I presented Jeremiah Johnson at the London cine-club in December 2008, at Severine and Chris' place in Chelsea.
Jeremiah Johnson is a 1972 film directed by Sydney Pollack, starring Robert Redford. It is not another agitated Western story but a slow, contemplative chronicle of a man trying to live in the Rocky Mountains.
Jeremiah Johnson, a fictional character, is inspired by novels about fur hunters, like 'Mountain Man' by Vardis Fisher, a novelist from Idaho. The script was written by the multi-talented John Milius who also wrote Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian and, more recently Rome. The movie was filmed in Utah at various mountain locations in extreme winter conditions.
I was supposed to show a film on the theme ‘Nature’ and I hesitated with three other options:
· A Kurasawa film: the beautiful Derzou Ouzala (the story of a Russian explorer in Siberia and his old local guide) would have been an obvious choice. Earlier in his career, the wonderful BW photography of forests in Rashomon and Kumonosu jô (Macbeth, Spider Web Castle, 1957) oozes pantheist magic.
· A Terence Mallick film. In all his films - I think he made only four - the most important thing is the long shot on fields waving under the wind.
· I also contemplated showing one of the episodes of ‘Planet Earth’. BBC Natural history production has reached near perfection with Blue Planet and Planet Earth. Unlimited resources from BBC, NHK and Discovery, high definition photography, great music and the warm narration of David Attenborough. Best moments: the Snow Leopard, lions killing an elephant, starving polar bear swimming in open sea and attacking a herd or walruses out of desperation, killer whale catching a seal and playing with their food, great white shark catching a seal in ultra slow motion, the many aerial shot and satellite shots, the fixed automated cams catching seasonal change or the movement of flowers.
Jeremiah Johnson, a fictional character, is inspired by novels about fur hunters, like 'Mountain Man' by Vardis Fisher, a novelist from Idaho. The script was written by the multi-talented John Milius who also wrote Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian and, more recently Rome. The movie was filmed in Utah at various mountain locations in extreme winter conditions.
I was supposed to show a film on the theme ‘Nature’ and I hesitated with three other options:
· A Kurasawa film: the beautiful Derzou Ouzala (the story of a Russian explorer in Siberia and his old local guide) would have been an obvious choice. Earlier in his career, the wonderful BW photography of forests in Rashomon and Kumonosu jô (Macbeth, Spider Web Castle, 1957) oozes pantheist magic.
· A Terence Mallick film. In all his films - I think he made only four - the most important thing is the long shot on fields waving under the wind.
· I also contemplated showing one of the episodes of ‘Planet Earth’. BBC Natural history production has reached near perfection with Blue Planet and Planet Earth. Unlimited resources from BBC, NHK and Discovery, high definition photography, great music and the warm narration of David Attenborough. Best moments: the Snow Leopard, lions killing an elephant, starving polar bear swimming in open sea and attacking a herd or walruses out of desperation, killer whale catching a seal and playing with their food, great white shark catching a seal in ultra slow motion, the many aerial shot and satellite shots, the fixed automated cams catching seasonal change or the movement of flowers.
Why Jeremiah Johnson?
Difficult to say why this nice but relatively low-key film is one of my all-time favourites, although it’s arguably not a heavyweight classic and Pollack probably not a one of the greatest directors. I fell in love with that film when I was 12. It impressed me a lot in many ways. At the same age I was also very much impressed by Little big man (1970), and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid (1969), two other sad, adult, compelling Westerns from the 60 and 70s. In Jeremiah I loved the naïve a capella songs, the simplicity of the tale (no plot, a chronicle). I love the music: a mixture of Western fiddle folk music and Indian flute. I love the voice over - I always love that in films.
Sydney Pollack died in May 2008. He was 73. Redford and Pollack were great friends and made seven films together, arguably some of their best including Three Days of the Condor (1975), The way we were (1973), Electric Horseman (1979), and Out of Africa (1985). Pollack won Best Movie and Best Director for Out of Africa. Redford and Pollack shared a great love for nature. Jeremiah was partly shot near Redford property in Sundance, a very remote ski resort in Utah, where Redford lives and where he created an Independent Film Festival in 1981. Redford’s own film A River Runs Through It (1992) was another beautiful film on nature. Redford has always been politically liberal and a militant environmentalist.
Jeremiah is one of the first and one of the best ecological films. When soldiers guided by Johnson cross an Indian cemetery and Johnson’s family is slaughtered in revenge by the Crow tribe, we don’t see the Indians at all. The whole episode works as a metaphor of Western white men disregarding nature’s rules and unleashing the wrath of natural gods. Before that Johnson had reached autarcic happiness with his squaw and son and was leaving in peace with all tribes; once that edenic harmony is broken starts the last part of the movie, a dark chronicle of vendetta between Johnson and the Crows.
On the other hand Jeremiah Johnson is not a preachy overstated ecological fable. Nature is not glorified. Johnson is not in search of a mystical experience. Nature is neither good or bad, indifferent to mankind. It is beautiful, brutal, awesome and bitterly cold. Indians, too, are neither better or worse than white men, but they tend to be wiser. They are part of nature, ordinary folks. They are more or less tolerant with white hunters who trespass their land. Jeremiah is one of the first Westerns where Indians are played by native Americans and speak Indian languages.
Is the film a Western or not? Those mountain men are not romanticized as the cow boys and heroes of the legendary Far West in classic Fordian Westerns; they struggle, they fail; they hardly survive. One of the first ‘realistic’ Western, but still a Western: the music, the beginning and the ending that tap into American legend. Contrast between the storytelling that is sober, simplistic, a chronicle or a survival, and the voice over, that tells us a legend and the beautiful, open end. ‘Et on raconte… qu’il y est encore’. I love the simplicity of beginning too, no lengthy introduction: Johnson arrives by the river and asks the first man he meets where to find game in the region. The man says go to the mountains on the left. Johnson says thank you, and he’s off.
Why exactly Johnson has come to the mountains is never explained. In a classic Western plot, Johnson would have committed a crime or would falsely be accused of a crime. In any case, near the middle of the film rescuing the migrants would then be his redemption, and the hermit would re-integrate the human society and marry the girl. Here, on the contrary, this good deed eventually will destroy Johnson’s life. Classic Westerns, like Greek tragedy, is about wild men trying to become decent civilized people. In the desillusioned vietnam-war America of the early 70s ,Jeremiah Johnson is a man who rejects civilisation, decides to go West to get lost, to become wild.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_johnson
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068762
