tryavna wrote:(And I can see where Schreck is going in terms of the P&P comparison, which I would extend to most other British cinema. While Ford himself might not like being compared to English directors, he does share their love of sacrificing narrative drive for developing quirks of character -- a practice that certainly dates back to Victorian literature.)
Very close to what I mean. P&P had a natural ability to make the ordinary seem huge.. take moments of a "life" transposed on screen, and cause you the viewer to swell up with sentiment hugely by the size of the impact.
Of course P&P had a far more stylish sense of the grand, and of hi art in general which they very self consciously injected into their pictures. But to me Colonel Blimp himself feels very Fordian owing to the size of his character, his connection to national tradition and sentiment, and via the sheer size of his delivery to the audience via P&P. Take a film like CANTERBURY TALE... sure on the surface there is a sophistication there vis the Chaucer etc. But if you examine that film and its substance very carefully, pick it apart and examine what it's made of and what it's doing, I'd say there's enough similarity there to chew on for quite an unexplored while. Look at the nighttime sets and the handling of the studio-bound Glue Man attack sequence, for example... that scene looks very Fordian to me.
Aside from the BIG characters.. the stationmaster so proud of his job, the village idiot, the warm kind hokey american soldier, the extreme variegation and charm of all the rest of the assorted characters in TALE, what is it that P&P are up to in this film aside from drawing this narrative line about national identity thru which are threaded the threads of a few characters thrown together by History and Fate (all very Fordian to me)?
What I think PP are doing-- and this is something I woke up to when getting my first look at I Know Where Im Going-- is Trafficking In Hieghtened Moments of Being Alive for their characters. They know what constitutes "a memory" for a human being: for example, in IKWIG, the scene where Livesey is talking across the windows at night to Hiller's character, with the evening light and the sea and the wind and the thin curtains blowing. If you or I or anyone else took the journey those characters did, despite the unfolding of larger or more "significant" events, THAT moment in the evening, talking across the windows would be something magical that would make you feel good while doing it, it would be one of those excellent moments where the earth and the sky and the constructs we build around us all come together and become sublime. As an old man you'd reminisce about "talking across the windows to this pretty young lady" whether you wound up marrying her or not. And if you did youd probably remember it more fondly than your wedding day.
Watching this scene makes you FEEL GOOD. You become alive to the characters and their surroundings the same way the characters are supposed to be. P&P had a way of finding those moments, nice conversations where people are REAALY enjoying one another's company.. they draw their characters with unabashed charm and delight, they are unabashedly deep in displaying their love for their country and the picturesqueness of its physical environs. And like Ford-- and this is something I've woken up to recently in my own "search" for Ford-- they unabashedly use music swelling with extreme sentiment.
Although the films are very different (and I might find another picture with greater similarity, especially viz the Technicolor which played into my initial sense of P&P when watching Drums.. but I'll stick with TALE since I just brought it up) Canterbury Tale & Drums have enough similarity to try and bring hom my point. Tale's ending is similarly (sort of) anticlimactic, and leaves the viewer wondering wtf? Suddenly the glue man is the good guy and all is forgiven because Nobody Loves Sublime Historical England? If you wanta extrapolate out into Implication, it's almost a justification of every whore killing society-cleansing Serial Killer on the face of the earth with his own Social Program For Flushing Modern Human Crud, And Flirtatious Women. Then we go to CHURCH(???!!!).
Of course the film is much more than that... and so much more is drums about than the flag going up (and djali nailed it above btw), and the barbarous indians vs the good Americans. While I think TALE is the better (more nuanced, more modern and less predictable) and richer film of the two, they both traffic in moments of "swollen humanity", magical moments, moments of atmosphere savoring the beauty of country and homeland, examining the charm of our own mythological national characters, and the directors are always aiming for your heart.. trying to seduce you with coziness, chill you with cold and wet, charm you with good grizzled characters who are on your side and will always do the right thing in a pinch. They're "about" country, but they are "composed of" interludes of human relations enveloped in earthy atmospheres, not action. The battles in Drums are really just an asterisk. Despite the flair for modernism in P&P (which Ford could approach when he wanted, i e Searchers), I believe that in terms of theme, sentiment and character rendering, they are the filmmakers who most resemble John Ford. They unquestionable were to England what Ford was to the USA.
