Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ethnics and Roughnecks: The Making of the Hollywood Renaissance
- 2 A Cinema for Democracy: John Ford and the Crisis of Modernity, Myth, and Meaning
- 3 Gender and American Character: Frank Capra
- 4 Revisioning Heroic Masculinity: From Ford to Hawks and Zinnemann
- 5 An American Conscience: Elia Kazan's Long Journey Home
- 6 Losing Tomorrow: George Stevens and the American Idea
- 7 Conclusion: Film and America after the Hollywood Renaissance
- Notes
- Filmography
- Index
2 - A Cinema for Democracy: John Ford and the Crisis of Modernity, Myth, and Meaning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ethnics and Roughnecks: The Making of the Hollywood Renaissance
- 2 A Cinema for Democracy: John Ford and the Crisis of Modernity, Myth, and Meaning
- 3 Gender and American Character: Frank Capra
- 4 Revisioning Heroic Masculinity: From Ford to Hawks and Zinnemann
- 5 An American Conscience: Elia Kazan's Long Journey Home
- 6 Losing Tomorrow: George Stevens and the American Idea
- 7 Conclusion: Film and America after the Hollywood Renaissance
- Notes
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
Structure, Style, Ideology
Over years and generations, a critical and popular consensus has deemed John Ford the quintessential American director. He occupies a special status as both an American artist and an American consciousness. In Ford, it is argued, the complexity and originality of the aesthetic imagination matches the depth, range, and intensity of his social and cultural imagination. Art, ideology, and culture cohere in the Ford canon to engender a representation and reconstruction of American culture in ways that are usually associated with major works of literature and art. The extent and quality of his aesthetic and cultural achievements make Ford a seminal force behind a movement that I have termed the Hollywood Renaissance of cinema and democracy that flowered during the middle decades of this century. In his work as a director and his influence as a cultural force, Ford's contribution toward establishing a democratic aesthetic of film compares to the efforts a century earlier of our most celebrated authors.
Accordingly, John Ford plays a crucial role in the genesis and history of the Hollywood Renaissance. He looms like a patriarchal presence over this movement. Of all the powerful men who pioneered in the creative and industrial flowering of film in Hollywood, no one exercised greater leadership or influence than Ford. John Wayne even dubbed him “Pappy,” an epithet of affection and admiration that insinuates Ford's parental and originating authority as a director and Hollywood force.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Hollywood RenaissanceThe Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Kapra, and Kazan, pp. 19 - 55Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998