what these people would regard as the essential aspects of themselves. Perhaps, sometimes, we know them better even from depictions that are blatantly racist; for the point of view is less synthetic, less unconscious. Mechanical honesty—the camera’s honesty—is insufficient.
I am thinking, for example, of a startling photo I saw of President Reagan in a European paper in the mid 1980s—startling because Reagan’s expression was so untypical, so horrific, so menacing: here certainly was a man more beast than man. “It’s not accurate,” I objected. “He’s never shown this way in the United States.”
“This shows the real Reagan!” my host retorted.
But of course every photo of Reagan showed “the real Reagan.” The choice of photo was a choice of which reality to emphasize, of which story to tell.
“Nasty Reagan,” I wanted to argue, was misleading historically, even if Reagan were Hitler, because Americans never saw this Reagan. As Louis XIV observed, one rules by appearances, not by the true nature of things. So we have to understand the appearances, or the true nature of things will be murkier than ever. If today we understand why there was enthusiasm for Stalin, but do not why there was enthusiasm for Hitler, it is partly because we still know Stalin through the images contemporary Russians saw of him, whereas we experience Hitler through images that bear little relation to what German Nazis saw, which were images of a patriarch of peace and righteousness. By “correcting” Hitler’s image, we may have served valid goals, but we may also have doomed ourselves to finding Hitler inexplicable, and to repeating “history.”
Thus art and history have preferred myth and fantasy.
It is awesome to contemplate the sheer quantity of European and American images of the Indians, to consider the constant fascination and inspiration these images have held for five hundred years, and to recognize how terrifyingly irrelevant this overwhelming hoard of images has been to what individual Indians actually were, and therefore how relevant these fantasies became to forming white attitudes toward those individuals, to forming the prisms, the icons, through which we perceive Indians—and how responsible these fantasies are for what was done to those individuals. This is what Ford is about.
Ford’s most extensive essay in this vein, on Indians, is The Searchers (1956). The Indians are mythic apparitions, appearing repeatedly and always suddenly out of nowhere, icons of savage violent beauty dread, and so entirely projections of white fantasy, that Ford himself termed The Searchers “a psychological epic.” For the white Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), the Comanche Scar is the “Other” that he can stare at but cannot see, worse, he is Ethan’s Doppelgänger, everything in himself that he despises. Specifically, Scar has raped Ethan’s brother’s wife, for whom Ethan himself nursed desire so obsessive that, before the picture begins, he has been wandering for seven years in order to escape her allure. Thus Ethan must kill Scar in order to destroy the complex of violence within himself, and will spend the picture’s storytime—a second seven years—searching to do so. “A man will search his heart and soul, go searching way out there,” goes the movie’s title song, alerting us that Ethan’s physical search is only a search for himself, to come to terms with his own solitude. And the search will resolve not with the death of Scar (whom Ethan finds dead and thus cannot kill), but with a transmutation of Ethan’s violence, solitude and racism into love, community and (the antonym of racism?) fraternity.
For this drama the Indians are basically props, so much so that the fact that Scar is played a white actor (Harry Brandon), rather than a red actor, seems entirely appropriate. Ford’s “psychological epic” makes no claims to realism. Quite the contrary: it identifies the myth-evoking landscapes of Arizona’s Monument Valley in 1955 as “Texas 1868” in an opening title card, and then goes on from there to a series of Charles Russell imitations and painterly compositions bathed in expressionist light. This movie is a myth based on other myths based themselves on still other myths, without beginning. It is an attempt to write “history” to serve to clarify the subjectivity of the historian, the myth maker—who, from colonial times, has sown the ideologies that have prescribed how Indians would, in actuality, be treated by American authorities.
It is because of Ford’s evident consciousness of this fact that his treatment of the Indians is “profoundly racist,” that is to say, not racist at all, but confessional: a confrontation with the limits of understanding, the sin of solitude, the intolerable violence wreaked by our callous adhesion to ideology (myth: ideas of what other people are, rather than I-thou contact): evil in Ford is always good intention gone astray; and tradition, which sustains us, is always the humus where evil has its roots. Thus to the whites, in The Searchers, the violence done by Indians is too terrifying even to be imagined, but also it has the allure of archetypal fire, of the raw reality that ideology expels from our consciousness. In contrast, violence perpetrated by whites is a Biblical romp: “O Lord, we thank You for what we are about to receive,” prays Ford’s Shakespearean fool, as he aims his rifle to start slaughtering Indians. And although the violence and ideological myopia in Ethan are transmuted eventually, they are not recognized by Ethan, still less so by his white community, who would exterminate an ant colony with less moral inhibition and much less jubilation.
Myths sustain societies in Ford, but poison them as well. They define the limits of understandings, but are seldom perceived. They rule and regulate our lives.
An Indian story in the middle of The Searchers depicts the limits of understanding. It is about an Indian named “Look” whom none of the whites can see, whose story is smothered by white stories. It begins beside the fireplace of a white home, when a girl gets a letter from her fiancé, whom she has not heard from in two years. There is much play between her agony, the opportunism of a rival courter, her father’s insensitivity, her mother’s distress. The boyfriend writes he has gotten a squaw, and then in flashback we see that John Wayne and the boyfriend inadvertently purchased Look, a plain, chubby girl, when they thought they were just buying a blanket. Wayne makes fun of her and the boyfriend kicks her out of his bed. Both the flashback and the letter-reading are played as comedies, dependent on indifference to the suffering of the two girls. Audiences, identifying with Wayne’s humor, identify also with his racism. Then Look is found dead, a victim in a cavalry massacre, and we are jerked into consciousness of Wayne’s morality—and our own morality. Look’s story, scarcely perceived by the six whites from whose perspective it is told, has been only a joke for them, a foil in the drama of their insensitivity toward each other. No one sees Look.
I know of no white film that has tried to assume an Indian’s point of view. Perhaps the effort has always looked doomed to failure—and indecent. As Ford observes in Cheyenne Autumn (1964), it is white words, white language, that have been our most potent weapon against Indians. Are we, the descendants of their destroyers, now to presume to tell their stories in the language that destroyed them? Is it time, yet, to acknowledge the responsibility to make their stories part of our common heritage?
Tag Gallagher
notes
1. One common device is to have an empathetic white character take up a semi-Indian style of life, by marrying into a tribe, for example—Broken Arrow (1950), Run of the Arrow (1957), Dances with Wolves (1990), Little Big Man (1970). But such films do not tell an Indian story; quite the contrary, they specifically look at Indians from the white characters’ point of view and interpret Indian life in terms of European concepts. In such films, the Indian characters are foils for a white drama and do not themselves emerge from stereotypes as rounded human beings; the roles played by Chief Dan George in Little Big Man and The Outlaw—Josey Wales (1976) are excellent examples—all the more so as George’s role is probably the richest part any actual Indian has played in a white film, and yet is nonetheless purely iconic. Indian roles are more usually played by caucasians or orientals, particularly if the parts are substantial: for example, Apache (Burt Lancaster, 1954), Taza, Son of Cochise (Rock Hudson, 1954), The Savage Innocents (Anthony Quinn, 1959). I would argue that here again it is a white point of view that is being presented. The Savage Innocents possibly comes closest to a non-white point of view of any film by an important filmmaker (Nicholas Ray); it goes out of its way to render the strange and bizarre as normal, and succeeds so well in inducting us into the alien sensibilities of its eskimos that, by the time a whiteman shows up, we feel him as the abnormal one.
A true Indian film would be one made entirely by Indians in their language—and, in the sense intended here, by Indians whose sensibilities are substantially formed by pre-contact heritage. Such a film would also require a genuine artist whose style was not derived from American, European or Asian models.
Unfortunately I have not had an opportunity to see any of the films made by Indians.
2. Hilton Edwards, “An Irish Film Industry?” The Bell, January 1953, p. 456; cited in Brian McIlroy, World CInema: 4. Ireland (Wiltshire, England: Flicks Books, 1988), p. 40.
3. Such too is the case with Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964), which, rather than foregrounding Indians as individuals, as in Mari Sandoz’s source novel, turns them into a Greek chorus to highlight a white drama of encroaching awareness. How the film would have been different, had Ford been in better health, is impossible to say. Ford, prematurely aged at seventy, depressed, and much under the influence of medications, accepted a bad script and actors and music he did not want.
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See Tag Gallagher's site for more texts and video essays (Ford, Renoir, Ophuls, Ulmer, Dreyer, Vidor, McCarey, Ferrara, Fuller, Walsh, etc.), and in an update coming soon, several feature films with his custom restorations and subtitles (Rossellini, Straub/Huillet, etc.).
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Next week, Sept. 23-27, Tag Gallagher will give a series of talks on John Ford as part of the Histórias do Cinema cycle at the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon. Tag's first public speaking engagement in over a decade, it launches Monday evening (18h30) with a screening and discussion of his seldom seen video essay "John Ford: Introduction" (62 minutes). STAGECOACH, HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, THE LONG GRAY LINE, and THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE follow. Happy trails, Tag.
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