In Defense of the Flaherty Tradition
In Defense of the Flaherty Tradition
by Richard Leacock
Paris, April 27, 1990
"My God John, you don't realize it, but some people starve in this world..." with John Grierson's reply, "That's what I've been trying to tell you, you stupid old bastard, for twenty years."
These quotes are used at the start of a review by Bryan Winston of Paul Rotha's Robert Flaherty: A Biography. What then follows is not so much a review as a scurrilous attack on Flaherty, man and film maker, drawing on Rotha's seriously flawed book to support his destructive mission. I also reviewed the book and dealt with many of its bizarre accusations. I thought that put an end to it; but recently, I have encountered books, articles and arguments from students that echo this attack, by people that have read, and accepted these assertions as true.
I was cameraman and associate producer on Robert and Frances Flaherty's last major film, Louisiana Story. We lived and worked together from the spring of 1946 to the summer of 1947, in a rambling old house in Abbeville, Louisiana, and I think it is time, on the basis of my direct knowledge, that the record be cleared. What are the major accusations? Having no social consciousness? Most of those that criticized the films for lacking "social consciousness" were Marxists or sympathizers of some form or another. They subscribed to the very commonly held view, that the whole world was moving steadily and inexorably toward a Socialist form of government. That this would be achieved through class based revolutions and, as a result, the "exploitation" of man by man would eventually be abolished and a state of pure Communism, a classless, utopian society would evolve... I, and most of my friends and coworkers were of roughly this persuasion; we were Ideologues. Flaherty was not an ideologue. He can best be described as a humanist. He particularly believed in the dignity of people who maintained a close relationship with their environment; he admired people who were very good at what they did, whether they be Eskimo building an Igloo, glass blowers in industrial Britain or roughnecks on a modern oil-rig. He hated the missionaries who, in his view, destroyed the natural goodness of people and opened the door for generally harmful economic involvement. He rejected all forms of violence, including revolutions. His views on the relationship between people and the machines that they have developed, are well expressed in the commentary of his film The Land, written and spoken by Mr. Flaherty. A film that was, in effect, banned for its social content. Being "unschooled"? True, Robert Flaherty had minimal formal schooling but was immensely well read, one of the most cultured and best informed people I have ever had the good fortune to work with. If you wanted to talk about ancient Rome you had best brush up on your Gibbon! Not understanding how to make films? "He never wrote a script; he did not cover scenes; he could not maintain continuity and never learned to direct dialogue" according to Bryan Winston.
When I went to Louisiana as Robert Flaherty's cameraman and we prepared to start filming in the spring of 1946, Mr. Flaherty spent weeks writing a detailed treatment of the film. Not a script, in the sense that each individual shot was listed, which would have been an absurdity for this kind of film, but a remarkably accurate description, beautifully written, of his conception of how the film would be. This treatment exists and can be read. Among other details it includes a description of the oil well blowing up. I used to worry about this scene because I had no idea how we were going to replicate an oil well blowing out, exploding! We tried, with pumps, to simulate it and it did not work. A neighboring well blew out and that is what is in the film.
Flaherty also wrote the dialogue which comes across as stilted and flat. This is due, not to his lack of skill in directing dialogue but, as in all the films of this period that used non actors, to the fact that they simply could not do it. Take a look at Humphry Jennings A Diary for Timothy and the other much applauded British Documentary films of that period.
No man I have ever worked with knew more about making films. His
approach was completely different from the normal practice of the industry. He was at odds with the "Hollywood" or industry approach where you write a detailed script which attempts to describe each and every shot in the entire film. Then a director, armed with this script and working with a veritable army of specialists including director of photography and his three or four subordinates, sound person and their assts; chief electrician and his crew, who handle all the lights; chief Grip and his crew who handle the camera dollies and cranes and all the equipment in front of the lights; Chief prop man; make up; costumes; transport; catering... and with the aid of all these talented and creative people plus, of course, the stars and other actors you go about systematically creating what is described in the script. It works! One distinguished–BlHp– director, Billy Friedkin, when I asked what he does, claimed that, like an orchestra conductor, it is not altogether clear; the machine works almost on it's own; but if anything goes wrong, say, they are on location in a distant clime, the star gets a call from a friend back home implying that his girl friend is hanging out with someone else....etc. then! the director has a job; to get the actor onto the set the next day, on time and fit to work!
Flaherty tried working with the hollywood director W.S. Van Dyke on a film called White Shadows. This was after his experience making Moana (1925) in Samoa. The film was made in Papeete but Flaherty could not stand the absurdity of this huge crew and the way they worked. He found it obscene.
The relatively small crews employed by the British Documentary film makers with whom he made sequences for Industrial Britain were also too big and too set in their ways for him.
Flaherty believed that film making was a relatively simple process and that he could do it all himself with the help of local people. To this day I agree with his position; not if you want to make Hollywood films redolent with wrecked cars and flaming Helicopters, but to make a different kind of film, a more direct observation of life but still, a Film.
Being profligate with film and time? An accomplished still photographer before he tackled film, Flaherty decided that you should spend what money you had on your equipment, which should be excellent but be as portable as possible, and the rest should go for time and film. Lots of time and lots of film. In most of the literature we still find him bitterly criticized as being "profligate" with film. In Rotha's book he is said to have shot 5600 ft (about 56 min) of film in
one afternoon "of nothing but ocean waves!". When you look at the final storm sequence of Man of Aran you can understand why. Never, before or since have I seen ocean waves depicted with such menace. Even today I meet people who ask what my "shooting ratio was" and what ever answer I give them there is a sea of nodding heads as if to say "Oh well, if I had that much film available then I could..." It should also be borne in mind that all the major films involved considerable animal footage; try telling an alligator what to do and when to do it! Then people criticized Flaherty for taking so long, a year at least, to shoot a film. Somehow this is deemed immoral. Yet on Hollywood films, though they might use less footage, they boast of the money spent, millions of dollars. They produce what are called "production values".
On his first three major films, Nanook, Moana and Man of Aran the man "who didn't know how to make a film" took with him, several tons of equipment: cameras, which he was able to take apart, clean and repair; an entire motion picture processing lab including Steinman-racks, developing tanks, a printing machine, an electric generator, and a 35mm projector. He did not take a lab technician, he knew how to do it himself and taught local young men to do it for him. He set up a motion picture laboratory so that he and his subject film makers could look at and learn from their efforts. Today, in Academia, this is called "feedback". I know of no other person in the history of film making that has done such a thing. He took with him a wide assortment of lenses, especially long focus lenses 80mm., 100mm., 120mm and on up to 300mm. He spoke at length to me, when we would sometimes chat together about our work, late at night after a long days filming. I had majored in Physics as a student at Harvard and had taken a course in Geometrical Optics, a somewhat arid subject that came back to life when the computer arrived and did what no human could ever do. But I have never met anyone other than Flaherty who knew so much about the use and reasons to use different lenses, (a good book on photographic optics is by Kingslake though it is probably out of print).
When I mention the focal lengths of the lenses Flaherty preferred, they are for use with a motion picture 35mm image. The size of the negative is a determinant of the focal length required to achieve a given result. What really counts is the observers point of view. Take a portrait, a head more or less filling the frame. If you come close to the subject, say one meter away and you fill the frame, you will use a "short" focal length lens, perhaps a 35mm. Now you move back to 3 meters away and, to fill the frame, you will need an 80mm lens. What the person looks like in the two close shots is very different, as is the background. This is why a studio portrait photographer will always be at the very least 3 meters away from his subject. I give this very elementary example because I doubt that most of the directors I have worked with know it and neither do Flaherty's critics. It is the "drawing" that matters, the position from which you wish to see an event, a person, a tree, an oil rig, an elephant... There is no such thing as an "elephant lens"!
The subject of scaling, fascinated Flaherty. How to impress an audience with the height of a tree, or a cliff. How to capture the ferocity of the ocean waves in a storm. How to convey the balletic splendor of the drilling process on an oil rig. All of these and many more are examples of Flaherty's knowledge of the camera, of optics, of the vagaries of the human eye. There is no general solution to these problems and there is nothing sacred about Flaherty's different ways of achieving his aims. He regarded each new sequence as a unique problem, the solution to which had to be discovered by trial and error. In teaching, I have found it well worth studying carefully, shot by shot, the sequence in Moana that shows Pea climbing the Coconut tree. The sequence in Man of Aran where the boy is seen fishing from a cliff. Several sequences in Elephant Boy where the scaling of the Elephant is extraordinary. The sequence in Louisiana Story where J.C. first sees the oil rig as it moves into position. The final storm scene of Man of Aran. If these sequences are filmed by a man who doesn't know how to edit, or to tell a story, then I wish that there were more as ignorant as he!
For me, the Flaherty films are uneven; as are almost all films, paintings, operas, quartets... I think it is important to realize that when these films were made, there was only one place to show films: the regular movie theater, at that time programmed by the large Hollywood producers (in the USA, that is). There were no alternate distribution outlets, no television, no Art Theaters, no film schools or college courses on Classic Cinema. He had chosen subject matter that was considered inappropriate by the industry. Both the Flahertys were acutely aware that after the almost miraculous success of Nanook, they still faced the same problem in their subsequent films. This is why there are sequences in all the films except Moana, which was a bust at the box office, that in my view are "crowd pleasers". The struggle between Nanook and the seal at opposite ends of a rope. The same sequence with Tiger King and the basking shark and then again in Louisiana Story with the boy and the alligator. These served as comic relief, no more, no less. In all these scenes there were some sturdy fellows at the other end of the rope. Cheating? This accusation implies that Flaherty had claimed that his films were pure "observation". This is not so. Flaherty was making "movies" to be shown in Theaters along with the hokum coming out of the studios. He chose to collaborate with native peoples to tell a story of their recent past. In Nanook, to depict life as it was before the introduction of the gun, the cigarette lighter, the Li-Lo mattress and canned Peaches. In Moana the story is set before the intervention of the Missionaries. No one, anywhere, in 1921 or in 1925, could make films without intervention, and it is important to realize that the man who talked of non-intervention and not writing scripts was not Flaherty but the Soviet film maker Dziga Vertov and he only talked about it and was no more able to do it than anyone else. Take a look at his Kino Pravda sequence depicting an early trial of "deviationists". Flaherty, like everyone else, was working with a hand crank camera which had to be mounted on a tripod. The camera had to be set up and then the scene was enacted for the benefit of the audience. Even in the arctic it is usually dark when you go to bed! and there was no way that he could film inside a normal Igloo with a bulky tripod and no lights. These accusations of "cheating" are ludicrous!
In reference to Moana, Bryan Winston writes "...the revival, on the body of Ta'avale (Moana), of the dead ceremony of tattooing..." When, in 1975, some 50 years after the filming of Moana, Monica Flaherty and I visited the village where she, aged five, had learned to swim, we saw every single thing that you see in the film still taking place, including several young men who had been tattooed just as Moana was. This important sequence, in which Moana is tattooed from the waist down, as a right of passage, was not and is not today, a "dead ceremony". Margaret Mead's work on Samoan society has been cited as challenging the accuracy of Flaherty's film. Recently Mead's work has been seriously questioned as being naive and perhaps preposterous. The village of Safune had not changed very much. The only road required a four-wheel-drive truck to get there. No running water. No electricity. There was an engine some miles down the beach that made an infernal noise at times; otherwise, peace. We had brought a small generator and a 16mm movie projector with us, and that first night the entire village gathered and we showed Moana, projected on a sheet (silent) with Pea, now a man of nearly 60, making comments on the side. The people of Safune loved it. It was their film. Their people. Their lives. Pea was by no means the only person who could remember the filming. We asked for and received their enthusiastic collaboration in making the first recordings for the sound version of Moana. Subsequently Monica Flaherty completed this work with the help of her Samoan friends, adding sounds, songs and dialogue that has revealed Moana as a film that appears to have been made for sound. Yet not a frame of the film has been changed. The sound version of Moana, is proof, that far from not knowing the rules of film making, and particularly of editing, Flaherty was way ahead of his time and anticipated our contemporary styles. Monica Flaherty did not change a single frame of the original film when she added sound. It looks as if it was shot as a sound film.
It was on Moana that Flaherty was experimenting with a bipack color process. In order to record a red image a new emulsion had been developed which was sensitive to red and least sensitive to green. The camera was loaded with two rolls of film, their emulsions in contact, one Orthochromatic (not sensitive to red) the other Panchromatic (sensitive to red). The process was far from perfect and was abandoned but Flaherty noticed that the Samoans skin tone, which appeared almost black on the regular Orthochromatic film, came out a beautiful tone on the new Panchromatic film. He proceeded to shoot the whole film on this new Panchromatic stock, which later became the standard of the industry. Moana was the first feature length film to use the new emulsion. Hardly the work of a dilettante.
On a more personal level Flaherty is portrayed as a callous man who didn't care for the people that he was filming and even endangered their lives. Part of this is due to Flaherty's love of telling a good story, the rest is pure malice. No one was ever even hurt on a Flaherty film. But more serious are the constant references to his drinking. I personally know quite a bit about alcohol and alcoholism. Some six years ago I found it wise to join Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA. I can usually spot a kindred soul!
I spent 14 months working and living with Mr. Flaherty. I had known him since my school days in England and remained close to him until his death in 1951. Mr. Flaherty loved to have a drink. He usually drank a well watered Scotch Whisky, slowly. I never ever saw him anywhere near drunk. Never! His good friend John Houston used to tell us that it was Flaherty who tried to teach him how to drink in moderation (and failed!). These tales are almost all attributed to John Grierson (an alcoholic) and Paul Rotha (an alcoholic). In 1964 I attended the Leipzig Film Festival. Mrs Flaherty was there. Both John Grierson and Paul Rotha had to be confined to their rooms under a doctor's care on account of their public drunkenness. I have always refrained from saying this in public because I thought it unseemly. I have regretfully come to the conclusion that it is time to deal with this garbage.
John Grierson managed to get his life under control and stopped drinking altogether, shortly before his death but, sadly, Rotha went on to the bitter end. Both these men were ultimately more interested in film as propaganda, I use that word in it's earlier sense, as it was used before Dr. Goebles gave it the modern connotation of lying. They had a social "mission", to put the working man and the "downtrodden" on the screen. Neither of them were film makers in the sense that I have been using the term; people who actually handled cameras and did their own editing. There was also more than a touch of jealousy!
The Flaherty films still work their magic on audiences. Why then, is it that they are grudgingly admired and then systematically denigrated in contemporary academic film literature? In the early 1960's Prof. Asen Balikci made a series of films on the Netsilik Eskimo. The life style of the Eskimo was acted out very much as it is in Nanook of the North but with a considerably greater time-lag and subsequently a synchronous dialogue sound track was created in a studio in Montreal. Fine. I have never heard any accusations hurled at these films. Is it because Dr. Balikci has a PhD.? Film academics have written an enormous amount in praise of the films made by the Soviet school of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov et al. Films that I find far less interesting today; that developed a rather crude sign language, and resulted in techniques more appropriate to TV commercials than to humanistic observation. It is so easy to write "intelligently" about these films and their "theories of montage..." and so difficult to write about the deceptive simplicity of a humanist film maker.
Academics are required to publish! Perhaps they should be warned of an inscription that Mr. Flaherty found over a doorway on the Aran Islands "May The Good Lord Preserve Us From The Wrath Of The O'Flahertys"
by Richard Leacock
Paris, April 27, 1990
"My God John, you don't realize it, but some people starve in this world..." with John Grierson's reply, "That's what I've been trying to tell you, you stupid old bastard, for twenty years."
These quotes are used at the start of a review by Bryan Winston of Paul Rotha's Robert Flaherty: A Biography. What then follows is not so much a review as a scurrilous attack on Flaherty, man and film maker, drawing on Rotha's seriously flawed book to support his destructive mission. I also reviewed the book and dealt with many of its bizarre accusations. I thought that put an end to it; but recently, I have encountered books, articles and arguments from students that echo this attack, by people that have read, and accepted these assertions as true.
I was cameraman and associate producer on Robert and Frances Flaherty's last major film, Louisiana Story. We lived and worked together from the spring of 1946 to the summer of 1947, in a rambling old house in Abbeville, Louisiana, and I think it is time, on the basis of my direct knowledge, that the record be cleared. What are the major accusations? Having no social consciousness? Most of those that criticized the films for lacking "social consciousness" were Marxists or sympathizers of some form or another. They subscribed to the very commonly held view, that the whole world was moving steadily and inexorably toward a Socialist form of government. That this would be achieved through class based revolutions and, as a result, the "exploitation" of man by man would eventually be abolished and a state of pure Communism, a classless, utopian society would evolve... I, and most of my friends and coworkers were of roughly this persuasion; we were Ideologues. Flaherty was not an ideologue. He can best be described as a humanist. He particularly believed in the dignity of people who maintained a close relationship with their environment; he admired people who were very good at what they did, whether they be Eskimo building an Igloo, glass blowers in industrial Britain or roughnecks on a modern oil-rig. He hated the missionaries who, in his view, destroyed the natural goodness of people and opened the door for generally harmful economic involvement. He rejected all forms of violence, including revolutions. His views on the relationship between people and the machines that they have developed, are well expressed in the commentary of his film The Land, written and spoken by Mr. Flaherty. A film that was, in effect, banned for its social content. Being "unschooled"? True, Robert Flaherty had minimal formal schooling but was immensely well read, one of the most cultured and best informed people I have ever had the good fortune to work with. If you wanted to talk about ancient Rome you had best brush up on your Gibbon! Not understanding how to make films? "He never wrote a script; he did not cover scenes; he could not maintain continuity and never learned to direct dialogue" according to Bryan Winston.
When I went to Louisiana as Robert Flaherty's cameraman and we prepared to start filming in the spring of 1946, Mr. Flaherty spent weeks writing a detailed treatment of the film. Not a script, in the sense that each individual shot was listed, which would have been an absurdity for this kind of film, but a remarkably accurate description, beautifully written, of his conception of how the film would be. This treatment exists and can be read. Among other details it includes a description of the oil well blowing up. I used to worry about this scene because I had no idea how we were going to replicate an oil well blowing out, exploding! We tried, with pumps, to simulate it and it did not work. A neighboring well blew out and that is what is in the film.
Flaherty also wrote the dialogue which comes across as stilted and flat. This is due, not to his lack of skill in directing dialogue but, as in all the films of this period that used non actors, to the fact that they simply could not do it. Take a look at Humphry Jennings A Diary for Timothy and the other much applauded British Documentary films of that period.
No man I have ever worked with knew more about making films. His
approach was completely different from the normal practice of the industry. He was at odds with the "Hollywood" or industry approach where you write a detailed script which attempts to describe each and every shot in the entire film. Then a director, armed with this script and working with a veritable army of specialists including director of photography and his three or four subordinates, sound person and their assts; chief electrician and his crew, who handle all the lights; chief Grip and his crew who handle the camera dollies and cranes and all the equipment in front of the lights; Chief prop man; make up; costumes; transport; catering... and with the aid of all these talented and creative people plus, of course, the stars and other actors you go about systematically creating what is described in the script. It works! One distinguished–BlHp– director, Billy Friedkin, when I asked what he does, claimed that, like an orchestra conductor, it is not altogether clear; the machine works almost on it's own; but if anything goes wrong, say, they are on location in a distant clime, the star gets a call from a friend back home implying that his girl friend is hanging out with someone else....etc. then! the director has a job; to get the actor onto the set the next day, on time and fit to work!
Flaherty tried working with the hollywood director W.S. Van Dyke on a film called White Shadows. This was after his experience making Moana (1925) in Samoa. The film was made in Papeete but Flaherty could not stand the absurdity of this huge crew and the way they worked. He found it obscene.
The relatively small crews employed by the British Documentary film makers with whom he made sequences for Industrial Britain were also too big and too set in their ways for him.
Flaherty believed that film making was a relatively simple process and that he could do it all himself with the help of local people. To this day I agree with his position; not if you want to make Hollywood films redolent with wrecked cars and flaming Helicopters, but to make a different kind of film, a more direct observation of life but still, a Film.
Being profligate with film and time? An accomplished still photographer before he tackled film, Flaherty decided that you should spend what money you had on your equipment, which should be excellent but be as portable as possible, and the rest should go for time and film. Lots of time and lots of film. In most of the literature we still find him bitterly criticized as being "profligate" with film. In Rotha's book he is said to have shot 5600 ft (about 56 min) of film in
one afternoon "of nothing but ocean waves!". When you look at the final storm sequence of Man of Aran you can understand why. Never, before or since have I seen ocean waves depicted with such menace. Even today I meet people who ask what my "shooting ratio was" and what ever answer I give them there is a sea of nodding heads as if to say "Oh well, if I had that much film available then I could..." It should also be borne in mind that all the major films involved considerable animal footage; try telling an alligator what to do and when to do it! Then people criticized Flaherty for taking so long, a year at least, to shoot a film. Somehow this is deemed immoral. Yet on Hollywood films, though they might use less footage, they boast of the money spent, millions of dollars. They produce what are called "production values".
On his first three major films, Nanook, Moana and Man of Aran the man "who didn't know how to make a film" took with him, several tons of equipment: cameras, which he was able to take apart, clean and repair; an entire motion picture processing lab including Steinman-racks, developing tanks, a printing machine, an electric generator, and a 35mm projector. He did not take a lab technician, he knew how to do it himself and taught local young men to do it for him. He set up a motion picture laboratory so that he and his subject film makers could look at and learn from their efforts. Today, in Academia, this is called "feedback". I know of no other person in the history of film making that has done such a thing. He took with him a wide assortment of lenses, especially long focus lenses 80mm., 100mm., 120mm and on up to 300mm. He spoke at length to me, when we would sometimes chat together about our work, late at night after a long days filming. I had majored in Physics as a student at Harvard and had taken a course in Geometrical Optics, a somewhat arid subject that came back to life when the computer arrived and did what no human could ever do. But I have never met anyone other than Flaherty who knew so much about the use and reasons to use different lenses, (a good book on photographic optics is by Kingslake though it is probably out of print).
When I mention the focal lengths of the lenses Flaherty preferred, they are for use with a motion picture 35mm image. The size of the negative is a determinant of the focal length required to achieve a given result. What really counts is the observers point of view. Take a portrait, a head more or less filling the frame. If you come close to the subject, say one meter away and you fill the frame, you will use a "short" focal length lens, perhaps a 35mm. Now you move back to 3 meters away and, to fill the frame, you will need an 80mm lens. What the person looks like in the two close shots is very different, as is the background. This is why a studio portrait photographer will always be at the very least 3 meters away from his subject. I give this very elementary example because I doubt that most of the directors I have worked with know it and neither do Flaherty's critics. It is the "drawing" that matters, the position from which you wish to see an event, a person, a tree, an oil rig, an elephant... There is no such thing as an "elephant lens"!
The subject of scaling, fascinated Flaherty. How to impress an audience with the height of a tree, or a cliff. How to capture the ferocity of the ocean waves in a storm. How to convey the balletic splendor of the drilling process on an oil rig. All of these and many more are examples of Flaherty's knowledge of the camera, of optics, of the vagaries of the human eye. There is no general solution to these problems and there is nothing sacred about Flaherty's different ways of achieving his aims. He regarded each new sequence as a unique problem, the solution to which had to be discovered by trial and error. In teaching, I have found it well worth studying carefully, shot by shot, the sequence in Moana that shows Pea climbing the Coconut tree. The sequence in Man of Aran where the boy is seen fishing from a cliff. Several sequences in Elephant Boy where the scaling of the Elephant is extraordinary. The sequence in Louisiana Story where J.C. first sees the oil rig as it moves into position. The final storm scene of Man of Aran. If these sequences are filmed by a man who doesn't know how to edit, or to tell a story, then I wish that there were more as ignorant as he!
For me, the Flaherty films are uneven; as are almost all films, paintings, operas, quartets... I think it is important to realize that when these films were made, there was only one place to show films: the regular movie theater, at that time programmed by the large Hollywood producers (in the USA, that is). There were no alternate distribution outlets, no television, no Art Theaters, no film schools or college courses on Classic Cinema. He had chosen subject matter that was considered inappropriate by the industry. Both the Flahertys were acutely aware that after the almost miraculous success of Nanook, they still faced the same problem in their subsequent films. This is why there are sequences in all the films except Moana, which was a bust at the box office, that in my view are "crowd pleasers". The struggle between Nanook and the seal at opposite ends of a rope. The same sequence with Tiger King and the basking shark and then again in Louisiana Story with the boy and the alligator. These served as comic relief, no more, no less. In all these scenes there were some sturdy fellows at the other end of the rope. Cheating? This accusation implies that Flaherty had claimed that his films were pure "observation". This is not so. Flaherty was making "movies" to be shown in Theaters along with the hokum coming out of the studios. He chose to collaborate with native peoples to tell a story of their recent past. In Nanook, to depict life as it was before the introduction of the gun, the cigarette lighter, the Li-Lo mattress and canned Peaches. In Moana the story is set before the intervention of the Missionaries. No one, anywhere, in 1921 or in 1925, could make films without intervention, and it is important to realize that the man who talked of non-intervention and not writing scripts was not Flaherty but the Soviet film maker Dziga Vertov and he only talked about it and was no more able to do it than anyone else. Take a look at his Kino Pravda sequence depicting an early trial of "deviationists". Flaherty, like everyone else, was working with a hand crank camera which had to be mounted on a tripod. The camera had to be set up and then the scene was enacted for the benefit of the audience. Even in the arctic it is usually dark when you go to bed! and there was no way that he could film inside a normal Igloo with a bulky tripod and no lights. These accusations of "cheating" are ludicrous!
In reference to Moana, Bryan Winston writes "...the revival, on the body of Ta'avale (Moana), of the dead ceremony of tattooing..." When, in 1975, some 50 years after the filming of Moana, Monica Flaherty and I visited the village where she, aged five, had learned to swim, we saw every single thing that you see in the film still taking place, including several young men who had been tattooed just as Moana was. This important sequence, in which Moana is tattooed from the waist down, as a right of passage, was not and is not today, a "dead ceremony". Margaret Mead's work on Samoan society has been cited as challenging the accuracy of Flaherty's film. Recently Mead's work has been seriously questioned as being naive and perhaps preposterous. The village of Safune had not changed very much. The only road required a four-wheel-drive truck to get there. No running water. No electricity. There was an engine some miles down the beach that made an infernal noise at times; otherwise, peace. We had brought a small generator and a 16mm movie projector with us, and that first night the entire village gathered and we showed Moana, projected on a sheet (silent) with Pea, now a man of nearly 60, making comments on the side. The people of Safune loved it. It was their film. Their people. Their lives. Pea was by no means the only person who could remember the filming. We asked for and received their enthusiastic collaboration in making the first recordings for the sound version of Moana. Subsequently Monica Flaherty completed this work with the help of her Samoan friends, adding sounds, songs and dialogue that has revealed Moana as a film that appears to have been made for sound. Yet not a frame of the film has been changed. The sound version of Moana, is proof, that far from not knowing the rules of film making, and particularly of editing, Flaherty was way ahead of his time and anticipated our contemporary styles. Monica Flaherty did not change a single frame of the original film when she added sound. It looks as if it was shot as a sound film.
It was on Moana that Flaherty was experimenting with a bipack color process. In order to record a red image a new emulsion had been developed which was sensitive to red and least sensitive to green. The camera was loaded with two rolls of film, their emulsions in contact, one Orthochromatic (not sensitive to red) the other Panchromatic (sensitive to red). The process was far from perfect and was abandoned but Flaherty noticed that the Samoans skin tone, which appeared almost black on the regular Orthochromatic film, came out a beautiful tone on the new Panchromatic film. He proceeded to shoot the whole film on this new Panchromatic stock, which later became the standard of the industry. Moana was the first feature length film to use the new emulsion. Hardly the work of a dilettante.
On a more personal level Flaherty is portrayed as a callous man who didn't care for the people that he was filming and even endangered their lives. Part of this is due to Flaherty's love of telling a good story, the rest is pure malice. No one was ever even hurt on a Flaherty film. But more serious are the constant references to his drinking. I personally know quite a bit about alcohol and alcoholism. Some six years ago I found it wise to join Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA. I can usually spot a kindred soul!
I spent 14 months working and living with Mr. Flaherty. I had known him since my school days in England and remained close to him until his death in 1951. Mr. Flaherty loved to have a drink. He usually drank a well watered Scotch Whisky, slowly. I never ever saw him anywhere near drunk. Never! His good friend John Houston used to tell us that it was Flaherty who tried to teach him how to drink in moderation (and failed!). These tales are almost all attributed to John Grierson (an alcoholic) and Paul Rotha (an alcoholic). In 1964 I attended the Leipzig Film Festival. Mrs Flaherty was there. Both John Grierson and Paul Rotha had to be confined to their rooms under a doctor's care on account of their public drunkenness. I have always refrained from saying this in public because I thought it unseemly. I have regretfully come to the conclusion that it is time to deal with this garbage.
John Grierson managed to get his life under control and stopped drinking altogether, shortly before his death but, sadly, Rotha went on to the bitter end. Both these men were ultimately more interested in film as propaganda, I use that word in it's earlier sense, as it was used before Dr. Goebles gave it the modern connotation of lying. They had a social "mission", to put the working man and the "downtrodden" on the screen. Neither of them were film makers in the sense that I have been using the term; people who actually handled cameras and did their own editing. There was also more than a touch of jealousy!
The Flaherty films still work their magic on audiences. Why then, is it that they are grudgingly admired and then systematically denigrated in contemporary academic film literature? In the early 1960's Prof. Asen Balikci made a series of films on the Netsilik Eskimo. The life style of the Eskimo was acted out very much as it is in Nanook of the North but with a considerably greater time-lag and subsequently a synchronous dialogue sound track was created in a studio in Montreal. Fine. I have never heard any accusations hurled at these films. Is it because Dr. Balikci has a PhD.? Film academics have written an enormous amount in praise of the films made by the Soviet school of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov et al. Films that I find far less interesting today; that developed a rather crude sign language, and resulted in techniques more appropriate to TV commercials than to humanistic observation. It is so easy to write "intelligently" about these films and their "theories of montage..." and so difficult to write about the deceptive simplicity of a humanist film maker.
Academics are required to publish! Perhaps they should be warned of an inscription that Mr. Flaherty found over a doorway on the Aran Islands "May The Good Lord Preserve Us From The Wrath Of The O'Flahertys"