Two responses re: Hawks and Ford

From: Michael Fitzgerald [[email protected]]

Don't have any suggestions with regard to Hawks, but I think the Ford
essentials are Iron Horse, Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The
Searchers, and Cheyenne Autumn. --Michael Ray Fitzgerald, PhD,
communications instructor, College of Coastal Georgia

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From: Leo Enticknap [[email protected]]

For programming undergraduate courses in general, an approach I've
found works well is to use a combination of very widely celebrated and
highly obscure titles, and then to encourage students to use the body of
literature about the former as an aid to interpreting the latter. In the
case of Ford, for example, "My Darling Clementine" and "The Hurricane"
might work, as both have thematic points in common (e.g. distrust of
morally bankrupt authority), yet the latter is not in the genre on which
Ford's reputation primarily rests. This technique also encourages
students to think about canonisation, too. I haven't tried it with Ford,
though. Fritz Lang's filmography lends itself pretty well to the
technique, as a sidenote ("M" and "While the City Sleeps" make a useful
pairing).

For Hawks, the BBC/Kevin Macdonald documentary "Howard Hawks:
American Artist" (BBC2, tx. 1 March 1997, 1500-1600) is perfect both for
introducing Hawks and auteurism in general. There is a neat,
three-minute extractable clip near the start that is perfect for the
latter. There is also a book of essays, edited by Jim Hillier and Peter
Wollen (same title, London, BFI, 1996), though a lot of them get mired
in 1970s film theory and in broad terms the book is nowhere near as
useful as the documentary. If you are based at a UK university, then you
can get hold of the documentary through the BUFVC.

Leo

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Leo
Enticknap
Institute of Communications Studies
2.35, Clothworkers'
Building North
University of Leeds
LS2 9JT
United Kingdom
My personal
website [1]
My page on the University of Leeds's website [2]
My page on
academia.edu [3]

Links:
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[1] http://www.enticknap.net
[2]
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/staff/leo
[3]
http://leeds.academia.edu/enticknap