On Working With Robert and Frances Flaherty
On Working With Robert and Frances Flaherty
By Richard Leacock
April 26 1990
When Robert Flaherty invited me to go with him to Louisiana, it was not exactly clear that I was to be the cameraman for Louisiana Story. He had seen a twelve minute film I had made at age 14, of my fathers banana plantation in the Canary Islands, but that was already ten years ago. It was 1946, World War II had ended and I had been discharged, along with literally millions of other young men, from the US Army. Three years as a combat cameraman, partly in the soggy wilds of Burma. Flaherty did not ask to see my work, lucky for me because I hadn't seen much either; in the army you "shoot" and send your film in and that is usually the last you hear about it unless there is something wrong. He took me on and what was to be a fourteen month filming saga, began. Filming, day after day, often seven days a week, in the swamps, marshes and Bayous of Southern Louisiana. A radical transition, yet the hazards, both natural and combative, of the towering forests of Burma were certainly a better preparation for life with the Flahertys than working with what I regarded as a "normal" documentary film crew.
We were a tiny group, Mr. and Mrs. Flaherty, Helen Van Dongen, our editor, myself and part of the time an assistant, Sydney Smith, who had recently graduated from the Putney School in Vermont. We lived as a family. At first Mr. Flaherty worked endlessly on the script. There have been many statements that he did not work from a script and , true to the nature of ambiguity and complexity, they are true! He did not "work from a script" but he wrote one and worked on it long and hard. He wrote, with lengthy discussions with Frances, the closest he could come to his vision of the finished film. I was to learn later, as we got into the filming, that your preconceptions are only valid as long as they retain their validity in the real world. That when you encounter something different from your preconceived ideas you latch onto this new vision and frequently abandon your preconceptions. The script that he wrote exists today and is, I think, remarkably close to the finished film. It is ironic that a major sequence in that script that is not in the film is a visual fantasy of the giant oil refinery at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where we spent many weeks during the winter, filming what we liked best about this huge, non-human, incomprehensible and perhaps magical monster. Pipes, weirdly shaped retorts, flames flickering in the lowering sky, hardly a human figure to be seen. A magnificently beautiful sequence that, when shown to our sponsors from Standard Oil, sent them into shock! It seemed that we had given our loving attention to just about every detail that was and is illegal in a refinery... and, when told not to use it Flaherty stormed out muttering to me "...they want it to look like a well appointed gentlemen's lavatory!...". Us? We had filmed in good faith and loved the sequence that we had created and to this day I think that it was the best oil refinery sequence I have ever seen; it explains nothing!
With script in mind, but not in hand, a typical days filming might start with Mr. Flaherty dropping a book outside my room at about 4.30 AM. Our equipment had been readied late the night before. Two Arriflex 35mm Cameras (recently liberated from Hitler's Wehrmacht) two Akeley Gyro tripods etc. Mr. Flaherty usually prepared breakfast while we were getting up. Fried beans, bacon, sausage, eggs, toast and lots of tea... by about six, as the sun rose, we were filming, maybe floating on trestled pontoons on the lake at Avery Island (the home of Tabasco Sauce). We were filming alligators. Alligators do not respond to direction. Patience! Infinite patience. May the good Lord preserve me from ever again making a film that depends upon the good will of animals!
Both cameras were set up. I would shoot with one and either Mr. Flaherty or sometimes Sydney shooting with the other. We filmed the alligators; when they moved we filmed, when they stopped, we stopped. We filmed birds. We filmed snakes. We filmed spider-webs and clouds and flocks of migrant swallows on the wing. When the glory of the dawn light gave way to the harsh shadows of high-noon we made preparations for "acted" scenes of J.C., our Cajun boy going through his comings and goings., then more filming into the dusk and home to our house to develop tests, ship film to our Lab in New York, screen rushes that had been returned, clean cameras... till late at night and a well earned well watered drink and then to sleep.
I was upset at what I considered a lack of decisiveness, a vagueness. I had been accustomed to Directors who knew exactly what they wanted..."put the camera here! Get that tree limb in the top right corner of the frame...a shaft of light here...the camera should be lower...", but Mr. Flaherty seemed not to know, would try this, then that and then, when we looked at the rushes, suffer with grunts and groans and then mutter; "that's better, that's good..." and we would go back to shooting with more confidence in what we were doing. I have never worked like this before or, until very recently, since. It upset me. The uncertainty was infectious. But slowly I began to understand that what we, or Mr. Flaherty, had done before was not important. That every single sequence was a new problem and had to be filmed in a new way and that the moment you started applying yesterdays lessons to today's problems, you were on the verge of becoming a bore. This was partly why Mr. Flaherty said that "our films are made with film and time, I need lots of both..."
When I look at Nanook of the North or Moana today, especially the version of Moana to which Monica Flaherty has added sound without changing a single frame of the original film, I am amazed at how modern both the filming and the editing appear.
I now find it curious that in the literature of film, far more attention is lavished on the "new" and "advanced" theories of filming and editing exemplified by the Soviet School of Eisenstein, Pudovkin et al. Flaherty was usually described as a kindly “romantic” with an "instinctive" approach, certainly not as a theoretician. More recently, with the publication of Paul Rotha's "Robert Flaherty; A Biography" he has come under attack not only in this book but in reviews such as Brian Winston's, in the British magazine Sight and Sound where Flaherty is described as a slovenly, incoherent, profligate, and ultimately, as an apologist for 19th century imperialism. I suspect that it is these "critics" who are out of step with our times.
Flaherty taught me to concentrate on finding images. You can only do that if you use the camera as an extension of your own eye. You look, you search. Yes, you pan and tilt. You learn to look for light and position yourself to take advantage of its beauty. You learn to sense the movement of the camera in space. You think of the image not merely as a way of showing something but also as a way of withholding information, of creating tension in the viewer. Of not revealing too much. Of seeing things with different perspectives by using different focal-length lenses. Collecting images that are not obviously connected, to create a space of your own making. And so it goes, with the caveat that nothing counts until you see it on the screen. You look and you look until you know it's right.
These films are of particular interest to those of us that see film making as an art of revelation, perhaps closer to drawing and painting than to Broadway. With this in mind take a careful look at the way in which Flaherty created the sense of height in the sequence where the boy is perched on a cliff in Man of Aran, I still marvel at the way the waves are captured in the final storm sequence in that film, unique! The sequence in Moana where Pea climbs a coconut tree; the height is achieved, not by geometry as in a conventional approach, but by using long lenses and making the time of climbing the scaling device. Some sequences were made, I think, purely for their entertainment value. The ubiquitous tug of war scenes of Nanook, Man of Aran and Louisiana Story, but remember that the Flahertys had only one outlet for their work, the local Cinema where they had to compete with the great studio productions. There were no alternate markets, no TV, no film schools, no festivals.
For me, the most important aspect of these films is their humanness. The details in Nanook of the family, of play; of play and work. Likewise in Moana, I had not realized until Monica Flaherty and I went to the village where the film was made, but some 50 years later, set up a projector and showed it to the entire population with Pea, now a man of 60 speaking...they laughed, not derisive laughter but a laughter of joy at seeing the same human frailties that are still part of their lives today. When filming people of his own culture, whether they be roughnecks on an oil rig in Louisiana or skilled craftsmen in industrial Britain, his prime concern was their involvement and skill in doing what they did so well, it was his token of respect.
It is time to turn our backs on the ill informed and often spiteful writings of the second rate who want to build themselves by sniping at the great. No one was ever hurt on a Flaherty film. No one was exploited because no one ever got rich from these films. Sabu the Elephant Boy became a Star and a Hollywood real estate tycoon who could easily have bought and sold the Flahertys. And finally, Robert Flaherty never claimed to be an Anthropologist and was, quite rightly, suspicious of ideologues. He was a superb film maker who worked intimately with his wife Frances. They both paid dearly the price of being blessed with integrity.
By Richard Leacock
April 26 1990
When Robert Flaherty invited me to go with him to Louisiana, it was not exactly clear that I was to be the cameraman for Louisiana Story. He had seen a twelve minute film I had made at age 14, of my fathers banana plantation in the Canary Islands, but that was already ten years ago. It was 1946, World War II had ended and I had been discharged, along with literally millions of other young men, from the US Army. Three years as a combat cameraman, partly in the soggy wilds of Burma. Flaherty did not ask to see my work, lucky for me because I hadn't seen much either; in the army you "shoot" and send your film in and that is usually the last you hear about it unless there is something wrong. He took me on and what was to be a fourteen month filming saga, began. Filming, day after day, often seven days a week, in the swamps, marshes and Bayous of Southern Louisiana. A radical transition, yet the hazards, both natural and combative, of the towering forests of Burma were certainly a better preparation for life with the Flahertys than working with what I regarded as a "normal" documentary film crew.
We were a tiny group, Mr. and Mrs. Flaherty, Helen Van Dongen, our editor, myself and part of the time an assistant, Sydney Smith, who had recently graduated from the Putney School in Vermont. We lived as a family. At first Mr. Flaherty worked endlessly on the script. There have been many statements that he did not work from a script and , true to the nature of ambiguity and complexity, they are true! He did not "work from a script" but he wrote one and worked on it long and hard. He wrote, with lengthy discussions with Frances, the closest he could come to his vision of the finished film. I was to learn later, as we got into the filming, that your preconceptions are only valid as long as they retain their validity in the real world. That when you encounter something different from your preconceived ideas you latch onto this new vision and frequently abandon your preconceptions. The script that he wrote exists today and is, I think, remarkably close to the finished film. It is ironic that a major sequence in that script that is not in the film is a visual fantasy of the giant oil refinery at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where we spent many weeks during the winter, filming what we liked best about this huge, non-human, incomprehensible and perhaps magical monster. Pipes, weirdly shaped retorts, flames flickering in the lowering sky, hardly a human figure to be seen. A magnificently beautiful sequence that, when shown to our sponsors from Standard Oil, sent them into shock! It seemed that we had given our loving attention to just about every detail that was and is illegal in a refinery... and, when told not to use it Flaherty stormed out muttering to me "...they want it to look like a well appointed gentlemen's lavatory!...". Us? We had filmed in good faith and loved the sequence that we had created and to this day I think that it was the best oil refinery sequence I have ever seen; it explains nothing!
With script in mind, but not in hand, a typical days filming might start with Mr. Flaherty dropping a book outside my room at about 4.30 AM. Our equipment had been readied late the night before. Two Arriflex 35mm Cameras (recently liberated from Hitler's Wehrmacht) two Akeley Gyro tripods etc. Mr. Flaherty usually prepared breakfast while we were getting up. Fried beans, bacon, sausage, eggs, toast and lots of tea... by about six, as the sun rose, we were filming, maybe floating on trestled pontoons on the lake at Avery Island (the home of Tabasco Sauce). We were filming alligators. Alligators do not respond to direction. Patience! Infinite patience. May the good Lord preserve me from ever again making a film that depends upon the good will of animals!
Both cameras were set up. I would shoot with one and either Mr. Flaherty or sometimes Sydney shooting with the other. We filmed the alligators; when they moved we filmed, when they stopped, we stopped. We filmed birds. We filmed snakes. We filmed spider-webs and clouds and flocks of migrant swallows on the wing. When the glory of the dawn light gave way to the harsh shadows of high-noon we made preparations for "acted" scenes of J.C., our Cajun boy going through his comings and goings., then more filming into the dusk and home to our house to develop tests, ship film to our Lab in New York, screen rushes that had been returned, clean cameras... till late at night and a well earned well watered drink and then to sleep.
I was upset at what I considered a lack of decisiveness, a vagueness. I had been accustomed to Directors who knew exactly what they wanted..."put the camera here! Get that tree limb in the top right corner of the frame...a shaft of light here...the camera should be lower...", but Mr. Flaherty seemed not to know, would try this, then that and then, when we looked at the rushes, suffer with grunts and groans and then mutter; "that's better, that's good..." and we would go back to shooting with more confidence in what we were doing. I have never worked like this before or, until very recently, since. It upset me. The uncertainty was infectious. But slowly I began to understand that what we, or Mr. Flaherty, had done before was not important. That every single sequence was a new problem and had to be filmed in a new way and that the moment you started applying yesterdays lessons to today's problems, you were on the verge of becoming a bore. This was partly why Mr. Flaherty said that "our films are made with film and time, I need lots of both..."
When I look at Nanook of the North or Moana today, especially the version of Moana to which Monica Flaherty has added sound without changing a single frame of the original film, I am amazed at how modern both the filming and the editing appear.
I now find it curious that in the literature of film, far more attention is lavished on the "new" and "advanced" theories of filming and editing exemplified by the Soviet School of Eisenstein, Pudovkin et al. Flaherty was usually described as a kindly “romantic” with an "instinctive" approach, certainly not as a theoretician. More recently, with the publication of Paul Rotha's "Robert Flaherty; A Biography" he has come under attack not only in this book but in reviews such as Brian Winston's, in the British magazine Sight and Sound where Flaherty is described as a slovenly, incoherent, profligate, and ultimately, as an apologist for 19th century imperialism. I suspect that it is these "critics" who are out of step with our times.
Flaherty taught me to concentrate on finding images. You can only do that if you use the camera as an extension of your own eye. You look, you search. Yes, you pan and tilt. You learn to look for light and position yourself to take advantage of its beauty. You learn to sense the movement of the camera in space. You think of the image not merely as a way of showing something but also as a way of withholding information, of creating tension in the viewer. Of not revealing too much. Of seeing things with different perspectives by using different focal-length lenses. Collecting images that are not obviously connected, to create a space of your own making. And so it goes, with the caveat that nothing counts until you see it on the screen. You look and you look until you know it's right.
These films are of particular interest to those of us that see film making as an art of revelation, perhaps closer to drawing and painting than to Broadway. With this in mind take a careful look at the way in which Flaherty created the sense of height in the sequence where the boy is perched on a cliff in Man of Aran, I still marvel at the way the waves are captured in the final storm sequence in that film, unique! The sequence in Moana where Pea climbs a coconut tree; the height is achieved, not by geometry as in a conventional approach, but by using long lenses and making the time of climbing the scaling device. Some sequences were made, I think, purely for their entertainment value. The ubiquitous tug of war scenes of Nanook, Man of Aran and Louisiana Story, but remember that the Flahertys had only one outlet for their work, the local Cinema where they had to compete with the great studio productions. There were no alternate markets, no TV, no film schools, no festivals.
For me, the most important aspect of these films is their humanness. The details in Nanook of the family, of play; of play and work. Likewise in Moana, I had not realized until Monica Flaherty and I went to the village where the film was made, but some 50 years later, set up a projector and showed it to the entire population with Pea, now a man of 60 speaking...they laughed, not derisive laughter but a laughter of joy at seeing the same human frailties that are still part of their lives today. When filming people of his own culture, whether they be roughnecks on an oil rig in Louisiana or skilled craftsmen in industrial Britain, his prime concern was their involvement and skill in doing what they did so well, it was his token of respect.
It is time to turn our backs on the ill informed and often spiteful writings of the second rate who want to build themselves by sniping at the great. No one was ever hurt on a Flaherty film. No one was exploited because no one ever got rich from these films. Sabu the Elephant Boy became a Star and a Hollywood real estate tycoon who could easily have bought and sold the Flahertys. And finally, Robert Flaherty never claimed to be an Anthropologist and was, quite rightly, suspicious of ideologues. He was a superb film maker who worked intimately with his wife Frances. They both paid dearly the price of being blessed with integrity.