Wystan Hugh Auden, in memory of Yeats, 1939:1
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
The words “he became his admirers” are ones that Joseph McBride borrows often — for example in his biography Searching for John Ford2 — to describe Ford’s influence on the generations that followed. It is apt. Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Satyajit Ray, Wim Wenders, Pedro Costa, Hayao Miyazaki, Hong Sang-soo, Ryusuke Hamaguchi — all have expressed their admiration publicly, and the list of New Hollywood ‘movie brats’ who claim the same debt is long enough to skip. The cultural, geographical and ideological diversity of these names says something in itself.
Continue reading “Punished Under a Foreign Code: A ‘lecture sociale’ on John Ford”
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