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How Green Was My Valley
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1. Time, Memory, Identity (1982 lecture from this series) Many theories of cinema structure themselves on the twin pillars of time and space, temporal and spatial dimensions. How Green Was My Valley allows us to consider the many functions and resonances of time in film – the ways it becomes expressive, significant, metaphorical, even (at times) mythic. The complementary lecture to this one considers space in Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1950). From Orson Welles’ films, particularly The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), we receive the powerful impression of a present tense of experience (for the characters and the world they inhabit) that is static, dead – an empty shell into which memories, traces, ‘immortal stories’ and fictions flow. The American cinema (our main focus in this course) is obsessed with time past – as something that comes to overwhelm and determine the present, often blocking any passage into the future. This is also, in another way, a legacy of European, Asian and Scandinavian art cinema traditions. Think of Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927), for instance, with its depiction of a ‘destined child’, his identity wholly formed in his childhood – the Emperor that he will be is already evident from his first games. The individual as the subject of growth and development, on the model of the seed, embryo or tree. Memory is identity: where you begin is who you are. (Note: Modern philosophy has often challenged this notion of selfhood.) In this particular regime of time and identity, memory so often is a bittersweet prison, a tender trap from which there is no escape, no forgetting, no evasion. We need to grasp more in this than simple nostalgia or naïve sentimentality. The past in these films has a force or substance all its own – it’s almost a separate dimension, an alternate reality. Ponder this great title: Out of the Past (1947)! This regime has an evidently psychic aspect: the Freudian notion of the return of the repressed. What you forcibly forget, you will forcefully re-live. But the repressed can also be a social category: collective haunting and guilt (Kubrick’s The Shining [1980] gets into this). A haunting that sometimes demands recompense or revenge – or, at the very least, recognition. Or a reckoning, as in the films of historical memory concerning Nazism (Verboten!, 1959) and other forms of fascism … Certain cycles that will be forever repeated unless they are truly, deeply faced. Consider the multiple traumatic ‘returns’ of Jack’s past in De Palma’s Blow Out (1981). Or the title of Eduardo de Gregorio’s tale, co-written with Edgardo Cozarinsky, of various, interlocking, South American conspiracies in contemporary France: Short Memory (1979). Memory can sometimes be the only oasis within the desert of the present. The better world that was … and may never be again. Or it can be a matter of remembering’s opposite, amnesia: forgetting your name and your place. A constant loop of remembering and forgetting (due to alcoholic intoxication) figures, you’ll recall, in Chaplin’s City Lights (1931). Let’s switch to film analysis. Cinematic narratives unfold on three simultaneous levels: the calculable time of the film’s world and events (its diegesis); the arrangement by the film of that diegetic time (the filmic narration); and the present-tense, experiential graph of the film’s action upon the spectator (its rhythm, flow, duration, economy, mechanisms of tension and release). In films of time and memory, we are dealing with the manifold possibilities of the flashback in cinema: the film catches up on, gathers back in, this other time, another story (perhaps an origin story), veritably peeping into this alternate or parallel world constituted by the past, this “foreign country” where they “do things differently” (according to L.P. Hartley in his 1953 novel The Go-Between which was adapted for the screen by Joseph Losey and writer Harold Pinter in 1971). In modernist cinema, we tend to find a contrary variant. The ‘other scene’ of the past is irremediably lost, memory is fatally eroded, fabulations intrude, history comes back to us in hideous, self-parodying clichés … The cinemas of Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras have explored many facets of such a vision/apprehension. In both classical and modernist models, however, the fictive narrating voice is usually primary. It is what calls us, leads us back … and, in itself, seems to be frequently situated in no specific time or place (unless these are specified in a narrative framing device): spoken from nowhere, in a spaceless void. The pure narrating voices of cinema: how seductive they can be! Classical Hollywood often exploited this floating, phantom, dreamlike quality of the narrating voice, particularly in the 1940s: from a melodrama such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) to Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door … (1948). A less-than-realistic ambience can creep in even when the act of past-telling is more grounded in the time-and-place facts of the fiction: see, for instance, Mitchell Leisen’s Hold Back the Dawn (1941) – another title that speaks volumes about the poetry of time! (1) Which reminds me: catch, if you can, Vincente Minnelli’s final testament, A Matter of Time (1976), which is derived from a 1954 novel translated into English as The Film of Memory … Note that, in the span of popular genres, the action forms of the war film or the Western are less likely to indulge in flashbacks – although the exceptions to this loose rule (such as Raoul Walsh’s highly Freudian Pursued [1947]) are striking. And doubtless the 1980s are going to deliver us many more action films that are disturbed by their characters’ pasts, as in Blow Out. To paraphrase the epigraph used by John O’Hara in his 1934 novel Appointment in Samarra (a passage I first encountered, as an adolescent, in the Time magazine review of Crazy Pete aka Pierrot le fou [1965]!): we all have a rendezvous with death. John Donne put it even more succinctly: “I run to death, and death meets me as fast”. Whatever the stylistic/narrational frame, there is always something at stake in the telling of a story in this way – something to be risked, to be won or lost. In tales of reigning silence and repression, the spoken-depicted flashback signals precisely the breach of that repressive wall, the breaking of silence, the lifting of a ban … as in the late 1950s films Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1959). In John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, we encounter a quite prevalent form of the memory-film: emphasis is placed on what has been lost, wasted … and how the present has thereby been drained of all vitality and colour. Present-day reality is grim; the past is the lost world of sunshine and joy. “How green was my valley then”: the fatally melancholic tone insists. Themes of youth and old age, strength and power (or lack thereof), contentment and fulfilment (and their destruction), structure the narration. The family unit in this Welsh mining town is what is most challenged, most at stake. Some films lean on a quasi-cosmic fatalism (as in Josef von Sternberg’s work) as a way to explain the loss of energies; in Ford, however, it’s more squarely a case of social decline due to industry, class war, capitalist history … It’s instructive to compare this film with Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961), a film in which the past that is mourned occurs precisely in its early scenes … and the story invents a distant perspective on those events by leaping ahead in its postscript-style coda (a device also used by Bernardo Bertolucci in The Conformist, 1970). On
a more intimate scale, Bonjour
Tristesse, with its switches from
colour (past) to black-and-white (present), evokes the same kind of
waste and regret. Nostalgia figures, within these fictions, as a kind
of terminal disease. The cinema films
death at work, according to the famous
formula of Jean Cocteau: everything the camera touches (as it were)
is caught in its inevitable state or process of ageing, decay, dying
… 2. At Table: Ford’s Social Mise en scène (2009 essay) In a brilliant text on The Searchers (1956), Ross Gibson asks, midway: Question: Who or what is looking, listening, breathing, feeling? Answer: For the first five minutes or so, it’s the cabin. It’s me as the cabin. (2) This surprising, inventive, not-quite-anthropomorphic notion of Gibson’s helps to explain – and deepen our feeling for – one of those classic shots too often snipped out of the total context of The Searchers: John Wayne seen, in the landscape, through an open door. Actually, when that door shuts, it’s the perfect confirmation of Gibson’s imaginatively phenomenological thesis: dwellings live in Ford’s cinema, they live and breathe and regulate the rhythms of everyone and everything that passes through them. Today, when we study Ford’s films in slow-motion and freeze-frame on DVD, we spy strategies that have more in common with the systematic minimalism of Tsai Ming-liang, Víctor Erice or Béla Tarr than with so-called Classical Hollywood: repetitions of framings, positionings, humans in relation to their architecture and/or their landscape, called up like the refrains in a song. Hardly five minutes in (opening passages are packed and crucial in Ford), How Green Was My Valley has a similar image to that doorway in The Searchers; not so well known, recognised or celebrated, but it’s there. The shot (or rather set-up, because the film chops it into two parts) starts in a flurry (actions and gestures often propel us in this way in Ford): Angharad (Maureen O’Hara) races out the open door with a stool for her mother (Sara Allgood), who is waiting outside, ritually, for the father and sons of the family to return home from their daily mining work. We already know, from the shots that immediately precede this, that there is a whole line of women waiting in just such a pose, plus a veritable army of miners trundling down the hill, joined in near-musical lockstep as they richly sing together – just as we know, from the shots that frame this tale from the vantage point of a bleak present-day, that this entire scene will only be some pathetic figment of itself in the future. Closer in on the mother’s pose, with the door frame out of sight, we see the act of giving-over that answers the act of getting paid (repeated shots of different faces framed behind the same window counter, and hands collecting money): into her apron the money goes. Then back to the door frame set-up: one by one the men enter, walk up and out, frame-right. So many cinematic spaces that look and behave like little contraptions of theatre in Ford: entry, exit, proscenium arch. An important detail: each man removes his cap at exactly the same threshold spot of home and hearth. Then a little lag as the last guy enters more slowly than the others, differentiated (in his singing vocal as well as his body) so that he can provide the grace-note to this superb mise en scène: he looks back at his mother, ‘notes’ her with his gaze, and thus inscribes her into our growing awareness (conscious or unconscious) of the volume of repeated gestures and actions that is being so carefully built up here. Here is where we are going with this: into a house that is not just framing the lives of humans in a story, but “looking, listening, breathing, feeling” too. A home-space defined not just by its drawable architecture or floor plan (the error of detached set design studies), but by the repeated vantage points, vistas and configurations that Ford bestows upon it, shot by shot. Vantage points, vistas and configurations that soak up emotion, repetition, ritual, that become saturated with these things and then, in turn, imprint them upon living, evolving bodies – which fold in or strike out against this framing as the vicissitudes of history, story and psychology enter the picture. To fully understand this interplay of person and place, we will need a somewhat unfamiliar idea to help us through: I call it social mise en scène. (3) Although I had already seen it (and worked on analysing it) several times in my life, How Green Was My Valley hit me like a ton of bricks when I re-viewed it in my 50s. It is among the most somber, the bleakest, the most despairing of Ford’s works: family and community there may be, but none of these families, and certainly not the overarching community that contains and defines them, remain in one piece by the film’s end. The supposed nostalgia of the tale – which viewers sometimes lazily detach or hallucinate from the free-floating poetry of its title, doubtless repressing the memory of what actually goes on in the movie – is tearingly bitter, even blackly ironic: as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the march of industrial civilisation is inexorable, and killing; all that’s left, finally, is this memory, this stranded voice or thought which calls back to a better yesterday, “How green was my valley then …”. But Ford’s films come alive when you attend to the full scale of their rhetoric (narrative, cinematic, emotional), rather than their plain, detachable, familiar themes and character-types (the often lazily-earmarked mythic level of Ford). And the aspect of this rhetoric that I want to address is what a number of commentators have helped describe as the category of social mise en scène. (4) In a nutshell, how does social mise en scène differ from the plain old mise en scène we know and love from the annals of film criticism? That mise en scène which is primarily about composing great images, still or moving, and positioning actors in sets or landscapes? Mise en scène has been conceptualised and deployed in many different ways by many different folks over many decades but, at heart, it is a theory of expressivity: directors shape the elements before them of bodies, environments, image, sound, technology. As François Albera puts it, the auteur (in this traditional schema of creation) gives form to the formless, as does a painter or a novelist. But cinema does not begin from the blank canvas or the white page. In dealing, especially, with bodies and environments (landscapes, sets, streets), cinema takes into itself the facts long recognised by sociologists of every stripe: that the social world itself is already strictly organised, codified (as Vilém Flusser would say), subject to a hundred dispositifs that govern (or at least regulate) behaviour, posture, gesture, level of emotion (contained or released), where and how one will sit, stand, walk, run, be active or passive, hushed or loud … Back in the 1960s in Italy, occasional film-theorists Umberto Eco and Pier Paolo Pasolini had already intuited this idea. For Eco, social life came to the camera already equipped with its complicated codes of proxemics and kinesics. Pasolini expressed his understanding in the following way. The semiological archetype of theatre … is the spectacle that unfolds every day before our eyes and ears, in the street, at home, in the public places, etc. In this sense, social reality is a representation that is not unaware of being a performance, with its resultant codes (good manners, appropriate behaviour, comportment, etc.). In a word, social reality is not unaware of being a ritual. (5) So, what we once considered the primary properties or components of mise en scène as an artistic practice – effects of suggestion, lyricism, the implied and constructed regard or viewpoint of the director – are not obliterated as such, but can be incorporated into a wider and even more complex stylistic system. What happens when the work of the director, his or her distinctive mise en scène, collides with, corroborates, interleaves with or outrightly contradicts the indexed (and, of course, re-staged) reality of any given social mise en scène: of a religious ceremony, say, or a street parade, or a political rally, or a corporate business meeting? Intuitively or otherwise, the idea would not be news to many great filmmakers: Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel and Roy Andersson (to name just three) based a large part of their art on it. Nor has film criticism, following its diverse inspirations, entirely failed to notice or deal with the concept of social mise en scène: when Jean Douchet traces the dynamic vector of the V Diagram as a staging principle for power and passion plays in Mizoguchi, or Shigehiko Hasumi observes the telling gestures that signal Ozu’s angry women, (6) we are exploring precisely the volatile intersection between the characteristic mise en scène moves that make up each auteur’s signature and the social codes that (in Jean-Louis Comolli’s words) “prescribe a place” for all subjects or agents (that’s us) in the evolving, everyday world of our specific culture. This too-brief sketch of a certain trajectory in film criticism is not meant to suggest that the discussion of mise en scène has, in the past, been merely formal (or formalist), and now stands to gain a social consciousness. Quite the contrary: in the hands of a Robin Wood or a Jean-Loup Bourget, film analysis has, for a long time now, profoundly addressed the drama (or comedy) of social identity and historical or cultural meaning, and articulated these concerns with a close attention to film style (which is precisely what advanced them beyond the sociologising tendency in Siegfried Kracauer or Parker Tyler, who tended to rely on glorified plot synopses as their material for study – as Slavoj Žižek sadly does again today). Social mise en scène, however, zeroes in on something specific: known rituals that are recreated, marked, inscribed in the flow of the film, usually in order to be transformed. And starkly so, in the case of How Green Was My Valley. Six minutes into the film: a dinner table scene. Could we draw up an entire taxonomy of cinema styles – by genre, auteur, period, nation, etc. – in terms of how they each depict the social manners at table? (7) Ford was very alive to these particular codes; he never stopped observing, staging and remaking them. This scene, in its affectionate and comic way, is devoted to defining or laying out – through minor transgressions – the rules of etiquette of a typical meal time for the Morgan family within the context of Welsh culture: everything must wait for the saying of the prayer by the father (Donald Crisp); no one can touch their food before he does; the women of the household (mother and daughter) wait attentively, standing to the side. That much is easy to describe; but the shots, the way they carve out and impress these familial hierarchies and divisions in terms of certain views of the house (a house is rarely mere background in Ford) would take a more sustained effort than is possible in this brief text. Ritual follows upon ritual in this first part of the film: carving the turkey; the handing-out of spending money in an adjacent room … always running along a hierarchy of age, and thus of size, placement in the frame, dwarfed by or beginning to impose upon the house … For the body’s resistance to space, as that body grows and the person changes, is also crucial in Ford, and indeed is the very wellspring of the fiction here. The role of the child, Huw (Roddy McDowall), constantly returned to in his place at the end of the chain, is far more than anecdotal or sentimental; it is literally anchoring for the system of the film’s social mise en scène. Seventeen minutes in, and everything is beginning to change, catastrophically. When Mr Morgan returns home, it is viewed from a radically different angle, and under a completely different mood of light and posture: no money for the wife, and his sons already waiting, in this tense alcove (it’s a violation, in a way, of the appropriate threshold behaviour previously established via the cap removal), to challenge the political stance the father has taken at work. Two minutes later (things move fast in this film): at table, and one of the sons literally breaks hierarchy by standing up – and another breaks all mealtime etiquette by speaking (“with or without your permission”, as he makes clear). The effect escalates: all the working-age sons stand up, while the father holds his lonely place at the head of the table. It is a literally upsetting scene: it is the social order of things, that particular side of Ford’s mise en scène, which is being tipped over, step by step, detail by detail here. “For the last time, sit down and finish your supper”, the father gently pleads. But the following shot confirms the unstoppable breakage of the domestic code: a son inscribed in a low angle against the lines that mark the intersection of three walls. Now they are all standing up – a striking pictorial violation – and they all exit, up the stairs. The women are still not yet permitted to speak. But the scene ends (as so many scenes in this film do) with the return to Huw the boy, still obediently in his subordinate place, but making just enough noise with his cutlery to insist on a tiny moment of affirmation of him in his place: “Yes, my son, I know you are there”. It
is the entire social mise en scène of the family home which is at stake – laid out, broken, then a
hopeless dream of longing for its historic repair – in Ford’s
masterful rendition of How Green Was My
Valley. NOTES 2. Ross Gibson, “The Searchers – Dismantled”, Rouge, no. 7 (2005). back 3. I subsequently expanded my initial work on this topic (including further bibliographic references) into a chapter of my book Mise en scène and Film Style (Palgrave, 2014). I have integrated some the re-phrasings from that later discussion of How Green Was My Valley into this 2009 text. back 4. See the essays collected in Jacques Aumont (ed.), La mise en scène (Brussels: DeBoeck, 2000). back 5. Pier Paolo Pasolini (trans. T. Simpson), “Manifesto for a New Theatre”, Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 29 No. 1 (2007), pp. 135-136. back 6. See Chika Kinoshita, “Choreography of Desire: Analysing Kinuyo Tanaka's Acting in Mizoguchi's Films”, Screening the Past, no. 13 (2001); and Shigehiko Hasumi, “Ozu’s Angry Women”, Rouge, no. 4 (2004), back 7. For a useful general survey of cinema as perceived from the particular angle of food consumption and dining manners, see the themed issue of the French magazine Vertigo, no. 5 (1990), “Le Cinéma à table”. back © Adrian Martin June 1982 / April 2009 / June 2014 |
