Americana

I posted the following as a review on amazon last October:

Horse Opera

David Thomson, White Light

Writing about the films of John Ford in His Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson argues about Ford's use of Monument Valley:

"...there is a lust for epic, clichéd panoramas, which forgets or forsakes the real meaning of that location - as geology, for its natives, and for the rest of America living on the edges of the empty quarter, witness, walking, riding, living, and being there, patient enough to see through the first spectacle. It also requires a study of its culture: what it has meant to, say, the Navajo, the Hopi, Willa Cather, Edward Abbey, and Edward Curtis. Ford's eye refused to contemplate history or responsibility."

The 'irresponsible' filmmaker Ford gets a walk on part in this tricksy, fanciful novel, as does his most famous actor John Wayne. As does Willa Cather. As do a whole host of folks. As in Suspects, his earlier `movie-novel', White Light is fiction functioning as film criticism, and for me the better novel. Where Suspects constructed a nightmare alternative history of America through the interconnected biographies of characters all drawn from film noir, White Light draws on only a handful of classic westerns, mixing both some of their characters and the children of their characters with some of the real life figures who stalked the West. Thomson helpfully provides a glossary of all of these figures drawn from history for any of us who might be struggling to distinguish reality and fantasy. Which is precisely the place his novel occupies: the gap between the real West and the fantasy constructed from all of the stories that have been told about it.

Most especially the films. The various stories contained in White Light don't often take the action to Monument Valley, but the profusion of character and story seems designed to attempt something of what Thomson calls for above in its treatment of the American West. Not only does the action look away from such iconic locations, but equally away from such famous stories such as the gunfight at the OK Corral, or the shooting of Billy the Kid, mentioned on the back cover, but which are only ever seen from off to one side, rather than placed in the centre. Thomson's characters are never in the heart of the action, but off stage so to speak. The mythical events happen largely without their help. Like all of us, they are part of an audience. However, they are also intimately involved in constructing an image of the West, whether as pulp author or photographer. Even Mathew Garth, who in Howard Hawk's Red River was actually involved in a cattle run which helped shape the civilising of the West, and whose repeat of that journey in later life occupies a long section of the novel, is here seen only as a figure damaged both by his past and his mythic status.

Thomson's view of the old American West is caustic, but also elegiac. It's never quite clear what has been lost in the civilising of the American West, but that's also true of many of the greatest westerns. It seems that even a writer as subtle and elusive as Thomson is constrained by the myth, for all his efforts to deconstruct it. Which might explain why this is a novel and not formal film criticism: it exists within that tension between reality and myth.

I mostly agree with myself there. White Light is a beautiful book, and a lot of it's power lies in that tension between the myth of the Western and the reality of America's past. Whether Thomson intended it or not, it does contain a strong streak of nostalgia for a time which I can only imagine was often brutal, certainly incredibly hard for many of the people who lived then. When I was younger I had little interest in the Western as a genre, but I've seen my share of films by now. And I've read Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy and Blood Meridian, which have always struck me as being firmly based within the genre. However powerful and beautiful McCarthy's writing undoubtedly is, I still find something troubling about his aesthetic. It goes to the heart of that tension between myth and reality because McCarthy's fiction is engaged with a romantic picture of the past which seems very dependant on violence. It's as if only in extreme violent situations do we become fully alive. Which to me is just macho bullshit, frankly. I imagine he'd also be easy to parody - his writing is far to manly to use any punctuation other than the full stop! - but I also think I'm probably being far too simplistic here. None of that accounts for the hypnotic power of his language, his unpunctuated sentences rolling out like the epic landscapes through which his characters so often travel. And the past that he writes about was incredibly violent. He hardly idealises that violence he depicts but rather presents it in a very matter of fact way. This is simply a depiction of what happened, for all McCarthy's aesthetic.

It is a problem though. In the final book of the Border trilogy the life of the ranch is overshadowed by the presence of the atomic bomb. The ranch is on land which is to be used for an atomic test site, an event which occurs outside of the book's narrative. The bomb is easy to read as a symbol for modernity. It's modernity which overshadows and threatens the dissolution of the life of the ranch. Still, however repugnant one might find modernity, and I've certainly got some sympathy for such a view, that hardly excuses romaticisising a past that was often a struggle against poverty and hardship. I know it's hardly the sort of life I would even be equipped for, let alone want to live.

It's a tension that even appears in documentary. I've just finished watching a series of three films made by the musicologist, photographer and filmmaker John Cohen. Cohen is clearly an important figure in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s whom I've previously never heard of before. The three films are That High Lonesome Sound (1962), focusing on the banjo player and guitarist Roscoe Holcomb, The End of an Old Song (1972), focusing on the unaccompanied singer Dillard Chandler, and Sara and Maybelle (1981), featuring two of the 'original' Carter family. Sara and Maybelle, the shortest of the three films is mostly assembled from photographs and a performance of several songs filmed at the Newport Festival in 1967. It feels odd to describe them as members of the 'original' carter family, since when is a family ever 'original'. To be part of a family is to be part of a continuum, one which stretches into both the past and the future. 'Original' here is a marketing tag, reflecting how much this successfull showbiz family has been transformed into a commercial entity, something which is underlined by the inclusion of a number of their records in the film's collage of photographs and ephemera. It's interesting that these are the actual records, the material object, as opposed to the record sleeves.

Sara and Maybelle is the most conventional of the three films, focused solely on the performers, where the earlier films are much more interested in situating the musicians at their centre in their particular social worlds in the early 1960s, bringing in other performers and footage of the landscapes within which they lived. According to Wikipedia Roscoe Handler subsequently went on to have a career performing within the folk revival, similar to many folk singers discovered around the time, whereas Dillard Chandler has little interest in performing at festivals and on the radio. He lived until 1993. Both of these films are incredibly beautiful with their silvery black and white photography. There's no sync sound, so the combination of image and sound creates a dreamy abstracted atmosphere, enhanced by the way in which the camera is never quite steady, frequently drifting off to observe a detail of the landscape or room. It's a compelling vision which underscores how the music seems to emanate from the past. I also strongly suspect that the aesthetic of these films had an influence on the fabulously titled Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus which similarly creates a composite picture of music of a much more modern American South, rooting the music in the culture as a kind of palimpsest.

Again from Wikipedia, in making the film about Dillard Chandler, John Cohen apparently intended to "debunk stereotypes of Appalachian folksingers being merely the preservers of traditional British and Scottish ballads, with few modern influences or styles", arguing that "much of his work bore more resemblance to the struggles of modern life than to Old World storytelling". Which makes his choice of title rather intriguing. This is not only an 'old' song, but one which has reached it's end, strongly suggesting that we are witness here to the end of a tradition. A tradition with its roots firmly in the past. The film's titles make the connection with Cecil Sharp's collecting in the Appalachians earlier in the century (Sharp apparently collected songs from serveral of Chandler's relatives) and suggest there may be no one surviving who can sing these old songs the way Chandler can. Towards the end of the film there's a moment where Chandler's singing is drowned out by contemporary rock and roll from the nearby jukebox. The presence of radio and recorded music as some form of threat to older musical cultures is present in both of these films, for all that they are situated in the present.

There's an element of nostalgia in both of these films, but what mitigates this is the respect for the hard lives these people live, which is precisely the quality that can be found in so much folk music. Nothing here idealises the past. It presents the past both as it was and as it is. Because we are always remaking the past, whether it is an individual or collective past. Perhaps instead of 'nostalgia', 'elegy' is the word I really want here.