John Ford and the Author Theory: contribution of Anglo-Saxon criticism towards debate

Abstract

Tradition in cinema criticism has given excessive importance to Cahiers du Cinéma in relation to Fordian authorship. However, it was in fact the ‘Turkish youths’ (Cahiers’s critics) the ones who not only undertook radical theories as regards cinema auteur but they were also the ones who decided what was the appropriate moment in which to establish Ford as an author, developing wide arguments on that issue. On a rather discreet level, but much earlier in time, the British magazine Sequence defended with strong reasoning the Fordian cause in the late forties. That position also made Sequence critics face the main obstacles in the Author Theory, although from a less systematic point of view. The existence and importance of Peter Ericsson’s article published in Sequence in 1947 in which the first reasons for the Fordian cause are defined, appears very clearly in the present article. From 1950 onwards and in the same magazine, the critic Lindsay Anderson would undertake once again the work that was raised by Ericsson.