En Plein Air. John Ford e Jean Renoir inquadrano la Wilderness.

With my doctoral thesis I am going to propose a comparison between John Ford’s and Jean Renoir’s cinema, with a deep focus on the attention they both show towards nature – especially the undomesticized wilderness. Starting form the acknowledgment of the two directors’ divergent approaches, which are somehow antithetical and complementary – the former relying on a centripetal frame and the latter on a centrifugal one – I want to underline the fact that such aesthetical opposition is rooted in the very nature of the cinematographic medium, which since its origins has contained both the tendence to catch and dominate the whole reality and the wish to open to undecipherable mysteries. From this perspective, such a comparison reveals the ambiguity not only of the cinema but of the human gaze, which, though aiming to comprehend everything, is destined to fail. As a consequence, an analysis of their geo-cultural contexts (the US and France) is necessary, in order to appreciate the over mentioned differences according to the cultural roots and artistic milieu of the two artists – who, by the way, occasionally met. Not having found any study specifically devoted to a comparison between the two directors, I hope my work will be considered innovative and my results will not appear too obvious. I also hope I have quoted a sufficient number of previous works by scholars I have in great esteem and to whom I am grateful.