Introduction How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941)

24 August 2024, Zeughauskino, Berlin

Text: Gerard-Jan Claes

An introduction to this film presents some inevitable challenges. The last thing John Ford’s oeuvre calls for is an excess of interpretation that would only dispel the wonders of his work. And yet his films nonetheless have posed and continue to pose a simple yet critical question to any viewer, contemporary or not: how is one to look and listen at what Ford presents us? Following from that: what makes his films, all made during the era of Hollywood’s classical cinema – Ford directed his first film in 1917, his last in 1965 as the studio system was nearing its end – so entrancing to us today, as the work of one of the greatest directors in film history, including his heartfelt fascination for people swept up in the storms of history?

How Green Was My Valley offers us a variety angles on the question. A first, obvious one is that of a commercial Hollywood prestige project, initiated by Darryl F. Zanuck: the 20th Century-Fox production chief acquired the rights to Richard Llewellyn’s novel of the same name, a bestseller from 1939. The film was to be Zanuck’s Gone with the Wind, designed to win plenty of Academy Awards, which it eventually did; it was nominated for ten Oscars and won a total of five, famously beating Citizen Kane in the same year.

The book and film tell the story of the Morgans, a hard-working Welsh mining family, seen through the eyes of youngest child Huw. He lives in a Southern Welsh valley with his loving parents, his sister, and five brothers in the late Victorian era. The film describes life in the Welsh coalfields, and how the family copes with the loss of their way of life. Amid a gathering economic recession, disagreements in the valley, as well as in the family over unions and liberal ideas begin to proliferate.

In How Green Was My Valley, Ford turns us into witnesses of an old world giving way to a new one. In this traditional society, the order by which a person had to abide was naturally given; one had limited control over one’s destiny and was only intended to fit into a community. For Ford, this state of self-evident continuity carries an undeniable element of bliss: everyone had a task and it was passed on from generation to generation; not to propel the world forward but to make a world go round without question. At the beginning of one’s life, one also knew its end. This eternal recurrence is taken away from the Morgan family: the new economic reality of industrialisation pulls the family apart.

The film looks back to this old world and opens with fifty-year-old Huw nostalgically recounting the story of his childhood in the green valley, growing up in a large family within a warm community. From the film’s very start – and I can give this little detail away without spoiling anything – Huw informs us that his account is littered by mere sweet recollections. As he tells us:

“Memory… Who shall say what is real and what is not? Can I believe my friends all gone when their voices are a glory in my ears? No. And I will stand to say no and no again, for they remain a living truth within my mind. There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it… So I can close my eyes on the valley as it was…”

A first source of tension immediately surfaces here: does the film not close its eyes to social injustice by appealing to the nostalgic effects of memory? Ford’s cinema is often labelled as “reactionary”, glutted by a yearning for tradition. One critic simply categorised How Green Was My Valley as a “monstrous slurry of tears and coal dust,”¹ a piece of cheap Hollywood pomp which sentimentalises and thus glosses over true proletarian questions in favour of mere cinematic entertainment. Given the influence of a politically reactionary producer like Zanuck—who admitted being “bored to death by the repetition of the strike business and starving babies” – this reaction seems unsurprising at first glance.²

Yet this view quickly betrays its severe limits. True, the film offers us no sociological insights into the mechanisms that drive inequality. “What we shall witness”, writes the American author and critic Tag Gallagher, “is a highly subjective,³ terribly colored depiction of reality, one in which a child’s emotions of remembering take precedence over crass facts. […] [But] to experience the movie only as a celebration of Huw’s dreamy myopia, denial of reality, and adhesion to tradition is to experience only Huw’s point of view; it is not to experience Ford’s point of view of Huw’s point of view.”⁴

The strength of Ford’s cinema is that he presents us and stages his fiction as pieces of fiction: the characters need not stand for “actual people”; rather, they serve as archetypes, fictional characters “made real”, concrete bodies that give off a shimmer of abstraction which only cinema can exude, thereby rendering them part of a history. Ford not only invites us to identify with the boy’s point of view; we look at Huw’s point of view as one possible position. The aversion to unions is not an aversion to social struggle, as if this were Ford’s political conviction, but simply a child’s aversion to change. In this sense, the film can be seen as a rather grim document: as viewers, we can only look at Huw’s dream as a delusion. His childish desire, to contain the world in the eternal stasis he found it in during his childhood is contrasted by Ford with the forces of history mercilessly sweeping the same world.

This does not only apply to the character of Huw. Ford merely makes us look at all the characters, observe them from the outside, without conjecturing after their motives. According to Gallagher, this also explains why the film comes across as so “staged”. He writes: “In fact this ‘staginess’ – the carefully noble manner in which the people talk, move, gesture – is one of Huw’s chief contributions as ‘director’ of his dream. He regiments his material into a mode of memory.”⁵ Here Huw and Ford form a perfect match. Ford does not offer us one seemingly homogeneous, naturalistic image of the world as we know it from that other, more ideologically manipulative type of Hollywood cinema; he offers us one possible stylisation of the world. Likewise, a happy ending is often bittersweet with Ford, as it mainly emphasises people’s wishful dreams and delusions.

Despite the social arena in which the film is clearly set, Ford does not even offer us a glimpse into the causes behind it. However, this was never Ford’s intention. Concerning his film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, he was adamant: “It is not a social film on this problem, it’s a study of a family.”⁶ Ford focuses on how, in a time of disintegration, people see their values faltering, clinging frenetically to old habits or scouting for new stories to prop up their lives. In this sense, he is more interested in the effects of politics, in the psychotic tendencies people use to create fictions and appearances to keep life manageable. More so, this film uniquely explores how these ideas and worlds vary across social classes.

This is one key aspect that makes Ford’s cinema so modern. Notably, it was Jean-Marie Straub who labelled John Ford the most Brechtian of all filmmakers. How is one to reconcile this with the Hollywood milieu in which his work was made? In his book on Ford, Gallagher also quotes Brecht: “Realism doesn’t consist in reproducing reality, but in showing how things really are.” The aim, then, is not to recreate a reality but to turn spectators into critical witnesses to the spectacle unfolding before our eyes, and not to fall into the ideological ruse of being true-to-life. In other words, Ford’s cinematic beauty does not disguise reality but rather generates distance, offering us an image of reality, stylised and formalised.

Yet part of the enchantment of Ford’s cinema lies in his unique form of popular historiography, capturing the routines, gestures, and rituals that structure the lives of characters in a specific community—in this case, the Welsh miners. The Dutch documentary filmmaker Johan van der Keuken once described the films of Japanese filmmaker Ozu as follows: “[The] work in relation to reality is part of this double movement: a back and forth between fictionalisation and a return to the world. A look of recognition on and of the world, in both senses of the word.”⁷ This is equally true for Ford, whose films consist of “eternally recycled elements” such as family dinners, laundry, work, singing and similar everyday scenes. This is where the real magic of his work arises: the world itself seems to evoke a certain mise-en-scène, with Ford seemingly only there to “present” the material. His cinema seems to be dictated not so much by concepts as by specific movements and gestures. In How Green Was My Valley, for instance, the kitchen table acts as the center of a solar system around which all life revolves. Much like the boy’s flashback, the world reveals itself as a choreographed dream without a message in which people appear as archetypes and daily events as sacred rituals,⁸ and life is transformed into a cinematic myth, a never-ending story.

Following this interpretation, Japanese critic Shigehiko Hasumi offers us an original look at Ford’s work with the notion of “the eloquence of the gesture”. Hasumi’s approach can be described as an inventory of Fordian “themes”, not to be confused with the general “subject” or “topic” of a film. For example: he detects themes of horses, trees, the act of throwing and white aprons, gestures that resurface in almost every Ford film. “I am particularly attracted to the significant details that have such tentacles,” Hasumi says, “guided by these tentacles, I see the ‘connection of souls’, that tie shots, films and images to each other.”⁹ For him, these gestures or repetitive movements create the narrative structure of the films through their repetition, but they do not carry any symbolic meaning. “Ford’s mise en scène,” he writes, “does not resort to a psychological and narrative logic, but to a succession of isolated [everyday] gestures […] ritualised by virtue of this neutrality.” In this sense, Hasumi claims, Ford’s films have no pretence. “Ford is content merely to assemble them.” The rituals, the forms and gestures are eloquent in themselves.¹⁰ 

Starting from this formalist manoeuvre, how are we to understand the film’s socio-political pretences? The dangers here are twofold: on the one hand, an aestheticism would exploit human misery to deliver a “beautiful” film above all else. And on the other hand, filmed journalism all too often reduces its subjects to set pieces in an argument. Neither apply to How Green Was My Valley. The Portuguese director Pedro Costa praises Ford for his documentary and poetic quality: “It makes me dream and it makes me come back. I felt so right when I saw a film by John Ford and I’m in front of those people. It was a dream thing. It was a real thing.”¹¹ As soon as people are filmed, they turn into a piece of fiction, and yet, at the same time, they retain their linkage to a certain reality. The challenge of any filmmaker, Ford tells us, is first and foremost to make a film with care for everyone and everything that appears in front of the lens. The film’s coherence is then not in the so-called meaning or message of How Green Was My Valley, but in the aesthetic solidarity between the people, gestures, forms, images and sounds, the “connection of souls” tying them all together.

In a short text published on Sabzian, artist Ignace Wouters notes that despite the impending doom threatening the community, everyone “continues to venture out to greet everyone as an equal.” Ford equally tailors his filmmaking to the demands of this mindset. “This calls for a film that goes beyond the antics of the medium to master the humble task of providing the most appropriate frame. The director succeeds in this with a talent kindred to his protagonists. This distribution of good-naturedness across the screen is not without effect. Ford similarly lets the receptive viewer bathe briefly in that very same light. In it, an embrace, a field of flowering daffodils and a call to strike appear as part of the same force.”¹² This is what renders the film so moving: solidarity not as a mere topic, but a form which we’re invited to take part in on equal terms as spectators.

In his assessment of the Hasumian approach, Australian critic Adrian Martin points out that Ford’s films “solicit us with their potential to be activated.” Ford challenges us to seek “understanding” within appearances themselves, rather than looking for something hidden or beyond them, and to bear witness to what is directly in front of us, “what we have been given to see.” Consequently, as a spectator, Martin concludes, “we have trained ourselves – led by the film […] – to comprehend, to admire and appreciate, to truly see and respect the achievement of what we have seen. That is the real ‘journey”, in fact the only journey, that we embark on when we watch a film.”¹³

In the latter sense, there is no better advice than to simply look at and listen, in that critical but playful sense, to what Ford offers us in How Green Was My Valley. Enjoy the screening.

1. David Thomson, “John Ford,” in A Biographical Dictionary of Film (New York: Morrow, 1979), 185-86. Quoted in: Tag Gallagher, John Ford. The Man and His Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 234-235. ↩︎
2. Originally quoted in Mel Gussow, Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), 87. ↩︎
3.  My emphasis. ↩︎
4. Gallagher, John Ford, 236-237. ↩︎
5. Ibid. 241. ↩︎
6. George J. Mitchell, “Ford on Ford,” Films in Review, June 1964, 331. ↩︎
7. Johan van der Keuken, “Meanders”, translated by Veva Leye, Sabzian (forthcoming). Originally published as “Méandres” in Trafic n° 13, Winter 1995, 14-23. ↩︎
8. Gallagher, John Ford, 569. ↩︎
9. Tetsuro Irie, “Shigehiko Hasumi talks about his ‘John Ford Theory’,” GQ Japan, 1 August 2022.  ↩︎
10. Shigehiko Hasumi, “John Ford, or The Eloquence of Gesture,” translated by Adrian Martin, Rouge, 2005. First published in French in Cinéma 08, 2004. ↩︎
11. David Jenkins, “Some Violence Is Required: A Conversation with Pedro Costa,” MUBI Notebook, 11 March 2013. ↩︎
12.  Ignace Wouters, “Prisma 18,” Sabzian, 23 May 2018. [translated by author] ↩︎
13. Adrian Martin, “Given to See: A Tribute to Shigehiko Hasumi,” LOLA Journal, February/September 2016. ↩︎