Yojimbo wrote:Schreck, if you're now saying Ford already had a highly developed pictorial sense, perhaps you might reconsider your answer to my question as to why he felt he THEN had to produce a complete film, which was more pastiche of/homage to Murnau than any of his films that I saw, before or after.
(admittedly my experience of his silent era is limited to the Ford at Fox box-set)
If you're accepting that he already had a fully-formed style, then 'Four Sons' must be considered either a retrograde step on his part, or pastiche/homage
And I also tend to relate 'The Informer' more with the crime cinema of the German Expressionists, rather than Murnau, specifically
(and perhaps it influenced later French films, such as 'Quai Des Brumes' and 'Le Jour Se Lève)
I'm not sure why I would want to reconsider my answer to your question, Yo.
Just because a person had a highly developed pictorial sense doesn't eliminate matters of degrees, and specific forms of stylization. Murnau is coming to Fox with a very specific pictorial sensibility where shots were endlessly labored over for hours and days and weeks with men like Wagner, Freund, and Hoffman in the echoing, reproduction, and expanding on famous works of art within the highly controlled zone of the studio. Maskings, overlays, gauze, fog, dreamy chiaroscuro, special effects, an excessively sophisticated dialog with art history . . . by the time Murnau came to Fox he was very famous for the incredible results he'd achieved within the UFA, along with his masterful command of film grammar, characterization, metaphor, and visual poetry. The end result is quite simply perhaps the most venerable level of genius resident within any filmmaker fore or aft, and the man ever remains my favorite filmmaker of all time.
John Ford, prior to the arrival of Murnau, had a very good visual sense--one that was very ventilated and naturalistic (albeit well-composed) versus the extremely highly labored over images of Murnau-- but had exhibited very little interest in this kind of excessively gleaming, dreamy, deeply shadowy, highly consciously poetic, swirling studio artifice which had such an "arty", "European" look. Ford was always--pre-'27-- at his best out of doors, allowing his actors and his narratives to breathe against the majesty of location, which was always his favorite place to be.
Obviously Murnau hit him like a ton of bricks . . . and starting with the hugely corny Four Sons, an obvious imitation of his new idol as well as a striving towards the new "high(er) visual art" to which he wanted his films to aspire, his style did a complete left turn andthe influence was more imitative than inspirational. As a couple short years wore on and Ford's own strong sense of self and style bloomed out and over his posession with all that was Murnauesque, we see him integrate somewhat labored over moments of pictorialism at key moments of establishment and narrative peak . . . but never thru and through across the entirety of the narrative, with fake beams of light stenciled on glass overlaying the lens (a la Four Sons), studio fog, etc. He becomes the Ford we all know and love, the master of that great intuitive sense of camera placement, striking visual moments at moments of punctuation, the deft editing, the capturing of magical moments and performance-- the perfect filmmaker for Hollywood's golden years.