Artists Write: Thinking While Making Things
Jackson Pollock and Piero della Francesca Ride Lonesome, Part 2
-- David Reed
The alternation s in this film between day and night both marks time and shows changes of mood. Day is for moving; night is for contemplation and conversation. These scenes are 'American night,' shot during the day with filters. Thus, although supposedly 'night,' there are strong, eerie shadows in the darkness, making night look like darkened day, daytime with an awareness of evil and destruction. Shadows cut across limbs and eat into figures, separating heads from torsos and limbs from bodies. At Dobie's corral, Boone talks to Wid and his head keeps dipping into shadow where it is deformed by the unexplained ultra-darkness.
...
There is a similar sense of dismembering in another scene in which Billy, the prisoner, gets the drop on Brigade and is talked out of shooting him by Boone. The camera shows the lower part of Brigade's body with the rifle against his stomach or the top half of his body, never showing him whole as Billy threatens to "cut him in two," quoting Brigade from their earlier confrontation -- a reminder to the viewer that the camera is always cutting the landscape and can cut a body as well.
There's a balance in this film between the hero, Brigade, and the villain, Boone, similar to the equilibrium Boetticher achieves between figure and landscape. Neither character dominates the action. Also, we are able to see unexpected sides of both characters' personalities. Brigade, the hero, is secretive and taciturn. Boone, the villain, is warm and sympathetic. The purpose of Pollock's all-over space is a form of psychological integration. This integration is achieved by one character in this film., Boone, and was lost by another, Brigade.
The huge spaces of the landscape and the movement across it imply freedom. Ride Lonesome emphasizes this freedom's inverse dark side. Boone declares to Mrs. Lane, "If a man had you he would never know a black lonely night." The amnesty Boone seeks is an escape from the loneliness of the Western hero, an integration of his freedom into the social world of other men and women.
In Boetticher's Westerns evil is a force of nature, not a result of individual psychology. Frank says he "almost forgot" killing Brigade's wife. The hero's advantage is not the goodness of his cause, but merely the willingness to risk his life. After Brigade kills Frank, Boone confronts Brigade to take Billy away from him so that he can turn Billy in for his amnesty. By risking his life, Boone becomes a hero himself. Brigade allows Boone to take Billy, while Boone rides off with Mrs. Lane and Wid. This is the only Western I know in which the villain not only escapes, but gets the girl.
When I lived in the Southwest, near Oljato on the Navajo Reservation, I often painted a tree by a well near my shack. At dusk the leaves of the tree would shimmer silver in the wind. The tree reminded me of the trees in Piero della Francesca's fresco, The Story of the True Cross, a story based on the Golden Legend. When Adam died, God told his son to plant a sapling in his mouth. When this tree was cut down, its wood was used to make the cross on which Jesus was crucified. Jesus, the second Man, redeeming the first, was a vehicle to release Adam's spirit trapped in the wood.
Like Piero's frescos, Boetticher's Ride Lonesome gives ordinary objects strange monumentality and significance -- rocks, hills, trees seem to hide unexpected powers. The landscape can conceal dangerous outlaws or Mescaleros but there is more hidden in it than that. As Boone says, "Funny ain't it how a thing can seem one way and turn out altogether something else?"
At the beginning of the film Brigade ironically says that Santa Cruz is his destination knowing his destination is really the hanging tree, an anti-cross. Instead of attracting a Jesus to release its spirit, it has attracted Frank to seek his revenge and now attracts Brigade to seek his.
In the last scene, Brigade burns down the hanging tree. By doing so, Brigade is attempting to release the spirit in the tree that has caused him to seek revenge. I doubt he thinks that he can be free, but he does feel that he might help Boone. For Boone is now where Brigade was before the story began. Boone is about to begin a domestic life. Brigade is hoping to keep the narrative from repeating itself, hoping he can help Boone to avoid the dilemmas he faced.
What amazes me is that Boetticher can combine this mysterious sense of the hidden powers in the landscape with the bluntness of his art. For in his filmmaking there is nothing hidden or left over. It is simple and direct. Idea and result mesh perfectly. As Boetticher said in an interview, "Nothing in those Scott pictures would make the audience say, "What did he mean? What was he trying to say?'"
Boetticher directed the final western of the Ranown cycle, Commanche Station, a year later. As different characters ride by on another journey, one can see the same burnt hanging tree in a flooded meadow. No emphasis is placed on the tree. But how can one escape noticing it? Perhaps Boetticher wanted to remind us of the strength of his art. Now the hanging tree is just a tree.
First published in Proximity Number Four. This is the second part of the essay. Part one is here.
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