Steven Spielberg’s favorite, John Wayne Western, is a 1956 classic

When Steven Spielberg grew in the postwar era, the stories of jeans fighting against the Native Americans were extremely popular because they represented the way in which the United States wanted to be seen at that time, as a strong and heroic justice bearer. He slipped to see “The Searchers” by John Ford when he was nine years old (through The Hollywood Reporter). He became not only one of his favorite films, but also one of his greatest artistic inspirations.

Often considered the best west of all time, “the search engines” defined the tropes of the genre that we all know and love. John Wayne offers his best performance as Ethan Edwards, a civil war veteran who performs a five -year search for his nieces who were kidnapped by the Comanche after the tribe members burned his house and killed his brother, sister -in -law and his son. “The Searchers” has all the show and adventurous emotion that we would later see in the series “Indiana Jones” of Spielberg, but his deepest themes of home and family resonated more with him and are embedded in almost all his films. Ethan sees the home as a place where he can feel safe and in control. Without his family there, Ethan is even more shaken by violence after the recent war.

Despite operating in completely different genres, this desire for stability and feeling of being left behind appears in Spielberg films such as “et”, where Elliot desperately wants ET to be part of his family instead of returning to space, or “artificial intelligence”, where the Robot boy David reveals the memory of his happiest day: simply being with his mother inside his brilliant home. These houses are broken, but the protagonists want to assemble them again.

Spielberg was not only emotionally connected to “the search engines”, but also taught him a very important lesson about cinema.

Steven Spielberg said AFI That he sees John Ford’s filmography, especially “The Searchers”, to be inspired before making his own films:

“I am very sensitive to the way he uses his camera to paint his images and the way he frames things. And the way he organizes and blocks his people, often keeping the static camera while people give him the illusion that there is much more kinetic movement when there is no.

Spielberg met John Ford when he was a teenager, who recounts in his semi -autobiographical “Los Fabelmans”. Ford is played by another visionary filmmaker, the late David Lynch, in a moving final performance and perfect final. The Ford and chain smoker describes the importance of not simply putting the horizon line in the middle of the frame, but rather to push it closer to the upper or lower part to generate a more convincing image. We see these pictorial techniques along “the search engines”, especially in the disturbing final shot where Ethan is wrapped in the shadow and framed by a door, looking towards the vast plains where he no longer belongs.

John Ford’s most famous Western showed Steven Spielberg how to create intentionally shots with emotional and visual greatness that makes use of each corner of the frame. Spielberg learned to be a visually expressive filmmaker when repeatedly studying his favorite film, and now he has produced some of the most emblematic images in cinematographic history, including the gaze of the swimmer’s legs in “Jaws”, T. Rex Roaring as the banner falls into the “original Jurassic Park”, and the Silhouette of Et Soaring through the moon, among the accounts, among the accounts, among the accounts, among the accounts, among the accounts.