ROBERT FLAHERTY: The man in the iron myth

Author(s): Richard Corliss

Source: Film Comment , NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1973, Vol. 9, No. 6, Special Issue:
Documentary Film (NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 1973), pp. 38-42
Published by: Film Society of Lincoln Center

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43451235

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Film Society of Lincoln Center is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Film Comment

This content downloaded from

88.214.187.12 on Thu, 25 Feb 2021 17:16:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 ROBERT FLAHERTY
The man in the iron myth by Richard Corli

Frances Flaherty, Ricky Leacock, and Robert Flaherty on location for LOUISIANA STORY, photo: Museum of Modern Art/ Film Stills Archive

38 NOVEMBER 1973

This content downloaded from

88.214.187.12 on Thu, 25 Feb 2021 17:16:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 If, alone among the gods in Andrew preconscious. The sharp whites and
Sarris's Pantheon, Robert Flaherty is I Remembering Frances Flaherty j grays produced by Flaherty's orthochro-
today scorned or ignored, it may be be- On the relatively rare occasions that I matic stock suggest a tonal morality play
cause of the sanctimonious reverence he have managed to complete a personal between Good and- not Evil- the Un-
was granted while alive, and the prema- film, one that has not been tailored to known. His uncanny knack for capturing
ture deification that immediately followed satisfy the needs of a client, I have in- on film the swirl patterns of soil and sea
his death in 1 951 . Now, when the profane variably had problems showing it. I tend (the innocent eye was also a painterly
"Hollywood hacks" of the Thirties and to assume that people will not under- one, worthy of Monet) can be traced to
Forties have become auteurist divinities, stand it, that they will think it is trivial, the palpable landscapes of nanook. And
Flaherty can just barely be noticed in a superficial, even silly. One way to deal here, the ability of his camera to record
remote niche: the Brattleboro reliquary. with this problem is to leave the film texture but not temperature helps univer-
Ironically, the icons erected in his name sitting on a shelf- "almost completed" salize his setting: the Arctic snowstorm
have fudged our perspective and ob- but that is patently absurd. I have to looks like an Arabian sandstorm. Nanook
scured his stature. For Flaherty is not so find out how other people react. So I is a Bedouin, and we are all Eskimos.
completely other that we cannot ap- show it to audiences. I am pleased if Without Nanook himself, however,
proach his career with the same unawed they "like it," but doubt that there are Flaherty's film might have been a turning
respect we (should) bring to a Hitchcock very many who understand what I have point in world cinema, but it would not
or a McCarey. Otherwise, critical filmog- been up to. Who's trusted judgment do have been a popular success. From the
raphies can turn into gaga hagiogra- I value? Believe me, there have not moment nanook of the north opened at
phies, in which neither the filmmaker nor been many. Frances Flaherty was one, New York's Capitol Theatre (on a double
the art of criticism is served. Movies were and I will miss her sorely! bill with grandma's boy), Nanook was a
not meant to be seen from a kneeling I remember the first time I ever star. He was also a remarkable natural
position. showed her a film, back in 1935 or '36: actor. It's easy to imagine that at first
Flaherty once said, "First I was an my first film about our banana planta- Flaherty led Nanook and his family
explorer; then I was an artist." For him, tion in the Canary Islands. Both she and through showmanlike bits of business (as
the journey was at least as important as Bob loved it and said so- but a day or in our introduction to the six, when they
reaching the destination. And, in one two later Frances took me aside and emerge from their kayak, one by one, like
sense, his films are so many flags mark- mentioned that she didn't like that so many midget clowns from a circus
ing the ends of expeditions into Hudson tricky cutting of the pumping machinery auto), and gradually learned to anticipate
Bay, Samoa, the Aran Islands, India, much. I was only 14 years old at the and trust his star, his subject, his collabo-
the American heartland, the billabong time, but it was important to let me rator, his friend, until the two became
bayous of Louisiana. In another sense, know that. one- became the film.
of course, these films- nanook of the Years later, when I worked with Bob Nanook's austere exoticism presents
and Frances on Louisiana story, I be-
NORTH (1 922), MOANA (1 926), MAN OF ARAN a danger for the contemporary viewer.
(1934), ELEPHANT BOY (1937), THE LAND gan to understand what was so special. Because it seems hatched from some Ice
(1941), and Louisiana story (1948)- Since then I have worked with many Age time capsule, the film- as well as its
people on many films. The Flahertys re-
mark Flaherty's excursions into various protagonist and its director- can too eas-
regions of the human soul, to discover
main unique. At first it was just Bob that ily be classified as a "noble primitive"
I concentrated on. Was he stupid? How
elemental truths, and to project them onto deserving of a civilized man's awe and
the mind-screens of the rest of us, who could a man of his stature and experi- condescension. What's missing from this
may have forgotten them in our century- ence not know how to film a sequence. overview is the respect for a craftsman
long rush toward catatonic computerism. I was used to people who knew, people that Nanook earns from Flaherty, and
But, though these truths may not have who would say "Put the camera here," Flaherty from us. The sequence in which
"Why don't you lower it an inch?" etc.,
been self-evident, Flaherty was hardly the Nanook fits an ice window for his igloo
only filmmaker to hold them. Indeed, and Bob just huffed and puffed and stands as the collaborative fusion be-
looked and looked and tried this and tween two men who respected crafts-
there are enough similarities between him
that and looked some more. But then I manship as both a tool for survival and
and Ford, Chaplin, Borzage, even Disney,
to place him in a tradition of the romantic- knew he wasn't stupid, so I tried to a fine art. And the film as a whole stands
visionary American. understand and eventually I understood alone- not as a mausoleum of textbook
Flaherty has been accused, in his film that what most people regarded in him cinema but as a memorial proclaiming the
explorations, of finding only what he was as a lack of discipline was, in fact, the immortality of a noble, atavistic way of
looking for: the Innocent Eye as Cyclops. supreme discipline. life.

As he grew older, this may have been
truer, for moana and man of aran can be
seen as spin-offs from the nanook story
line. But in his finest films, nanook and
the land, he simply saw the truth and
brought it home. These films stand at
opposite ends of Flaherty's psychical
spectrum. Nanook was his response to
a subject with which his nature was in
complete harmony; the land was an
atonal wail of compassionate horror.
Only later did I begin to understand
Frances. She was always there, taking Before nanook, in the words of Arthur
hundreds and hundreds of stills. Some Calder-Marshall, Flaherty was "the son
day if you have a Flaherty film sittingof a mining prospector" who "because
around, go through it on a viewer andhe loved the North so much went back
see if you can find a good still. Try andthere to make a film." But from the mo-
find a good still of that tall coconut tree ment he accepted Jesse Lasky's offer of
in moana -you won't find one. There employment at Paramount, "Flaherty was
were almost no frames in those films a film director, an explorer in search of
that made good stills - the stills youfilm subjects and the money to make
them." Lasky's telegram, as quoted by
associate with these films are almost all

Standing alone among his works, they the work of Frances. She was always Flaherty, exhorted him to "go off some-
also stand tallest. . with us and working. She understood. where and make me another nanook."
We didn't talk about it, we just worked But in most respects, moana is nanook's
Seen today, Flaherty's first film is together. We all had a consuming love polar opposite: from the frozen sub-Arctic
something of a revelation as both artwork of our work and each other. That is why to the South Seas; from a family fighting
and artifact. Though it was released in showing a film to Frances was so the elements to stay alive, to a society
1922, nanook seems like an afterimage so lacking in hardship that it must invent
of the cinema's prehistory and man's ļ special. - Ricky Leacock ļ copyright © 1973 by Seeker and Warburg Ltd.

FILM COMMENT 39

This content downloaded from

88.214.187.12 on Thu, 25 Feb 2021 17:16:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
a ritual of pain as the conduit to man- prophecy of man in the automated future.
hood; from Flaherty as explorer-collabo- There's also a temptation to blame the
rator to Flaherty as filmmaker-observer; Samoans for an accident of geography
from nanook the film to moana the pro-
duction.
For anyone who has seen both films,
the temptation to make moral judgments
-about both Flaherty and his subject- is Nanook's offers Flaherty- and without
strong. Nanook is an emblem of primitive Flaherty's comradely commitment to a the Documentary Film; Flaherty was more
man at his courageous, pacific best;
Moana, the nice-looking young Samoan,
is an icon of the child-man at play, a
Nanook.
MOANA.
40 NOVEMBER 1973
88.214.187.12 on Thu, 25 Feb 2021 17:16:26 UTC
as the backdrop for a stage show at the
Roxy Theatre.
that makes of their lives an eventless idyll, In 1 926, John Grierson saw moana and
as opposed to Nanook's epic struggle. called it a "documentary" film, thus bap-
What can be said is that, without the tizing a genre and investing Flaherty with
bone-chilling conflict that a situation its like
spiritual paternity. But it's really Grier-
son who deserves to be called Father of
man rather than his contractual commit- precisely its godfather (in the pre-Puzo
ment to a studio- his films run the risk sense). You can see the difference be-
of degenerating into pretty pictures.tween these two giants in a sequence
Certainly moana is very pretty. Fla- from industrial Britain, a film Flaherty
herty's camera (making exquisite usebegan of in 1931 and left for Grierson to
the new panchromatic stock) catches complete. Five years earlier, Flaherty had
light glistening off the water, or off the shot a crude fourteen-minute study,
Samoans' mocha-colored skin, with all called the pottery maker, for the Metro-
the dappled silkiness of a William Daniels politan Museum. Now, in industrial Brit-
ain, his camera homes in on the beautiful,
portrait of Garbo. But to say this is already
to note a transition in Flaherty from clay-caked
artist hands of a strapping young
to technician, and to suggest that, after potter at work at the wheel. It is an image
making a masterpiece, Flaherty composed (like many from Flaherty's later films) of
an étude. Though he films the native great formal and tonal beauty, and Fla-
craft of tattooing with the same care he herty would certainly have let it speak,
had shown toward Nanook's ice cutting, by itself, its admiration for yet another
Flaherty's respect seems trivialized here: obsolescent skill. But Grierson's narrator
the craftsmanship is not elemental but must exclaim- and exhort- "Look at
ornamental- as is the film. Only at the endthose hands!" If Flaherty would have us
of moana does he come to grips with the understand (in his own way, and in our
static, undramatic quality of Samoan life,own good time), Grierson would have us
as the camera stoops and stops to con- learn (and now, because tomorrow may
template a lovely young boy, in a gaily be too late). And if the wild Irishman was
colored bedspread, watched over by a both anthropologist and artist, the wily
loving mother- peace. But peace is not Scot was both sociologist and socialist.
box office. Nor, more importantly, is it part In its final form, therefore, industrial
of Flaherty's obsessive concern to hear Britain celebrates individual craftsman-
his own voice above the ta-pocketa- ship only to the extent that it can be bent
pocketa of the Industrial Age. Ironically, toward communal consumption, if not
Flaherty was now discovering that, to mass production.
express this viewpoint on film, he must Given this dialectic, it's odd that Fla-
teach himself the mechanisms of the herty's next film, man of aran, should be
movie camera- and try to ingratiate him- by some Griersonians as dra-
criticized
self with the motion-picture industry. The sensational and socially irrele-
matically
story of moana is the record of Flaherty's vant. Flaherty had gone off to the Aran
attempt to learn these hard lessons. Islands and, instead of returning with a
One mechanism Flaherty never could fulsome indictment of the absentee land-
fathom was the movie mogul's mind. As lordism responsible for Aran's poverty, he
the filmmaker's career progressed, his brought back a tale of dewy-eyed urchins
clout with the major distributors dimin- and anachronistic sea monsters. Grier-
ished to the vanishing point; and, after son himself, in a "defense" of the film,
nanook (a Pathé release) and moana put the argument gently but pointedly: "I
(Paramount), the films he'd hoped would like my braveries to emerge otherwise
have universal appeal were seen largely than from the sea, and stand otherwise
by bureaucrats and buffs. The history of than against the sky. I imagine they shine
his 1926 experimental short, the twenty- as bravely in the pursuit of Irish landlords
four dollar island, is instructive. Subti- as in the pursuit of Irish sharks."
tled "a camera impression of New York," Here Grierson is skillfully indulging in
the film presents Manhattan as a sky- a mode of attack he calls foolish earlier
scraper ghost-town, with the spectral in his remarks: "to complain of a pear
movements of tugboats on the East River that it lacks the virtue of a pomegranate."
recalling the entrance into Bremen of The pear is the Flaherty documentary,
Nosferatu's chamal cargo- a sort of Styx which he created and which remained
and stone. Its temperament and tech- uniquely his own; the pomegranate is the
nique are hardly mainstream Flaherty, Grierson documentary, the film of social
and its importance to him would seem to realism, which man of aran never pre-
have been as a celluloid sketch-pad for tended to be. Flaherty's films were epic,
some unspecified future project. But in not episodic; they were built around a
light of his career's subsequent turn, the hero, not around a cast of faceless prole-
final disposition of the twenty-four dol- tarian thousands. (The land proves the
lar island is poignant and ominous: it great exception to both these rules.) As
was cut from two reels to one, and used for the anachronism of the Aran Islanders
This content downloaded from
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
hunting basking-sharks- which they had
not done for fifty years- this was not a
new device for Flaherty. He had dressed
Nanook in more "genuine" Eskimo cos-
tumes, and taught him a more pictur-
esque method of catching seals. He had
subjected Moana to the painful and un-
necessary ordeal of tattooing, and indeed
painted as a primitive paradise a Samoan
island that had for years been wallowing
in British Imperial corruption. But Fla-
herty's concern was always for the truth,
not facts: "One often has to distort a thing
to catch its true spirit."
Still, if man of aran should not be
condemned for what it is not, it can be
criticized for what it is. For the first time,
we can see the lyrical naïveté of nanook
solidifying into an attitude. We can follow
Flaherty's eye as it wanders away from
the people and toward the sea, away from
individuals and toward archetypes. We
MAN OF ARAN. all photos: Museum of Modern Art /Film Stills Archive
can sense a conscious attempt on Fla-
herty's part to create a pictorial style; and
here, the chiaroscuro compositions
(charcoal rock, black-clad figures
against a gray sky) are light-years re-
moved from the natural grandeur of nan-
ook, the easy elegance of moana. We
suspect that Flaherty's spiritual kinship
with nature is in danger of degenerating
into either adoration or exploitation; the
spectacular shark-hunting and sea-fury
scenes smack of (very) special effects.
And for the first time, we dare to put
impertinent questions to the characters
in a Flaherty film: If life is so tough, why
don't they move? It's a measure of man
of aran's failure, by Flaherty standards,
that the appropriate analogues are not
other Flaherty films; for aran suggests
nothing so much as a harpoon-gun wed-
ding between the abstract immersion of
Steiner's h2o and the narrative bathos of
RYAN'S DAUGHTER.

By the late Thirties, Flaherty was inTHE LAND.

trouble. Jobless, broke, and angry, he
had just failed in his third try at collabo-
rating with the commercial-film enemy
(MGM and W.S. Van Dyke on white shad-
ows of the south seas, F. W. Murnau
on tabu, and finally Alexander Korda on
elephant boy). Career ironies were be-
coming unpleasant, and inevitable. With-
in two years of nanook, Flaherty had gone
to Hollywood and Nanook had gone back
north to die of starvation; within a year
of elephant boy, Sabu had gone to Hol-
lywood and Flaherty was left in London,
where he might have succumbed to the
artistic death of stagnation if Pare
Lorentz hadn't invited him back home, to
make a movie for the U.S. Film Service.
America was one country Flaherty had
never really explored. Geographically
and metaphysically, his life's itinerary had
led him to primitive lands in search of
timeless truths. On four continents, he
had found patches of land- of subzero
solemnity (nanook), tropical torpor LOUISIANA STORY.

FfLM COMMENT 41

This content downloaded from

88.214.187.12 on Thu, 25 Feb 2021 17:16:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
(MOANA), oceanic ferocity (man of aran), swirls and eddies of snow (nanook), sea
cause. (And when it leaves, the film tells
jungle impenetrability (elephant boy)- (MOANA, man of aran), and smoke (THE us, it even cleans up after itself.) In the
that Nature, in its setting of climate and
TWENTY-FOUR DOLLAR ISLAND). Here it's the climactic explosion of the gusher, nature
character, seemed to be offering to Fla- soil. In long, graceful helicopter-shots, is tamed but not enslaved. As with man
herty as a ready-made metaphor. And you can see his eye take in the rolling, of aran and the land, Flaherty spotlights
each film had been a safari into the man-made designs of earth, and feel his lone figures standing by impotently as
darkest memories of the race, an expedi- hand caress this huge, gorgeous, func- nature whips itself across the screen; but
tion to capture on film the endangered tional sculpture. here the force is benign, productive- and
species of living legends before they re-
It's appropriate that Flaherty should all because of man's ingenuity and
ceded irrevocably into myth. But now, in
proclaim his independence from the craftsmanship. As nocturnal meditations
the America of 1939, his government state-sponsored documentary by findingon the machine, the land is a nightmare
sponsors had assigned him the task of this particular aesthetic solution to theirsymphony, and Louisiana story is a
resolving on film a horrifyingly tangledpressing political problem. Certainly this dream play.
mass of contradictions and complexities. is the only "solution" the land offers. Flaherty's features trace a line from
Why, at the tail end of the Great Depres-After limning the beauty of this "patternactuality (nanook) to ideal (moana) to
sion, were so many migrant workers outthat will hold the soil," this "new design"possibility (man of aran) to miracle (Loui-
of work? How could they be (in Calder- (which, as Flaherty has shown in other siana story). With each succeeding film
Marshall's words) "near to starving in a films and other lands, is as old as the the narrative becomes fuller and more
land where farmers were being paid by earth), he asks, "But what about the clearly defined until, at last, Flaherty
the Government not to raise hogs"? people?" It is an unanswered question. made a fiction film with real people. In
Where had the Government failed its The land is Flaherty's belated attempt toits relaxed pace, rural genius loci , and
people? come to terms with the twentieth century: subjective use of a child's viewpoint,
Flaherty's refusal to absolve the New a fragmented work on an insoluble puz- Louisiana story recalls some of Clarence
Deal with a fast shuffle made the land zle. Typical of its maker, a man with a Brown's Forties work (national velvet,
a failure as propaganda (the film was magnetic sense for unpopular truths, the THE YEARLING, INTRUDER IN THE DUST). In-
effectively suppressed, and to some de- film dared to ask the one question no deed, Flaherty even indulges in a bit of
gree remains so today), but his will- machine man could answer. Hollywood Darwinism, with his film's sur-
ingness to explore the faces of America's vival of the nicest. One reason for the
dispossessed, without flinching or equiv- generally ecstatic response of Flaherty's
ocating, helped make it a great docu- longtime admirers to Louisiana story may
ment. The film's very lack of cohesion At the end of the war, Flaherty have been their hope that its relative
recalled
reflects, in the splinters of a broken eco- Helen van Dongen- the editorial mind accessibility might suggest to the moguls
nomic mirror, a human catastrophe too behind his camera eye on the land, a that finally the old renegade could make
overwhelming to be shoehorned into the collaborator who was really a co-author- a personal but salable film for them. If
microcosm of a narrative scenario. In- into his service, and enlisted the young this was so, their hope was futile. Flaherty
stead of a single, simple vision, the land Ricky Leacock as cameraman, for a proj- had no sustaining work between the
projects a series of eloquent images. A ect commissioned by Standard Oil. This completion of Louisiana story and his
dozen men crowd around a foreman; one time, there was a story: of a half-wild boydeath three years later.
stays outside the group, sitting hopeless- whose exploration of the bayou fauna
ly. A dying cow, a dead house, dead-eyed intersects with his discovery of Civiliza-
children- all are still standing. Unem- tion in the guise of a Humble drilling team. There were really three Robert Fla-
At first suspicious of the men and their
ployed scarecrows of men stare into the hertys: man, myth, and moviemaker. To
machines, the boy soon becomes friend-
camera; it seems they have all the time judge the third, it would be helpful if we
in the world to pose for film portraits that
ly, and the film ends, suitably, with mutual had never heard of the first two- if we
echo Dorothea Lange even as they prefig-
economic and spiritual blessings. How- could bring to the criticism of his films
ure Diane Arbus. An old Negro, obliv- ever naïve or dissembling this scenario the same innocent eye that he brought
ious to the camera, emerges from a rat-
may sound in a time of controversy over to his film subjects. The enshrinement of
infested, death-corroded house, looks oil spills, pipelines, and tax shelters, the Flaherty myth, which has become a
around, sees nothing, polishes and rings
there's no doubting Flaherty's emotionalminor industry, clouds that vision. As a
an old carillon, surveys the land again,and artistic commitment to this, his last result, Flaherty's reputation is in danger
says "Where they all gone?" and returns film. For in Louisiana story we can read of drowning in a swamp of hype and
to his home, closing the door on his the artist's autobiography: the bayou half-truths,
boy when it could keep afloat,
unseen voyeurs to converse at peace is an icon of Young Bob, the adventurer easily and gracefully, on its own. The man
with his demons. A boy sleeps, his hands and fantast; and the man who plays his Js dead. The myth must die. The films will
moving; his mother says, "He thinks he's father is a Flaherty lookalike and talkalike. live. Hill
picking peas"; she strokes his hair and (At the punch line of one of his stories,
the hands stop; as the scene fades out, you can hear the film crew cracking up ROBERT FLAHERTY FILMOGRAPHY
the hands start moving again. with laughter- and perhaps a sense of (1884-1951)
The land is a film without heroes or déjà vu.) KEY: CAL University of California Exten-
villains- only victims. The closest Fla- Louisiana story marks the signing of sion Media Center; CON Contemporary
herty comes to an éminence grise is the Flaherty's détente with the machine. And Films; ICS Institutional Cinema Service;
abstract shadow of mechanized farming, his sympathetic treatment of the great ILL University of Illinois Visual Aids Ser-
which turned farmers into foremen, and oil derrick is a triumph of humanist vice; MMA Museum of Modern Art; TFC
"farm hands" into exactly that: factory anthropomorphism. Gliding through the "The" Film Center; UON University of
workers on an endless belt. And the clos- luminous backwater, the derrick has the Nevada Audio-Visual Communication
est he comes to an optimistic conclu- silent mystery and ponderous grace of Center.
sion-if we discount, as we should, the some prehistoric monarch, an aristo- 1922 Nanook of the North CAL, CON,
apocalyptical prose announcing the ad- ILL, MMA, TFC, UON; 1926 Moana MMA;
cratic relative of the area's alligators and
vent of "the ever-normal granary"- is his water snakes; but once anchored, it will- 1934 Man of Aran CON; 1937 Elephant
camera's infatuation with contour farm- ingly becomes man's servant, honored toBoy ICS, ROA; 1941 The Land MMA;
ing. Flaherty had always delighted have in
been domesticated in a worthy 1948 Louisiana Story CON.

m NOVEMBER 1973

This content downloaded from

88.214.187.12 on Thu, 25 Feb 2021 17:16:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms