Ngozi Onyema
Film 3000
November 01, 2011
Film: The Searchers
TRT: 119 minutes
Language: English.
Date of film: 1956
Director: John Ford
Award: Named “The Greatest American Western of All Time” by the American Film Institute in 2008.
The topic in film theory that this film “The Searchers” relates to is the auteur theory. Auterism is the notion that the director is the singular genius of the motion-picture medium. This theory has more to do with the audience/critics than it does the film but it does involve the audience/critics perception and critique of the film specifically the director. This was brought up in a time when some people felt that some films and their directors were wrongfully underappreciated and also felt that some of these directors should be looked at with high esteem and honor as authors which is the English pronunciation/version/meaning of the French word auteurs. John Ford was seen as one of these highly esteemed directors in the world of auteurs.
The article titled “John Ford’s The Searchers” by Stefan Herrmann starts off pointing out the racism expressed in this film. Douglas Pye says that The Searchers film does not offer “a coherent set of perspectives” which as the author of this article points out is based on a wider view on the time the film was made. The article goes on to tell different views of the film by critics. One critic in particular who is well known to hold John Ford as an auteur is Andrew Sarris. Andrew Sarris called the film in his 1971 essay on The Searchers “resolutely untraditional”, naming it Ford’s “greatest symphony”. Sarris examined the film under stylistic terms and did not focus on the ideological means of it like other critics did. In the second article titled “Gunning for John Ford at the Auteur Corral” by Thomas Doherty, the article offers a defense of John Ford against his critics and basically champions the idea of John Ford as an auteur. It speaks about the two most passionate partisans in this battle of criticizing auteurism: Andrew Sarris in the auteurist corner at a small journal called Film Culture and Pauline Kael then operating a pair of movie-revival theaters in the Berkeley are and soon to be the New Yorkers resident cinephile. Taking his cue from the French crowd at Cahiers, Sarris sought to “convert film history into directorial autobiography”. More audaciously, he celebrated Hollywood workhorses like Ford, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock as capital A artists, fit to be ranked with all the great visionaries of the century. The auteur critics were infact a very convincing group.
These articles not only describe the film but the nature of the critique of the film. Some critics were surprised that Ford went back to doing Westerns but as this article points out, the time he did it gives us a sense of what the nature of critiquing was like. These articles relate to the screening and point out where we were at that point in time as a society while at the same time acknowledging art, style and pointing out underappreciated greatness.
My personal opinion as a result of all of this is that everyone is a critic. Even taking it from the film itself, there’s criticism within the characters in the film. This is sort of like art imitating life or life imitating art. People see things in different ways as all the critics of this film do. More than anything this film and its responses is a testament to how we all see things.
Bibliography:
Doherty, Thomas (2000, June 9). Gunning for John Ford at the Auteur Corral. Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 46 Issue 40, pB9, 2p. Retrieved November 01, 2011, from Academic Search Premier Database
Herrmann, Stefan (2001, April 9). John Ford’s ‘The Searchers’. Steffanherrmann.com. Retrieved November 01, 2011 from http://stefanherrmann.com/text/essays/archive/searchers.html
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