engleski

John Ford's Hamlet, or the Western as an American Mourning Play

It could be argued that the Western epitomizes film as an American art, to which the gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1881) supplies a specimen story and a story of origin--a proposition supported by the fact that Wyatt Earp eventually acted as a consultant to early Hollywood filmmakers, including young John Ford. In Ford's version of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral--My Darling Clementine (1946)--the story invites to be considered against an emphatic reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet, suggesting that Hamlet ultimately captures the constitution of the Western, and anticipates the seminal function of American cinema in the ideation of modernity. With a focus on My Darling Clementine, I propose to analyze how Hamlet is accommodated and transformed in the Western, while Ford, freshly returned from World War II, claims for the Western the rationale and the rationality of the early modern mourning play. What is finally at stake is America as a laboratory of political modernity, whose own rationale relies on the thinking of transformation.

John Ford, Hamlet, the Western, American cinema

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