Embedded Files
Jeremiah Johnson chronicles a 19th century Mexican-American War soldier whose disenfranchisement with society spurs him to retreat to a life of isolation in mountain wilderness. Naive about survival in extreme conditions, the protagonist suffers until he encounters an experienced mountain man, who mentors him in basic mountain life systems. Acculturation to climate and habitat is not enough, however, as Johnson must learn to respect the customs and culture of the indigenous Crow Indians or face certain death. Johnson's journey takes him through many Utah locations, including the Alpine Loop, Mt. Timpanogos, Ashley National Forest, Leeds Snow Canyon, St. George, Sundance, Uinta National Forest, Wasatch-Cache National Forest, and Zion National Park.
Five Bullets of Rich Description of Place in Jeremiah Johnson
- Fat trout and beaver slip through a snow-covered bubbling stream.
- Low slopes sweep from left to right horizontally and function as frames to the indomitable mountains behind and yet-to-come.
- Smoke-tipped tepees sit in rings on grassy plains, swaddled by mountain shadows.
- A burial occurs against a background of a diagonally striated rocky outcrop, dimpled by desert sunlight.
- The wind builds in volume and tenor, swirling, howling, and accusing.
Five Scholarly Research Excerpts
about A Sense of Place
1. “A sense of place is something that we ourselves create in the course of time” and is “the result of habit or custom.... reinforced by …..a sense of recurring events” (Jackson, 1994, p. 5).
2. A film’s sense of place, “dual in nature, involving both an interpretive perspective on the environment and an emotional reaction to the environment” (Hummon, 1992, p. 259), creates contradictions of place and identity.
3. Identification of places helps us to organize the world into mental structures, allow us to function effectively, and are also are a source of “emotional security, pleasure, and understanding” (Yan Xu, 1995, p. 1).
4. Places are “repositories and contexts within which interpersonal, community, and cultural relationships occur, and it is to those social relationships, not just the place, to which people are attached” (Low and Altman, 1992, p. 7).
5. Architecture as art distinguished from the running river “becomes flexible, textured, and subject to poetic play and refiguring” (Mentz,, 2011, 84).
Works Cited
Hummon, David. (1992). "Community Attachment: Local Sentiment and Sense of Place." pp. 253-278 in Place Attachment, edited by Irwin Altman and Setha Low. New York: Plenum.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. (1994). A Sense of place, a Sense of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Low, S. M. & Altman, I. (1992). Place attachment: A conceptual inquiry. In Altman, I., and Low, S. M. (Eds.), Place attachment. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 1–12.
Mentz, S. (2011). Shakespeare's Beach House, or The Green and the Blue in Macbeth. Shakespeare Studies, 3984-93.
Yan Xu. (1995). Sense of Place and Identity. Action Research Illinois. Retrieved 04 May 2015.
What are place features and their symbolism in the film?
Argument:
.
Films have the capacity to persuade audiences to consider alternative lifestyles and entirely different psychological spaces. Jeremiah Johnson, produced by Sydney Pollack and starring an understated Robert Redford, argues that the social world suppresses our natural selves, and it is only through a return to nature that we can truly understand the multiple layers of self that establish our identities.
Support Paragraph, grounded in A Sense of Place:
Shot in a series of breathtaking Utah mountain settings, Jeremiah Johnson chronicles one individual's quest to reconcile knowledge of the contemporary world with a largely lost and ancient, self-sustaining self. The Rocky Mountains present unforgiving climates, formidable peaks, and a habitat in which only the most rugged and determined can survive. Lost, starving, and nearly frozen, Johnson confronts a wilderness of loneliness that is “dual in nature, involving both an interpretive perspective on the environment and an emotional reaction to the environment” (Hummon, 1992, p. 259) and which creates contradictions of place and identity. Indeed, Johnson's process from Mexican-American War deserter to mountain man is far from pure, as we vacillate from identifying with him as a hero in one scene to rejecting him for colonialist complicity and sacrilege of indigenous customs in another. It is only when Johnson accepts "social relationships, not just the place"(Low and Altman, 1992, p. 7) that he is able find peace, in so that the sun glinting off mountain peaks symbolizes hope in the face of the tremendous obstacles that all humans face in the journey toward self-actualization.
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