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From Midway to Korea! : John Ford and the De-Fused Documentary

2015; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/flm.2015.a589135

1548-9922

J. P. Telotte,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

From Midway to Korea!:John Ford and the De-Fused Documentary J. P. Telotte Because of ideological shifts and cultural fashion, notes Jonathan Kahana, the documentary has always had to adapt to new “modes of visual representation,” particularly in its “fusing” of the conventional “empirical methods of documentary” with the sort of “abstraction” or expressive appeal recognized in contemporary cultural discourse (89), including that of the narrative film. However, the very difficulty of fusing empirical and expressive methods reveals a historical change occurring in both of these areas of film during the middle of the twentieth century. John Ford, who found great success in his World War II documentary The Battle of Midway (1942), would, only a few years later, have far more trouble addressing the circumstances surrounding the Korean War, a generally unpopular and politically charged conflict, even though his approach was similar. For while This is Korea! (1951) did receive some appreciative notices,1 as Ronald L. Davis sums up, the film was on the whole “poorly received,” booked by few theaters, and suggested to some that the old master might be “losing touch with current reality” (247). Yet that vague notion of “losing touch,” a charge often leveled against older filmmakers whose popularity might be waning, deserves more careful and precise explanation, especially since many of Ford’s greatest films were still in the offing. And This is Korea!, a film largely ignored in studies of both the documentary tradition and Ford’s canon, illustrates the attempt to fuse the empirical and expressive methods—or, rather, it illustrates how two film genres de-coupled, de-fused, resulting in a text that was unable to link an otherwise effectively observed or empirical reality to attitudes or methods that would enable it to speak effectively to a contemporary audience. We should begin by noting that, prior to the Korean War, Ford had a reputation for frequently and effectively, if fictionally, dealing with factual material, as evidence his many previous film adaptations based on real-life events, including The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), and They Were Expendable (1945). And, of course, his World War II documentaries The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943) were both well received. The Midway film was widely circulated (thanks to the backing of President Roosevelt himself2), garnered good reviews, and was honored by the film industry in 1943 with an Academy Award as Best Documentary, while December 7th was similarly well received and also won an Academy Award. Moreover, we might recall Ford’s oft-cited dictum for fusing the fictional and the factual, articulated by the newspaper editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1963), who observes, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That comment should remind us not only of how much our sense of any documentary “truth” might draw on a fictionalizing or narrativizing impulse, but also of Ford’s keen understanding and appreciation of that relationship. “Legend” still mattered. In studying Ford’s World War II documentaries, historian William Murphy little credits that awareness, dismissing Ford’s treatment of the war as typical of how “entertainment filmmakers” would “tackle a documentary film” (5), resulting in what he terms “crude propaganda” (3). Yet Francesco Casetti offers a more nuanced perspective, for he sees the “fusing” process in Ford’s films as a challenge facing all filmmakers, whether documentary or narrative, thanks to the nature of cinema as always both observer and commentator, or, as Casetti puts it, “at once a witness and a fully active protagonist” (17) in all that it presents. Because of that duality, he suggests, the cinematic gaze often seems to “overlap” the objective and the subjective, becoming “a field of convergence for” these “different dimensions” (75)—one that is constantly challenging the filmmaker to integrate those “witness” and “protagonist” dimensions, both the empirical eye and the cultural understanding that the filmmaker brings to his subject. Ford’s The Battle of Midway seems an instance of the effective integration of these dimensions, particularly as that film painted its “reality” in well-observed and highly evocative images, while incorporating them into a narrative thrust that worked well for...