Deathwatch by Combs C. Scott

Author:Combs, C. Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, ART057000, Art/Film & Video
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

LOOPING BACK, OUT

The premier use of the obituary voice in fiction film may be John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941), a film in which a son recalls his childhood in a story that concludes with his father’s fatal mining accident. Earlier voice-over was envisaged as a defense against time. In the recently restored The Power and the Glory (1933) the protagonist tells the story of a dearly departed friend, talking over images from the past that reset the now-soiled reputation of the deceased. The flashback structure in Preston Sturges’s script for the film devised a kind of posthumous testimonial.7 When Philip Dunne was commissioned to write the screenplay for John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley—a film that “may well have set the mold,” as Sarah Kozloff puts it, for voice-over flashback—he followed Sturges’s earlier model, which he termed “narratage.”8 Originally conceived as a voice speaking over a silently playing film, narratage afforded Dunne and Ford the strategy of making the past present as a frame narrator (Huw Morgan) recollects his childhood experiences in a Welsh coal mining village. Huw’s voice strikes up the story of the valley “as it was when” he was a boy, when it was “possessed of the plenty of the earth,” before the sludge of the coal blanketed the hillsides. His voice courts us into, and then back out of, the past.

Huw’s memory and the film are correlated by the narrative as techniques to ward off mortality. The film’s theme would seem to be, as Kozloff writes, “the power of memory (which is explicitly linked to the power of God) to defeat death and loss.”9 A pair of deaths occurs toward the end of the film, both foreshadowed by the warning whistle (a knell that spells approach rather than death’s aftermath) blown from the mine’s entrance. With the first, Huw’s father, Gwilym, ascends from the mine depths on the service elevator, positioned in a tableau of grief. His son Ivor lies across his lap; Gwilym’s hand rests on his son’s arm, and the preacher, Mr. Gruffydd, places his hand on Gwilym’s. They hold their pose for several seconds in a tableau that ascends. Later, Gruffydd’s departure from town is interrupted by the familiar sound of the alarm whistle. The crowd gathers again around the mine’s open mouth, fearing that Gwilym has not escaped the explosion.

After Huw enters the mine and holds the hand of his still-breathing father (a descent that gives time for Gwilym to utter his final words to Huw: “That is a good old man you are”), we cut to his mother, Bess, standing with his sisters, Bronwyn and Angharad, awaiting the outcome of the rescue attempt. Bess tells the women that she has just had a vision in which Mr. Morgan appeared to her.10 (We may be reminded of Mammy’s premature registration of Spunk’s death in Hallelujah!) Returning to the elevator shaft, the last two shots of Gwilym in the flashback alternate between movement and stillness. The first repeats the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.