My poem "Sheela-na-Gig" is now online as part of Weird Fiction Quarterly's Advent of the Weird. I remain indebted to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashlyme for the inspiration. Please imagine a soundtrack of PJ Harvey and a slight apologetic look in the direction of the ghost of Seamus Heaney. I am delighted by the historical provenance of the photograph which has been chosen to accompany it.
Back in moving pictures, the Elisha Cook Jr. rabbit hole has led to a fact I had not known about George Stevens' Shane (1953) and which I have become fascinated by: that it is responsible for changing the way that violence is portrayed in American cinema.
It's a new fact to me, not to film history. The director had been interviewed about it as early as the promotional weeks before the film's release:
In most Westerns, everybody shoots and nobody gets hurt. One thing we tried to do in Shane was reorient the audience to the horror of a pistol. We used gunplay as a last resort only of extreme violence.
There's no shooting in Shane except to define a gun shot, which for our purposes is a holocaust. It's not a gesture of bravado, it's death. When guns are used, they're deadly [. . .] When two men face each other with guns we go to great pains to point out that one is an upright figure of a man the moment before a trigger has been pulled. In the next moment he's a hunk of nothing in mind.
The 1953 article credited his inspiration to the all-American unnerving spectacle of children playing with toy pistols, shooting one another point-blank for harmless fun. His son linked it instead to his father's experiences in WWII, where his unit of the U.S. Army Signals Corps had taken the only color film of the Normandy landings and Stevens himself had recorded the atrocities of newly liberated Dachau:
Dad told me of a basic idea he wanted to convey. He had come home from war having watched only one movie in three years, and went to see a John Wayne Western in which, as he put it, they were using six-guns like guitars—shooting, falling down, getting up and shooting some more. In combat he had seen what a round from a .45 could do to the human body. In Shane he wanted to undermine the glamor of gunplay by dramatizing the significance of a single bullet [. . .] Torrey draws. Wilson draws faster. The three wranglers violently yanked Torrey back, splaying him in the mud, avoiding the cliché of the victim clutching his stomach and falling forward. To magnify the moment, my father recorded an eight-inch Howitzer firing in a canyon and combined it with a high-pitched rifle shot. Two decades later, Sam Peckinpah, himself a director of Westerns, would say, "Killing used to be fun and games in Apacheland. You fired a shot and three Indians went down. You always expected them to get up again. But after Jack Palance shot Elisha Cook, Jr. things started to change."
By 1974, Stevens himself was making an even broader and more deliberate connection between his experience and the material:
As time went on, however, I kept feeling that I should do a picture about the war—all the other guys had done or were doing pictures about their war experiences, [John] Ford, [John] Huston, Wyler, and so on. And here I was avoiding the subject. Until I found Shane—it was a Western, but it was really my war picture. The cattlemen against the ranchers, the gunfighter, the wide-eyed little boy, it was pretty clear to me what it was about.
I did an unusual sound effect in that picture. In most Westerns, you know, people are shooting off guns all the time, until you don't even notice it anymore. I wanted people to be really jolted out of their seats the first time Shane uses his gun. It didn't happen until maybe an hour into the film; I very carefully kept gunshots out of it up until that point, to make the first one more emphatic. So I got a little cannon, put it right off-camera, and when Alan Ladd fires his gun, I had them shoot off the cannon and it made a tremendous roar.
That I have seen earlier Westerns in which violence is treated unglamorously and disillusioningly is not the point. Prior to Shane, apparently no one in Hollywood had thought of using a harnesss and wires to create the illusion of a gunshot victim blasted off their feet by the lethal transference of kinetic energy—the PCA pushed to tone the scene down and Stevens pushed right back—and the brainwave of defamiliarizing the sound of the shots from library cracks and zings to the impact of a battlefield seems to have been another innovation: a visceral, expressionist way of translating the novel's ambivalence toward the capacity for killing, which even when employed heroically exacts an alienating cost. Being set in Wyoming in 1889, it is a war story, of the Johnson County War. I haven't seen the film since seventh grade and had no ability to evaluate its handling of violence, especially not in comparison to other movies when I had seen comparatively few to that point, but it is instructive that I remember the killing of Stonewall Torrey as a kind of nightmare shock, it seems to be coming on forever and it's still worse than the viewer imagined when it actually hits: something of that awful instantaneous man-to-meat conversion that Stevens was aiming for must have come through. I still expect to argue with the film when I rewatch it because I cannot imagine that in 1953 it was allowed to preserve the aspect of the novel I turned out to love most, but I have seen a lot more Westerns since, and a lot more violence in movies, and I am willing to guess that it will still have its effect.
ashlyme for the inspiration. Please imagine a soundtrack of PJ Harvey and a slight apologetic look in the direction of the ghost of Seamus Heaney. I am delighted by the historical provenance of the photograph which has been chosen to accompany it.Back in moving pictures, the Elisha Cook Jr. rabbit hole has led to a fact I had not known about George Stevens' Shane (1953) and which I have become fascinated by: that it is responsible for changing the way that violence is portrayed in American cinema.
It's a new fact to me, not to film history. The director had been interviewed about it as early as the promotional weeks before the film's release:
In most Westerns, everybody shoots and nobody gets hurt. One thing we tried to do in Shane was reorient the audience to the horror of a pistol. We used gunplay as a last resort only of extreme violence.
There's no shooting in Shane except to define a gun shot, which for our purposes is a holocaust. It's not a gesture of bravado, it's death. When guns are used, they're deadly [. . .] When two men face each other with guns we go to great pains to point out that one is an upright figure of a man the moment before a trigger has been pulled. In the next moment he's a hunk of nothing in mind.
The 1953 article credited his inspiration to the all-American unnerving spectacle of children playing with toy pistols, shooting one another point-blank for harmless fun. His son linked it instead to his father's experiences in WWII, where his unit of the U.S. Army Signals Corps had taken the only color film of the Normandy landings and Stevens himself had recorded the atrocities of newly liberated Dachau:
Dad told me of a basic idea he wanted to convey. He had come home from war having watched only one movie in three years, and went to see a John Wayne Western in which, as he put it, they were using six-guns like guitars—shooting, falling down, getting up and shooting some more. In combat he had seen what a round from a .45 could do to the human body. In Shane he wanted to undermine the glamor of gunplay by dramatizing the significance of a single bullet [. . .] Torrey draws. Wilson draws faster. The three wranglers violently yanked Torrey back, splaying him in the mud, avoiding the cliché of the victim clutching his stomach and falling forward. To magnify the moment, my father recorded an eight-inch Howitzer firing in a canyon and combined it with a high-pitched rifle shot. Two decades later, Sam Peckinpah, himself a director of Westerns, would say, "Killing used to be fun and games in Apacheland. You fired a shot and three Indians went down. You always expected them to get up again. But after Jack Palance shot Elisha Cook, Jr. things started to change."
By 1974, Stevens himself was making an even broader and more deliberate connection between his experience and the material:
As time went on, however, I kept feeling that I should do a picture about the war—all the other guys had done or were doing pictures about their war experiences, [John] Ford, [John] Huston, Wyler, and so on. And here I was avoiding the subject. Until I found Shane—it was a Western, but it was really my war picture. The cattlemen against the ranchers, the gunfighter, the wide-eyed little boy, it was pretty clear to me what it was about.
I did an unusual sound effect in that picture. In most Westerns, you know, people are shooting off guns all the time, until you don't even notice it anymore. I wanted people to be really jolted out of their seats the first time Shane uses his gun. It didn't happen until maybe an hour into the film; I very carefully kept gunshots out of it up until that point, to make the first one more emphatic. So I got a little cannon, put it right off-camera, and when Alan Ladd fires his gun, I had them shoot off the cannon and it made a tremendous roar.
That I have seen earlier Westerns in which violence is treated unglamorously and disillusioningly is not the point. Prior to Shane, apparently no one in Hollywood had thought of using a harnesss and wires to create the illusion of a gunshot victim blasted off their feet by the lethal transference of kinetic energy—the PCA pushed to tone the scene down and Stevens pushed right back—and the brainwave of defamiliarizing the sound of the shots from library cracks and zings to the impact of a battlefield seems to have been another innovation: a visceral, expressionist way of translating the novel's ambivalence toward the capacity for killing, which even when employed heroically exacts an alienating cost. Being set in Wyoming in 1889, it is a war story, of the Johnson County War. I haven't seen the film since seventh grade and had no ability to evaluate its handling of violence, especially not in comparison to other movies when I had seen comparatively few to that point, but it is instructive that I remember the killing of Stonewall Torrey as a kind of nightmare shock, it seems to be coming on forever and it's still worse than the viewer imagined when it actually hits: something of that awful instantaneous man-to-meat conversion that Stevens was aiming for must have come through. I still expect to argue with the film when I rewatch it because I cannot imagine that in 1953 it was allowed to preserve the aspect of the novel I turned out to love most, but I have seen a lot more Westerns since, and a lot more violence in movies, and I am willing to guess that it will still have its effect.
