How the West was filmed.(Searching For John Ford)(Book Review)

Publication: Spectator

Publication Date: 24-MAY-03

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2003 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)

SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD by Joseph McBride Faber, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 838, ISBN 05 7200 753

It's a rare film that knows its own author. Actually it's a rare one that had a single author, though Chaplin's come very close. Film-making is an exercise in collaboration. Producer, director, script-writer, cameraman, sound engineer, editor, actors and actresses, all play their part. When the Hollywood studio system was fully developed, the producer was the dominant figure; the director, then, as Gore Vidal likes to say, was 'the producer's brother-in-law', handed the script, cast list, locations, and told to get shooting. Sometimes several directors would work on a movie in succession; they were almost as expendable as writers. When the shooting was finished, so usually was the director's job. He might have little say in the final product.

The studios saw directors as technicians. It took critics and theorists of the cinema, many of them French, to decide that directors were artists and the true 'auteurs' of the movies they made. Most weren't. A few, a very few, were. One of...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.