The Searchers

THE SEARCHERS (1956). John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter spend years searching for Wayne's niece (Natalie Wood), who was abducted as a child by Comanches. Far from a picaresque adventure yarn, The Searchers is director John Ford's forceful meditation on racism, revenge and obsession -- one of the most powerful ever filmed. And Wayne's portrayal of a brutishly obsessed "savior" is downright frightening. (119 mins)

Jonathan Lethem said of Wayne’s portrayal of Edwards that he was “tormented and tormenting ... his fury is righteous and ugly, at once, resentment branded as a fetish.”

While the movie was primarily set in the staked plains of Northwest Texas, it was actually filmed in Monument Valley. This geographical space became the icon of Ford’s America.

In a 1964 interview with Cosmopolitan magazine Ford said:
“There’s some merit to the charge that the Indian hasn’t been portrayed accurately or fairly in the Western, but again, this charge has been a broad generalization and often unfair. The Indian didn’t welcome the white man... and he wasn’t diplomatic... If he has been treated unfairly by whites in films, that, unfortunately, was often the case in real life. There was much racial prejudice in the West.

Within the movie there is the dialectic of mobility vs stability, trail vs hearth. Ethan’s mobility is seductive at first but then becomes problemetized by his racism.

The traditional icons of white vs native, civilized vs virile. In order for Ethan to match the virility of the other (the Indian), he must become an outsider to civilization. Interestingly, Ethan loves his brother’s wife, and it is the impotence of the borther that causes her death.

In this film, “someday this country is going to be a fine country”, in Easy Rider, “this used to be one hell of a country”

Many now draw the parallel to the hype created to draw us into the war on Iraq. Have we again been lead by one who is creating an Other for us to hate?

The intro is striking- a brick wall and the theme, “what makes a man to wander, what makes a man to do wrong?”

Themes of the Road Trip Movie (a mid-season introduction)

Season Three of Rowhouse Film Festival is called "On The Road." Starting with a quintessential road movie, Easy Rider, we'll explore the genre of the road film as a manifesto for freedom & wandering, and as the anti-establishment American dream.

We all go on roadtrips and inevitably they have marked meaningful moments in our lives. So what is it about the open road and us driving down them that is so compelling for us (and filmmakers) to try to capture?

Very loosely, this is what we're trying to explore here this season by examining 12 films about being "On The Road." We've built and organized our series around a few obvious themes, general sub-categories (perhaps meaningless) that they all can fit into: the buddy flick, romance on the road, the lone rider on a quest, and the family who strike on the road for new beginnings.

But what we find when we look a little further into what is now become a genre in American film making -- "the road movie" -- are the inseperable iconography of the car and the horizon which surrounds it. Most strikingly we see in cars an individualist mode of transportation, a modern interpretation of a rugged cowboy's horse. And the expanse of open road articulates a similar manifest destiny to modernize and to make the unknown known.

And yet, mining the cinematic history of these mobile obsessions, we might find that the films themselves repeatedly focus on the consequences of a culture moving away from the stabilizing structures of community and communication. There is often desperation and turmoil which send our travellers adrift in a desire to find significance and perhaps stability in the contemporary world.

Down By Law

DOWN BY LAW (1986). When fate lands three hapless men -- an unemployed disc jockey (Tom Waits), a small-time pimp (John Lurie) and a strong-willed Italian tourist (Roberto Benigni) -- in a New Orleans prison, their adventure toward escape and freedom begins. Director Jim Jarmusch delivers a twisted comedy filled with fine performances and sharp black-and-white frames from cinematographer Robby Müller. (107 mins)

Some themes that came up in the discussion:

*As noticed by a few people, for a "road movie" Down By Law has a striking lack of on-the-road scenes and an absence of a actual car, and yet we sense the arc and denouement of a road trip film here. How is it that we still feel more or less ok with categorizing film in this road movie genre? Or do we not?

*If not, perhaps it's because we are responding to a quality -- general to most of director Jim Jarmusch's films -- of ambiguity, and a sense that nothing is ever realized from the journey, that it may all be pointless. In his often farcical or satirical films, the characters have been described as seeming "listless" or "jaded," and this signifies a movement away from Hollywood and back to independent filmmaking. In fact, Jarmusch is known to have distanced himself from "high concept" and MTV aesthetics, and particularly in this film the slow and ambiguous action on the road is itself a rebellion to the crash-and-burn quality in mainstream Hollywood cinema, especially in the road genre. As one critic says, "Jarmusch embraces the artificiality of performance and the performance of artificiality." Stylistically, there is the feeling of stasis, due in part to his long single takes and sparse editing which reflects his resistance to intermingling the the styles of televion/advertising with filmmaking

*Jarmusch's characters (who are often somewhat listless) don't have the same kind of more traditional metamorphosis or transformation that we see in other more mainstream road movies (like Thelma & Louise for example). So in the end do we, Rowhouse Film Fest members, leave satisfied that this road trip had gone somewhere meaningful -- either literally or metaphorically?

Roberto (played by Roberto Benigni, who might remind a modern-day viewer of Sasha Barron Cohen's character, Borat ... or vice-versa) is hardly jaded at all; he is talkative, confident, of course comedic, and is even oblivious of his own comedy -- which is exactly what makes it comedic in the first place. His scene are filled with culture clashing and language barriers and are played perfectly by Benigni who offers relief to an otherwise muted, more subdued film.

*Yet Zack (Tom Waits) is the opposite: he is almost completely silent during his time in jail -- that is, except for when he is asked by Jack (John Lurie) to prove his identity; and he does just that during his fake broadcast scene where he instantly transforms himself, for a moment, into the cool, New Orleans DJ , using his invented radio voice, which is in fact just a ruse for how sad, down-on-his-luck, and alcoholic his really is. Zack is perhaps the saddest and arguably most pathetic character in this film of listless escaped convicts. He seems more concerned about his shoes than his albums (his source of employment), for example, when he's thrown out of his girlfriend's apartment and into the street.

*Some last questions posed by the group: Does this film feel similar stylistically to Easy Rider, a now classic independent film of it's era? And what is it about the "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream" scene that is so compelling?

*Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, how f-ing cool are these two cats? (Below: Jarmusch & Waits, 1984). Wow. (Nice shoes indeed, Tom!)