ABSTRACT
Emotions and empathy in John Ford In our last chapter of this book, we will focus on John Ford’s masterpiece The Searchers (1956) analysing it from the rasa perspective. The literature on Ford is vast but there is no book or article, as far as I know, that has explored Ford’s extraordinary propensity to arouse rasa emotions. Ford’s greatness as a director, then, lies in his facility to elicit rasa in the spectator, even in the simplest of scenes. An example is the shot of the cactus rose on the coffin of Tom Doniphon at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. This image emits the most profound sorrow and pathos (the karuna rasa). Other examples revolve around intimate scenes between the male and female protagonists of his films, exemplified by the pairing of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in several films, when emotions conveying the erotic rasa (shringara) pass between them in a glance, a posture, and a gesture. Bharatamuni instructs us in the Natyasastra that the rasa states and sentiments in a play ‘depend on Glances’ which are then ‘represented by gestures and postures’ (see Ghosh 1967, Vol. 1, 246). There are many gestures in Ford’s films, and his gestures can be both overt and covert. Hasumi Shigehiko has isolated a tendency in Ford’s characters throughout his films to throw objects around or at each other, as for example, John Wayne throwing a gun at Ward Bond in The Searchers (see Hasumi 2005). This tendency to throw objects can be seen as overt signs of Ford’s armory of gestures. On the other hand, Ford can be very subtle, as in a memorable scene in The Searchers, inside the Edwards home. Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne) takes his leave to join Reverend Captain Samuel Clayton’s riders to track down missing cattle (a ruse by the Indians to divert the men away from the homesteads so that they can attack the homes). As he leaves, his sister-in-law Martha (played by Dorothy Jordan) gives him his coat and Ethan returns the gesture by kissing her on the forehead. Clayton (played by Ward Bond) is in the scene, but he averts his eyes from Ethan and Martha. Nothing is said but the emotion is all very evident and it depends on glances, gestures, and postures. Clayton’s presence in the scene makes it even more poignant, however. His averted look contains a missing back story about their relationship that we can only infer from the rasa that Ford effortlessly arouses. Earlier on, Clayton had observed Martha caressing Ethan’s coat privately in her bedroom. The whole first half hour of the film, revolving around
the Edwards home, is particularly rasa-rich, which I will return to later. Apart from such relatively quiet and intimate moments, Ford can activate rasa in scenes of monumental splendour, particularly on outdoor locations in Monument Valley. In The Searchers, the search party who have ridden out to search for the members of the Edwards family taken by the Comanches, are followed by two lines of warriors, one line on each side of the search party, the Indians riding parallel with the searchers and composed as if they are part of the landscape, at one with the rise in the horizon of the desert sandstone mountain. Ford easily evokes wonderment and awe (the adbhuta rasa) in the way he integrates the Indians with the landscape.
