Reply to Multiple responses RE: Hawks and Ford

From: Leo Enticknap [[email protected]]

 Andrea A. Campbell writes:

"I think that list showcases some of his
best films, as well as his range as a filmmaker and together demonstrate
many of his hallmarks as an auteur."

At the risk of sounding argumentative, surely the uncritical acceptance of value judgments such
as "best" is not something we should be encouraging as educators? If
we're going to teach students about Hawks, surely we should be doing so
with the aim of enabling them to assess, critically and through the
evalaution of objective evidence, what he work tells us about authorship
and personal vision in cinema, and possibly about his own personal
vision in relation to the themes and topics he was involved in making
films about.

All the lists posted in the last email basically
encapsulate the judgments of mainstream critics in relation to Hawks,
plus the reason why auteurist writers celebrated him. If all you're
trying to do is to understand those basic concepts, then fine, those
films will work. But if you're also trying to encourage students to
think critically about how useful the Bazin concept of auteurism is, and
where its limits lie, they're not going to get you very far. If I was
trying to do that in relation to Hawks, then I would absolutely show
"The Thing From Another World". After all, if historians can't even
agree on the nature and extent of Hawks's creative contribution, the
film has to raise the question as to whether the Cahiers du Cinema
critics misunderstood and/or oversimplified their position, doesn't it?
"Today We Live" would be another possibility - a film in which the other
principal creative contributors (Faulkner, Crawford and Cooper) were
established figures in their own right, and therefore, along with the
fact that it came relatively early in Hawks's career, forces the
question as to how much came from him and how much from "the
system".

"(They are also all entertaining and I have found my students
like most of them.)"

Sorry, but these are absolutely not valid reasons
for showing films to students in a formal course of education. We are
educators, not entertainers; even if we are educating about
entertainment. One of the reasons I am so keen on screening the
relatively unknown work of relatively well known filmmakers is that it
denies students the cop-out route of pulling off the library shelves one
of the several zillion monographs on religion in Ford films, psychology
in Lang films, women in Hitchcock films, something with the syllables
"post" and "ism" in the title, or any other of the old favourite topics
in which several dozen PhD candidates churn out identikit monographs
each year; because the monographs simply aren't there on the shelf, and
so the students are forced to do some actual problem solving for
themselves.

Leo