She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford, 1949)

In my recent appearance on Craig Lindsey's "The Sour Hour," I made mention of the fact that my education in film history was, to put it lightly, spotty and incomplete. That's because I never studied cinema in a formal way. My academic training as an undergrad was mostly in art history, and my later graduate education in film was more specialized. So I noted that, while I have seen over a dozen Straub / Huillet films, I have only seen three John Fords. The names were not chosen at random, since Ford, among the directors of canonical Hollywood, was vital to the work of Straub and Huillet by their own admission, and has influenced other filmmakers whose work I have studied in more depth, such as Béla Tarr and Pedro Costa.

But I have always had my ambivalence where Ford is concerned. More than the Westerns I have seen by Anthony Mann and (especially) Budd Boetticher, the films have struck me as having certain unreconstructed, even originary elements with regard to masculinity and First People's representation, and this has sent me down a politics vs. aesthetics K-hole I've intuitively wanted to avoid. I look like a narrow-minded "social justice warrior" if I reject Ford on these grounds, but a disconnected "aesthete" if I ignore them. So in certain respects it's been easier to stay away, even though the Fords I have seen -- The Iron Horse, Stagecoach, Fort Apache, and The Searchers -- have been impressive, to say the least. (Hm. Guess I've seen four.)

Is there really all that much I can add to the discourse around She Wore a Yellow Ribbon? I was finally prompted to watch it because of a recent restoration, and the bands of color -- the uniforms against the landscape and sky -- are among the most painterly I've seen in any classic film. But unlike, say, the expressionism of a Sirk or a Hitchcock, there is a rigidity and boxy control to Ford's compositions, with the great peaks of Monument Valley anchoring nearly every frame as if they were Cézanne's Mt. Saint Victoire. This is expertly crafted spatial cinema, in the sense that the territory is, thematically, what is being fought for, of course, but Ford constructs the film to emphasize that it is this open but contested space that determines what can and cannot happen within the plot and the frame.

Then there's John Wayne. His Capt. Brittles seems like an ur-text for a particular kind of cinematic masculinity, and at first it was rough going for me, since I naturally recoil from this type of posture as, well, "toxic." His repeated refrain that to apologize is a show of weakness -- a shibboleth that has carried certain ideologues through the (bad) Obama to the (good) Trump administrations -- was nearly a deal-breaker for me, even though I intuitively knew that the pointed repetition of the idea signaled its probable reversal. In fact, what Ford and Wayne are doing is casting Brittles (note the name) as a once-necessary bastion of masculinity that is gradually ceding to a more nuanced form of command, in the form of Lt. Cohill (John Agar). We are seeing a moment of transition. 

At the same time, what Brittles represents may not be replicated, to the detriment of the future. After all, it was he who could attempt to parlay with Pony-That-Walks (Chief John Big Tree), a direct skill of experience, and understanding the natives as people with needs rather than simply savages, that the younger men may not be able to replicate. Having already lost his family, Brittles has nothing to lose. This is not to say that any generation of the cavalry would have been somehow kinder or less aggressive toward the First People as they plowed through the West, but it is Brittles only who Ford shows engaging on a human level.

I'm not going to pretend that these basic thematics don't leave me with a sense of ambivalence. There were times when I was so awestruck by She Wore a Yellow Ribbon on a visual level that I seriously considered turning off the audio, appreciating it simply as a moving painting. But what kind of a viewer would that make me? I frequently insist that viewers should engage with art that challenges their comfort zones, that this is precisely the space of encounter wherein the work of art occurs. I will be watching more John Ford, not just because it is the film expert's due diligence (although it certainly is a gap in my knowledge I must fill), but because these films reflect a worldview that nudges against the limits of my own.