The Innocente Eye
The Innocente Eye
The Innocente Eye
95
The
Innocent Eye
The Life of Robert J. Flaherty
He ore the
I silent-film epic Nanook of the North
made Robert f. Flaherty famous, he had spent
a number of and exploring
years prospecting
in the area of Hudson Bay, Ungava, and Baf
finLand. Arthur (Balder-Marshall begins his
book about this extraordinary human being
with an account of that adventurous young
manhood prelude to a life that took Flaherty
to the South Seas, the Aran Islands, and India,
across the United States, and into Louisiana.
Sometimes stormy, sometimes comic, always
absorbing, his career included the creation of
such films as Moan a, Man of Aran, Elephant
Boy, The Lund, and Louisiana Story.
Utili/ing a wealth of research material gath
ered by Paul Rotha and Basil Wright, distin
1 1
/;/;//*
<//mv hy Paul Rotha and Basil Wright
ARTHUR CALDER-MARSHALL
Based on research material t>y
APPENDICES
1
Synopsis ofNanook 255
2 Synopsis ofMoana 257
3 Synopsis of Maw ofAran 259
4 Commentary of The Land with visual indicatives 261
5 Synopsis of Louisiana Story 280
6 Film-credits of Robert J. Flaherty's Films 286
Some Books Consulted 291
Acknowledgements 292
Index 297
ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece
SECTION ONE
The Sub-Arctic Nanook: Between pp 72-73
SECTION TWO
Samoa: Moana 104-05
SECTION THREE
New Mexico ; Industrial Britain ;
Man of Aian
SECTION FOUR
India : Elephant Boy 184-85
SECTION FIVE
U.S.A.: The Land 200-01
SECTION SIX
Louisiana Story 216-17
[71
Foreword
published work for quotation and also threw open the archives of the
Robert}. Flaherty Foundation in Brattleboro. She did not, however, in
view of her many commitments, feel that it would be possible to
collaborate to the extent of giving her personal recollections, except in
[9]
THE INNOCENT EYE
so far as they had already been recorded in her book Elephant Dance
and her lecture notes.
Rotha and Wright intended to produce the book as a combined
operation, making it a sort of biographical film history. But being
active film-makers, they found that their periods of leisure did not
coincide. Together they screened
all the
Flaherty pictures and made the
digestswhich are printed in Appendices 15. But from then on the
brunt of the work fell upon Rotha.
Even for him, was a part-time occupation, filling in gaps between
it
his own films. He went to New York, interviewing people who had
known Flaherty. In August, 1957, he visited Frances and David
Flaherty at Brattleboro. He wrote innumerable letters and collected
reams of reminiscences, especially from David Flaherty, Newton
Rowe, John Goldman, John Grierson, Helen van Dongen, J. P. R.
1
Golighdy, E. Hayter Preston and Irving Lerner. He consulted
innumerable film books and periodicals for contemporary views of
Flaherty's work. He collated these materials, submitted them to a
number of people and collated their comments on them. At the
same time, he collected a larger number of magnificent still pic
tures which he arranged with the careful skill for which he is
renowned.
The
result was an encyclopaedic assembly of research material of
great value to students of the film. The typescript of this work is now
lodged with The Museum of Modern Art Film Library, New York,
so that students may consult it.
The publisher who had commissioned the book felt that the interest
of this work would be confined to too small and
scholarly a public and
he suggested that a book about a character as colourful and adven
turous as Robert Flaherty could be
designed to meet a far wider public.
After all, die research had been done.
When Rotha told me of his difficulty in.
meeting the publisher's
request, Iwas able to sympathize. If one takes great pains to
produce
one sort of book, it is psychologically almost
impossible to unscramble
it and make an entirely different type of book.
At the same time, when comments of the publisher
reading the
(who by then had rejected the typescript) I could understand what he
1
A full list of acknowledgements will be found on p. 292.
[10]
FOREWORD
had been driving at.
Flaherty's life and personality were interesting to
a far larger public than that for which Rotha had written.
Two other publishers, Messrs. W. H. Allen in London and Double-
day in New York, professed an interest in the book, provided that it
was rewritten on the lines advocated by the first publishers and Rotha ;
Though for several years I worked closely with the British Docu
mentary Film Movement, I am not and never was a member of the
inner circle. I am not primarily a writer for films and I foresaw that
give what
it the publishers wanted. So I insisted that if I undertook the
the other hand I have benefited from a type of research I might have
neglected.
Those who scan these pages for the classic stories of the Flaherty
saga will be disappointed. Pearls of anecdotage they may be, but when
cast before this swine, they appeared to contain grains of truth too
considering the enormous amount of work he had already put in, for
making over this material for a book with every conclusion of which
they may not necessarily agree. And even more I want to thank my
wife, not merely for the arduous working of typing and re-typing,
but also for her sharp, critical challenging of loose phrasing and judge
ments passed without due consideration, even when this meant entire
recasting of sections or chapters. A C-M.
NOTE
We are indeed grateful to our old friend Arthur Calder-Marshall for
writing this biography based on our earlier MS. We
should record,
however, as he himself states above, that there are divergences in
assessment. These occur almost wholly in Chapter 19, The Epilogue.
we do not accept the theory that Flaherty, whom we
In particular
knew so well, needed those periods of enforced idleness between his
films in order to prepare himself for the next task. If allowed, we
believe he could have been active filmwise all along the years from
Nanook.
pR B ^
NOTE FROM JOHN GRIERSON
As Arthur Calder-Marshall suggests, we have all been somewhat
fanciful in our more personal accounts of Flaherty. This came partly
from the conversational respite he gave us when he blew into town.
It was not the least of his
gifts that he engaged us richly in that Canadian
tradition of story telling which insists that Paul Bunyan, Holy Old
Mackinaw and all Enchanted Wanderers are not the less real for being
improbable. But Arthur Calder-Marshall is now right to say that we
have done him less than justice. He was never really the roistering
character our legend suggested and if the film business was a Nessus
;
J. G.
[12]
PART ONE
THE MINERS AND THE
MOCCASINS
of the 42nd parallel there were more opportunities than people and
at first sight was just a question of choosing from what one should
it
good building.
Jack London, who was eight years older than Bob Flaherty and in
some ways similar in his responses to the urges of time, remembered
Nine-year-old Bob Flaherty must have heard talk about this during
the lock-out, have known that the security on which he as the boss's
son depended was suddenly ebbing away. The buoyancy of his world
was dropping.
This was a gradual thing, the pruning away of unnecessary household
For months the mine in which my father had his all-in-all had
been closed down. The miners were starving. One day they
banded together hundreds strong and marched towards the office
where my father was. I watched them gathering round it. Some
bombarded the little building with stones others with axes began
;
[17]
THE INNOCENT BYE
The period of almost two years which young Bob spent at Rainy
Lake was the most formative in the shaping of his bent. Bob and his
father lived in a cabin but took their meals in a boarding-house.
He was the only boy in the place and he was spoilt by everyone. How
ever tough the miners and prospectors might be, they respected his
innocence.
When bands of Indians drifted into camp, they brought him gifts,
moccasins, now a commonplace, and even once a bow and arrows.
Now and then they even let him enter their tepees, which revealed a
world totally different from that white man's world where mines
could suddenly be closed down and starving men driven to mob their
fellows. When at night the Indians held their dances, Bob would fall
the trail was always in a circle. You had to be patient and wait,
and then the rabbit would come loping along and you got him.
This was in the depths of winter, when there was deep snow on
the ground and the rabbits couldn't burrow. 1
Such knowledge as this was far more exciting to Bob Flaherty than
secrets hidden in school-books. The circumference of a circle might be
2
77T but knowledge of that wouldn't get a hungry man a meal in the
North.
And it was in the North that young Bob knew that his future lay.
Other people might regard Rainy Lake as an outpost of North
American civilization, but to young Bob, as to his father and all the
men in the camp with any vision, it was on the edge of a vast land-
mass, largely unexplored and unexploited. The Hudson's Bay Com-
1
taken from one of two pre-recorded radio-talks (transcribed from
This is
telcdiphone
recordings) made for the B.B.C. in London, I4tb June and 34th July, 1949, in which Fla
herty was interviewed by Miss Eileen Molony. Further recordings dealing with Moana and
subsequent films were also recorded on 2pth August, 5th September and ist October, Mr.
Michael Bell also made some recordings of Flaherty which are used later in the book.
Hereafter these are referred to as B.B.C. Talks.
[18]
THE MINERS AND THE MOCCASINS
pany had of course long been operating but their ; interest in the
northernterritories was confined to fur-trading. Men like Robert HL
young Bob Flaherty absorbed from his father at Rainy Lake and he
took for granted that when he was older he would be one of the
it
bered Bob as a 'tousle-headed boy who had little idea of the ways of
2
civilization'. At table he found it easier just to use a knife and dispense
with his fork. But despite his backwoods table-manners, he was
1
B.B.C. Talks.
2
Transcribed from Portrait of Robert Flaherty, a radio programme of the recorded
memories of his friends, devised and written by Oliver Lawson Dick, produced by
W. R. Rodgers, and broadcast by the B.B.C. on 2nd September, 1952. Those taking part
were Sir Michael Balcon, Michael Bell, Ernestine Evans, Frances Flaherty, Peter Frcuchen,
Lillian Gish, Oliver St. John Gogarty, John Grierson, John Huston, Denis Johnston, Sir
Alexander Korda, Oliver Lawson Dick, Henri Matisse, Pat Mullen, Sir Edward Peacock,
Dido and Jean Renoir, Paul Rotha, Sabu, Erich von Stroheim, Sir Stephen Tallents,
Virgil Thomson, Orson Welles and the recorded voice of Flaherty himself. Each of the
speakers was pre-recorded over a period of months in addition, not all that was recorded
;
was used in the final programme but we have had access to most of the telediphoned text.
Hereafter this is referred to as the B.B.C. Portrait of Robert Flaherty.
THE INNOCENT EYE
popular with other boys. They must have envied him the range of
his experience; and then, as later, he was wonderful
company. But he
had already matured too much in practical living to acquire an
academic discipline. In later life he wrote with his left hand very
clumsily. It is possible that at school he was made to use his right
hand and that the confusion this caused made him backward at class-
work.
In 1900, Robert H. Flaherty joined the U.S. Steel Corporation and
the family moved to Port Arthur on Lake Superior. The one aptitude
which young Bob displayed was for mining and prospecting. To give
him the technical knowledge he would need, the Flahertys sent him
to the Michigan College of Mines. Here at least was a subject allied to
his practical interests.
It was no use/Whether he
actually took to sleeping out in the woods,
as has is not certain. But it is a fact that after seven months
legend it,
[20]
THE MINERS AND THE MOCCASINS
When her family settled in Michigan, she tried to recapture that
early delight. She would go off alone on her horse, following the faint,
overgrown trails of the old logging days. She would pick out on the
map some tiny lake or pond hidden in the woods and set off to find it.
Sometimes she got lost or darkness fell before she could reach home.
Then she spent the night in one of the deserted lumber camps that the
forests had swallowed up. What she liked best was to wander all night
Sunday young Flaherty came to dinner and she found that he pos
prospecting expeditions.
His young manhood was as his childhood and seemingly
nomadic as
more aimless. He worked in copper-mine with some Finns for a
a
time. His father, hoping to teach him in the field what he had failed
to learn at the College of Mines, took him on several explorations for
iron-ore on the pay-roll of the U.S. Steel Corporation. He learnt how
to map and prospect. He learnt how to judge geological formations.
And what was most important of all, he learnt how to travel and
survive in unknown country.
That phrase 'country that hadn't been seen before' holds one of
the secrets of Bob Flaherty's life and work. It is worth examining.
In the first pkce it isn't true. What Flaherty really meant was that
the country had not been seen before by white men. The Indians who
roamed the country did not count. They belonged in the same order
of nature as the caribou and fish on which they lived. They were
denizens of the wonderful other world, which formed such a contrast
to the 'poverty-stricken country' in which his family had lived in
presence destroys the pristine perfection. The white explorer may wish
to see a world as it man came but he can only
was before the white ;
[22]
THE MINERS AND THE MOCCASINS
ful lake about a hundred miles long, then up one of the rivers running
into it to the height of kndwhere the water divides, going south into
Lawrence and north into the Hudson Bay'.
the St.
When the river became unnavigable, they had to portage over the
watershed until they found a navigable northward-flowing stream.
This brought them to Little Long Lake, some twenty miles in length.
Knobel was in his usual position in the bow of the canoe. He'd do
his mapping as we went along with a cross-section book and a
little compass - a sort of mariner's paper compass.
Knobel and Flaherty staked out about five thousand acres of land
covering several veins of ore. But it was years before
these deposits
were opened up and then not by Knobel and Flaherty. Men who make
fortunes out of common minerals like iron and copper are not pioneer
precious as gold.
Little Long Lake looking
Thirty-five years later someone went to
for gold and found it. Flaherty was philosophical. 'There's a saying
for one thing, that's all you'll
among prospectors, "Go out looking
ever find". We
were exploring only for iron-ore at that time.'
Later on he was to go out looking for something other than iron-
ore, for what life might have been like before the white
man came,
and that was all he found.
months with him on the Tahsish Inlet in the Rupert District on the
west coast of Vancouver Island. But he was not making a wide survey
for the Grand Trunk Pacific. He was prospecting for marble. During
this visit, Bob and Frances became formally engaged.
In November of the same year he was still on Vancouver Island,
but now, as actors say, 'resting'. Mr. T. H. Curtis, assistant to the
resident engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway (Island Division),
met him in the Balmoral Hotel, Victoria. He found Flaherty, then aged
twenty-two, 'a most likeable soul, kind-hearted,
generous but im
provident*. He seemed to have some sort of allowance from his mother.
Although he paid his hotel bills, he spent all the rest on things like
books, fancy ties and socks. 'He never seemed to have any specific aim
as to
occupation or employment. In fact, work in my idea and ex
perience was right out of his ken. He talked at one time of going to
Alaska when the
spring set in, but to do what I don't remember.'
1
But all thatMr. Curtis could do was to introduce Bob to his friends
in Victoria.
Among them was Mrs. MacClure, the musical wife of a
well-known architect.
Flaherty played the violin and he often went to the MacClures' for
musical evenings. There he met a Mr. Russell, the conductor of the
Victoria Musical Society, and struck
up a friendship, which ended in
Curtis and Bob a house with Russell and his brother. 'We more
sharing
1 In
two letters to Paul Rotha, 5th and loth April, 1958.
[24]
THE MINERS AND THE MOCCASINS
or less mucked in together,' Curtis remembers, 'and Bob filled the
role of house-boy.'
must have been an even lower point in his career than
It
being
sacked from the College of Mines, though the career-minded Curtis
did not realize it. With
'house-boy' Flaherty, he went on canoeing
trips. Curtis loved fishing for its own sake. Flaherty, used to living on
the land and water, was bored by fishing as a sport, but he loved
canoeing.
On Christmas Day 1906, they crossed the Victoria Inlet to the Indian
Settlement on the other side. Curtis was
rather surprised to find that
young Flaherty was entranced by the songs and music of the Indians.
He took them seriously.
This glimpse of the twenty-two-year-old
Flaherty by a man who
obviously had little in common with him is interesting. He appeared
likeable, kind-hearted, generous, improvident and completely vague.
And was to prove an exterior view of him for the rest of his life.
that
But the man within was different. He was not articulate. He did not
propound an aim and then proceed to fulfil it. He flowed to his end,
like a stream, its
finding way by a careful exploration of possibilities ;
and the end was purely and simply to get north and stay north, to
cross the watershed of the St. Lawrence which
always flowed back
to civilization and reach the watershed of the northern flow, where
life was still
pristine.
I have emphasized the influence which Bob's father had upon his
career. The vision of the
exploration and opening up of the North
was Robert H. Flaherty's. But I think that Bob Flaherty owed the
N J
THE INNOCENT EYE
In Toronto he met his father who had left U.S. Steel and joined
the great Canadian firm of Mackenzie and Mann as a consultant
engineer.
Sir William Mackenzie was one of the few men in Canada who saw
that great territory, despite its climatic difficulties, as a challenge to
human endeavour. He
brought to Canada the large vision that Cecil
Rhodes had brought to South Africa without the need for aggression
and its tragic aftermath. Mackenzie had money and he had pull with
the Government of Canada.
In 1910 the Government of Canada decided to build a railroad from
the wheatfields of the west to the west coast of Hudson Bay for the
Flaherty accepted with alacrity. This was the chance for which he
had been waiting and training all his life.
INTO HUDSON BAY
companion was
E
^or the first stage of the journey Flaherty's sole
a young Englishman named Crundell. The outfit
was modest; a seventeen-foot 'Chestnut', beans, bacon, bannock, dried
fruitand tea, the usual grub supply of north-country men, a few simple
instruments and a carbine Winchester.
They jumped off for the North from a tiny settlement outlying the
Northern Ontario frontier, named Ground Hog. The reason for its
existence was that it was temporarily the rail-end until the Ground
Hog river had been bridged by the Grand Trunk Pacific.
Down the little Ground Hog, into the big Mattagami and on into
the smooth mile-wide Moose was only five
days' travel, for though
the distance was nearly two hundred miles, the rivers were high and
flowing strong.
During this, and subsequent journeys, Flaherty wrote up his im
its underlying formation show, it was the floor of the now distant
sea. Through it to the Mattagami, a deepgroove loops and winds.
Wide scars of burnt forests, chafing tangles of tree trunks
barked and bleached by the weather, alternate with live forests of
fir, silver birches and long-stemmed sea-green groves
of poplars.
startling. Even in
the forest places the cawing of some Whisky
Johnny' for bits of bannock and bacon rind, and the forlorn cries
of 'Poor Canada' were the only sounds. Of natives we saw only
-
signs gaunt tepee frames, sleeping patches of weather-rusted
inclined upstream
boughs, and here and there poles that, as they
or down, pointed out the travellers' direction, or message sticks
[28]
INTO HUDSON BAY
A few curious half-breeds and their wives stood at the edge of
the bank as we climbed from the landing. The men slouched,
hands in pockets, gazing intently, and the women, in the abashed
manner of the country, peered from the hooded depths of their
plaid shawls. In the background a group of Indian women and
their children lingered furtively. Dogs innumerable, enervated by
the warmth of the sun, lay sprawled on the green - short-haired
Indian curs, and here and there a splendid husky from the barrens
of the Eskimoes far northward. On the green stood an elaborately
staged flagpole flanked by two old bronze field guns; adjacent,
the trade shop, over its entrance the Company's emblazoned coat
of arms ; and deep-set from the green an old three-storied fur
warehouse, alongside of it the forge of the armourer and the
boat-yards of the shipwrights and carpenters; and facing them all
the master's white red-roofed mansion with dormer windows and
a deep encircling veranda.
With the post officers - they wore informal tweeds and white
collars - we dined in the mess-room of the mansion, where a
moccasined Indian served us from a sideboard array of old
silver plate. Travel on the river, the high or low water,
and such countryside topics as the approaching goose-hunting
time 'Hannah Bay way,' Tom Pant's silver foxes, Long
Mary's good-for-nothing husband, and, of course, what the
free-traders were doing, were the topics of conversation. We
were somewhat nonplussed that none showed more than per
functory interest in news from the frontier or concern for the
mail we had - towards the latter not half the avidity
brought
one of us would display towards a morning paper. It must
be remembered, however, that most of these men are recruited
in their teens from the Old Country. Growing up in the
service from clerk apprenticeships, they become inured to the
At Moose Factory, Flaherty was told that the chief factor was at
Charlton Island, some seventy miles out in the bay. The factor was the
man to make arrangements for the farther stages up the Bay from
Charlton.
l R. J. Flaherty, My Eskimo Friends, Doubleday, 1924.
THE INNOCENT EYE
We were provided with an open 'York' boat and a crew, one
Captain John Puggie, a half-breed post servant, and three upland
Indians, one of whom (but not distinguishable save that he was
Despite a storm which swept the rudder away, with only a sweep
to hold her, Captain Puggie landed them on Charlton before nightfall.
But to Flaherty's dismay, the chief factor dismissed his plans for imme
diately journeying north as impossible at this late season. They must
wait at Charlton for a schooner, which would take them north to Fort
George. There they must winter until the sea ice formed, when they
could proceed by sledge with Eskimos.
ing little or no furs but heavy tales of distress, showed that the sea
was now safe for travel.
The factor gave advice about camping grounds, the missionary
presented him with little notes in syllabic Cree to members of his flock
and with his two Indian drivers, Flaherty was off across the sea ice.
While they were still in Indian
country below the tree-line an
amusing encounter took place, which he was to lift word for word
from his journal and use in his novel The Captains Chair (published by
Hodder & Stoughton, and Scribner, in 1938).
[30]
INTO HUDSON BAY
ering through the darkness ahead. It was the fire-light of an Indian
tepee.
The bark-covered tent was filled with Indians, young and old,
but they made room enough to put us up for the night. Through
the evening they sat in circles round the tepee's leaping fire - the
old hunters, their grim, weathered faces as set as so many masks,
in the the younger ones, their faces dancing in the
first circle;
flickerof the fire's light, on their knees behind them; and the
women and children, timid and shy, hovering in the background
of shadow beyond.
These Indians seldom saw white men other than traders. They
watched every move I made - what I ate, how I ate, how I smoked
my pipe.
'See !' exclaimed one, as I struck a match for a light. 'He is too
lazy to reach to the fire for a coal.'
The women marvelled at my queer costume, clucked over the
colour of my eyes and hair. 'See!' said one. 'His skin is like a
child's!'
'Wait till he gets beyond the trees,' said another.
'Yes,' said still another, 'then he will surely freeze.'
'Yes,' they all
agreed. 'He will surely freeze.'
They were consumed with curiosity as to why I was under
taking such a journey. drivers told them I was making it for
My
no other reason than to look at the stones of a certain little island
which, if good stones, might one day be boiled over big fires and
made into iron - such iron, for instance, as their guns were made
of. The tepee shook with laughter. Was it possible that I believed
thatby boiling stones I could get iron such as their guns were
made of? They had still another laughing fit.
[31]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Whale, the nearest outpost to the Nastapoka Islands, and then they
took their leave.
Flaherty couldn't speak a word of Eskimo, but he made do with
mime and the whole encampmenr turned to and made him a camp.
Wetunik and his wife lent a hand with the cooking and he loaded
them up with sea biscuit and tobacco.
From this first Eskimo Flaherty seems to have felt
contact with the
an instinctive sympathy. The Indians, apart from the family described
above, he found corrupted by contact with white men. But even post-
trained Eskimo had retained their racial dignity.
My Eskimo Friends.
[3*]
INTO HUDSON BAY
Old Harold's embarrassment was understandable. Great Whale was
a Hudson's Bay Company post. Though Governor and Company'the
gical expert
on Northern Minnesota and Michigan. He, like Robert H.
Flaherty and others, had been pursuing the theory
that the fabulous
Islands deposits similar to those of the Lake Superior region, but not
days when to bare my hands to and light a pipe was much too
fill
cold, he performed that office for me. He was master of the grub-
box and sleeping-bag. With his teeth he pulled off my boots of
sealskin at turning-in time at night and was master of ceremonies
1
at every camp along the way.
The fourth day out from the Great Whale they came upon an
Eskimo encampment, which makes an interesting comparison with
the domestic picture of the Indians quoted above.
[33l
THE INNOCENT EYE
beings on hands and knees
and the bounding forms of dogs.
Leather-faced as I was, and dressed as were the men, the Eskimoes
took me, for the moment, to be one of their own kind, but when
they found their mistake there was peal of laughter,
a and peering
close, they wrung my hand again, with unintelligible exclama
tions the while as to the novelty that Nero had brought amongst
them.
On hands and knees through a low tunnel I followed Nero
who, whip-butt in hand, cowed the dogs as we brushed by them,
and within twenty feet squeezed through a door into a large
igloo dome. The housewife,
her naked babe nestled warming in
the depths of her kooletah hood, turned from the trimming of
her seal-oil lamp which lit the white cavern with a feeble yellow
cast, and welcomed us. Her babe, too, poked out its tiny naked
arm for the hand-shaking.
A
frozen seal carcass which lay on the snow floor, a nest of
days breaking off rock samples here and there and taking close-up
of the cliffs. He had come 600 miles and
photographs iron-bearing
travelled for months from Ground Hog and he had to go through the
routine of fulfilling his task. But even with his limited knowledge of
mineralogy, he was certain that Dr. Leith had been right. The deposits
on the Nastapokas were of no economic value.
1
Op. at.
[34]
INTO HUDSON BAY
This was a disheartening experience. What he had hoped was the
beginning of a career in Hudson Bay had come to just as dead an end
as all his previous ventures.
He was going to pack up and strike south,when Nero pointed out
across the frozen sea and said, 'Big land over there. Husky (Eskimo),
the year. For fodr days they were marooned on an island. While they
slept, the sea ice driven by a nor 'caster upped anchor from the coast
[35]
THE INNOCENT EYE
and swept out to sea. When the west wind drove it back again, it
came up-ended in broken pans and rafted fields. Dogs fell between
the floes. Nero freeing their toes from cutting ice particles muttered
*Damn hard time.'
Why indeed should they, thought Flaherty, if they hadn't seen the
Admiralty Chart? He asked how many Eskimo had come in from
the islands.
There was a long colloquy between Harold, Nero and the servants
and they agreed that at least a hundred and fifty heads of island families
had in recent years come in to trade at Great Whale.
Comparing that figure with the Eskimo on the mainland between
Cape Jones and Gulf Hazard, Flaherty convinced not merely himself
but Harold that the Belcher Islands must be much bigger than the
Nastapokas, but he, Bob Flaherty, had discovered the possible existence
of a group of islands so rich in iron-ore that Sir William Mackenzie
would send him back to explore them next season.
[36]
3
sea,fragments of rock which led him to think that the rock system of
these islands was similar to that of Minnesota. A later geologist, A. P.
Low, who mapped the east coasts of Hudson Bay and James Bay, had
up of thick ice.
SirWilliam Mackenzie authorized Flaherty to attempt to reach the
Belcher Islands from Moose Factory. Travelling by the same route,
down the Ground Hog, Mattagami and Moose Rivers, Flaherty took
with him time a marine engine, which he fitted to the Nastapoka,
this
[37]
THE INNOCENT EYE
that "all same noise like gun never mind, scare 'em seal, that's all",
Nothing further could be done until the sea froze; but Nero
promised Flaherty that in 1912 during the six weeks in February and
March when the ice-fields were crossable by dog and sledge he would
take him to the Belchers.
What do with the intervening five months? Mavor, the factor
to
of Great Whale, had barely enough food for his own needs. The nearest
alternative was Fort
George, 180 miles south. For such a trip the
battered Nastapoka was useless. No 'York' boat crew was available at
this late season, for fear of being trapped in the ice. Canoe was the
only transport.
Mavor, who had spent eight years at Great Whale unrelieved and
1
Op. tit,
[38]
ACROSS UNGAVA PENINSULA
was suffering from loneliness, decided to go with Bob, leaving old
Harold as his deputy.
Once again
Flaherty was Though the ice seemed strong
frustrated.
study.
But the Richmond Gulf crossing, till then the northernmost achieved,
was through Indian country well within the tree-line. Peck had
analysed his failure to make the Lake Minto traverse. 'We were not
able to carry a large supply of provisions, but we expected to meet
with reindeer and other animals which frequent these parts. In this,
however, we were disappointed. For eleven days we struggled on over
the frozen waste, but not a vestige of animal life could be seen. We
were therefore with heavy hearts obliged to retrace our steps or perish
by starvation.'
[39]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Of the route which Flaherty proposed to take, the only part which
had been reliably mapped was the forty-five miles from the Hudson
Flaherty could not persuade Nero's wife to let her husband go all the
way to Fort Chimo. So it was arranged that Nero with one team of
dogs should go as far as he had explored with Low, about a quarter
of the total distance, and then with the weakest dogs and only
enough food to enable him to regain the coast, he would return,
leaving Flaherty to go on with two other Eskimos, Omarolluk and
Wetunik.
Omarolluk had a reputation as a great hunter and sledging man.
His wife was won over by Harold's promise that she and her children
should live on rations at the post during his absence ; and Omarolluk
himself was beguiled partly by a wage triple that of the post and even
1
Op. cit.
[40]
ACROSS UNGAVA PENINSULA
more by the guarantee that he could take part in the big
deer-killing
Koksoak River in the spring.
at
Along the coast they had had driftwood fuel. Now there was only
the occasional stunted tree in a wind-sheltered
pocket. As they worked
higher, even these disappeared. All that was left were creeping willows
and trailing spruces which they burrowed for beneath the snow on
hands and knees, using snow-shoes as shovels.
On the fifth day they crossed the watershed. The valleys
began to
curve away to the east and below them they saw miles and miles of
snow-smoking plain, sprinkled with multitudes of boulders 'which
stood out of the satiny waste like pin points of jet'. Then as
they
wondered which valley to choose, the snow-smoke settled and in the
middle distance they saw a vast sweep of ice whose far horizon was a
landless rim. It was Lake Minto or as the Eskimo called it
Kasegaleek,
the Great Seal Lake.
THE INNOCENT EYE
Richard Griffith in The World of Robert Flaherty quoted the following
from Flaherty's journal of this expedition. They give a more
extracts
and murderous temper as the odour of the seal meat came to the
crouching circle of them is beyond telling. They foamed at the
mouth. What would happen to us without them?
March i8th. Our Waldorf fare of Army rations, jam and canned
steak will soon be exhausted, then beans for ever. Nero spoke of the
flies inland, that often kill the deer. He had seen them inches
deep
on the deer, the deer's face being raw and swollen
by their work.
In July this happens when there are hot
days and calm. He had
seen them after being killed, and
says they are bloodless through
the flies' work. The Eskimoes
keep their dogs in their tents during
this time,
imagine the smell. At one point this a.m. we reached
the summit of a portage and started
descending, but barely
to
managed stop short of a 75-feet precipice. With our sledges that
continually strain for speed, it was no small matter to stop in time.
We also shortly discovered that while we were looking over for
a new course, we were standing on asnow overhang which pro
jected from the cliff about 25 feet. There are many snow forma
tions like that in the
rugged area here, and south along the
[42]
ACROSS UNGAVA PENINSULA
Richmond Gulf country. The snow is everywhere wind-driven
and packed to a picturesque extent, such as is not
possible south
ward. This overhang of which I speak resembles the eave of a house
on a huge scale. Many a hunter has lost his life
through uncon
sciously walking to their edge, then suddenly breaking them off.
Two men of Little Whale River plunged hundreds of feet to their
death in that manner.
We are camped in a tiny valley which contains a handful of
stunted trees one of which is 5 feet high.
Camped early as the dogs
are tired with their trying journey today. Do not seem to be
in good condition. When
we get to the deer herds they will
improve again.
March i$th. This entire area is barren of soil silt and trees. The
rounded hills are everywhere interlaced with small lakes that are
in shadow most of the day. The snow on the shadow sides of the
lakes and slopes and cliffs of the hills never disappears. It truly is a
desolate area. The confusing network of lakes in today's travels
were too much for Wetunik, and we were consequently delayed
while he climbed the hills to locate our course. At 2 p.m. we
descended on to the surface of Lake Minto, though having lost
the Eskimo route to it, we came on to it in strange country, so
that Wetunik wasn't sure we had hit it until we travelled east
ward some four or five miles and he did some further scouting on
the hills. We saw two partridges, one of which Nero shot. It was
given to 'Beauty' tonight for his supper. Would an Indian give
his dog a lone partridge?
March 2ist. Omarolluk gave further information about whales
. . *
last night. He said there were many whales on the north coast,
that they were black, had divided spray, white about their mouths,
and were very large. These are the Ottawa Island whales of which
he speaks, and other unknown islands west of Hope's Welcome.
At one time the Eskimoes managed to kill one and the bones of
it are still there. , . . This is Nero's last day with us. He turns back
tomorrow for Great Whale River, We missed the Eskimo trail
[44]
ACROSS UNGAVA PENINSULA
March 24th. Head wind made a disagreeable day of it. About one
o'clock Wetunik became confused again and the men climbed one
of the high granite hills for sight. The lake is a monster and will
prove to be the largest in Labrador, not excepting Lake Mes-
stassine, I think.
March There seems to be no change in appearance of country
2$th.
as a -whole, everlasting hills of granite and at wider and wider
distances little patches of dwarf trees, snuggled in the valleys away
from the winds. Heavy load for our dogs, one of which shows
signs of giving way soon. I hope we see the deer.
March 26th. Arrived at the end of the lake about ten o'clock. The
discharge a small open rapid.
is Wetravelled on a mile farther,
then camped as the drift is blinding and wind very strong. Trees
are increasing in size and number, and we are camped in quite a
grove.
March 27th. Very cold day with a typical March wind and blinding
drift. Became partly snow blind, and eye is very sore indeed this
dog I purchased from Jim Crow died today, but I thought they
said they were going back to Great Whale River. For a moment
was alarmed and angry, but I caught their meaning in time. Much
laughter.
[45]
THE INNOCENT EYE
March 2$th. Our travel was most trying and were in seemingly
imitating a seal waving flippers in the air, to urge the dogs out
of the ice-jam we were stuck in today. Have acquired a few
Eskimo words and our crazy-quilt conversations are laughable
indeed.
April ^rd. Ruined our earth shoeing and had to run on the runners
today. Tonight the men have made new shoeing. At feeding time
one of the dogs mistook Wetunik' s hand for deer meat and made
mess of it. It's one damned thing after another with
a considerable
Wetunik. Omarolluk's knee giving him trouble.
April 4th. Last evening at camp noted a Canada Jay, first bird
other than the ptarmigan seen on the
trip. Travel very tedious and
slow owing partly to the spring
day, which makes both men and
dogs very sluggish. We are all on edge now, expecting and
wondering when we shall come to the sea.
April yth.About 1.30 arrived at the mouth of the river. Was much
surprised and delighted as were the men. The river empties into a
fiord of Ungava Bay. The mouth was choked with ice and we
had a very hard time of it indeed. We were from 1.30 to 6
p.m.
travelling about three miles, and then we had to camp on sea ice
and walk about a mile for a few
pieces of driftwood for a fire,
[46]
ACROSS UNGAVA PENINSULA
with the result that we did not get into our blankets until about
9.45. Very tired but happy.
April pth. Wetunik confused and does not know the route from
here to Fort Chimo. He is certainly a useless guide and 'attuhV
has been his cry ever since we left Nero. It seems from what I
can gather from the men that the sea coast is impossible to travel
[47]
THE INNOCENT EYE
by sledge and the Ungava Bay is open water. An
Eskimo route
starts in from this Gulf Lake overland for Fort Chimo. As Fort
Chimo is more than 75 miles
away in a straight line it is most
[48]
ACROSS UNGAVA PENINSULA
southward and his later discoveries 300 hundred miles northward on
1
Ungava Bay'.
At Fort Chimo, Omarolluk and Wetunik went south for the big
deer-killing and during the fortnight they were gone, Flaherty went
;
back with the post-driver to Leaf Gulf hoping to examine the iron-ore
formation more closely. But already the ice and snow was melting
rapidly and he had to return to Fort Chimo to wait for the break-up
[49]
THE INNOCENT EYE
refused to use it. A 'man killer',they called it, too heavy for the
portages ; so for years it had lain idle in the loft of the fur post.
It was just the kind of craft we needed, however big enough to ;
weather the seas along the hundreds of miles of sea coast we must
1
travel.
The tides on this fantastic coast rose and 40 feet. At low tide
fell
long fangs projected miles out to sea, littered with gigantic blocks of
sea ice gleaming white and green. And when the tide flooded, the
islands disappeared and the blocks rode off in the wind to form new
formations on the ebb.
On wind came scudding from the east, driving
the third day the
the sea ice shorewards. The great white shapes of bergs sailed with a
majestic menace in with the ice pack from the open sea. Before night
fall, the Walrus was prisoner on a small high island rock. The raft ice
When the gale died, the sea was solid. But soon the ebb and flow
worked channels, winding like ribbons through the pack-ice. Through
these capricious lanes, the Walrus found her way, signalled on by the
exploring kayaks. But winding as they did, they often made in a day
only a few miles as the crow would have flown, if it could have
existed in that savage climate. And often they were held prisoners
as
for days on end. But finally on a day in June they reached the wide
open arms of Payne Bay and sailed to the head of it, where the river
which A. P. Low had named the Payne burst through a multitude of
boulder channels to the sea. The Walrus had reached her journey's end.
All hands debarked and camp was made ashore amid a confusion of
sea-drenched garments spread on boulders to dry. For two days the
1 dt.
Op.
[50]
ACROSS UNGAVA PENINSULA
women worked on mending boots and clothes and Flaherty's crew on
Flaherty found the Payne River magnificent, with its great terraced
slopestowering hundreds of feet above and the narrow level plains
along the river edge carpeted with mosses and with purple, white and
yellow flowers in solid banks of colour and among them bees and
butterflies.
There was never a more happy and carefree crew than we five.
Banter, smiles and laughter were our stock in trade. Day and
night to us were almost the same, and there was no watch to space
them. We ate and slept when we willed. 1
This was the joy of Bob Flaherty in the North, which was such a
contrast with, for example, the rather morbid excitement of
death. For Flaherty it was a very simple thing. Danger may have
reluctantly because he wanted to see this, the largest lake in the Ungava
Flaherty agreed to take the northern
fork.
peninsula,
Ice or no the northern fork could hardly have been more
ice,
race of water for miles on end. The canoe had to be tracked, or towed,
ten-foot banks of ice stranded along
using the treacherous surface of l
shore. Usually three of the crew tracked the man-killer' while Nawri,
1
Op. dt.
[51]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Flaherty had to join the men on the tow-line, while the Peterboro
awash to the gunwhales came on by inches.
For three days they toiled. It seemed as if the rapids would never end.
The last rapid was the worst. It seemed as if they were over it, when
the sealskin tow-line, catching a
sharp-edged boulder snapped. The
canoe with all their worldly goods, swung broadside on and
began to
race downstream. If the canoe was lost, it was more or less certain death.
They raced along the ice bants, knowing that their chance of catching
the canoe was more or less
hopeless.
But Nawri was still in the canoe. He waited until the river doubled
Up and up they went. Larger and krger grew the banks of snow.
The river became a series of links between lakes and so shallow
ponds,
one could almost wade across them.
By lyth July, they came to a point
where the river had been reduced to a frothing creek.
They were near
the main divide and they decided to next and each explore
split up day
the possible rivers running down to Hudson Bay.
But in this height of land man
proposes and God disposes. That
night a gale scattered their fire and sheets of rain extinguished it. Next
morning thick wet snow was flying and for two days they were
prisoners in the flapping shelter of the tent with cold water to drink
and sea biscuit to eat.
The third day the weather cleared and on the
following day they
found a possible route and for a
couple of days more they portaged the
outfit and the man-killer across the head of land. From then on it
was
like
free-wheeling down a hill often without brakes until on 1st August
they reached at last the Hudson Bay.
Flaherty had every reason to congratulate himself as an explorer. In
one year he had made two traverses of the
Ungava Peninsula which had
defeated previous explorers, drawn two new lines across the blank
all
map of the Ungava interior. But though he was now on a coastal belt
sparsely inhabited by Eskimo, he had nearly 300 miles of hazardous
Hudson Bay waters to navigate before he reached
Cape Wolstenholme.
They never did reach Cape Wolstenholme in the man-killer. In a
storm they were driven ashore in a
tiny cove. But by the Providence
[52]
ACROSS UNGAVA PENINSULA
which, always guided him it was only a comparatively short distance
to the Wolstenholme Post.
The twenty-eight-year-old Flaherty had failed to reach the Belcher
Islands. But he had earned his salary. He knew as he waited for a ship
to take him back to Lower Canada that Sir William Mackenzie would
back him on another expedition in 1913.
[53]
4
THE BELCHERS AT LAST
Xlah
Jaherty may have been expelled from the Michigan
College of Mines, but when he returned with his reports to Sir William
Mackenzie, he found that he had great prestige. By succeeding where
A. P. Low had failed he had graduated with first-class honours in the
difficult school of exploration.
Sir William was not interested in the Leaf Bay iron-ore series. The
location did not fit in with his railroad operations, 1 but he was im
pressed by the exploring abilities of Robert H. Flaherty's boy. He had
drive. He had independence. If he was headed off in one direction, he
found another in which to employ his talents without sitting down
and waiting for new orders and he had a capacity for survival which
was obviously based on his ability to get on with the Eskimo. He
liked them. Going North was like Going Home.
'Get a ship,' he said, when Bob Flaherty told him of the failure of
the little Nastapoka with its built-in engine. The Belcher Islands, if they
were as rich in iron-ore as Leaf Bay, could very well provide alternative
cargo to Western wheat.
1
The Leaf Bay deposits are being worked currently by the Cyris Eaton Co. In the
words of Prof. Edmund Carpenter, Dept. of Anthropology, Toronto University, they
are now 'bringing in untold wealth to the New World'. Letter to Paul Rotha, 24th May,
1959.
[54]
THE BELCHERS AT LAST
There was no suitable ship in Hudson Bay. But at St. John's, New
foundland, was a topsail schooner, the Laddie, 75 feet over all and
85 tons register. Built at Folo, Newfoundland, she had been
through
theHudson Strait before.
The Laddie, in dock for four weeks, was re-rigged and overhauled
from bow to stern, and belted with greenheart to shield her from the
ice. And while this was being done, Sir William had another brain
wave.
Though, as I have said, his travel diaries were vivid, Flaherty wanted
1
B.B.C. Talks.
2
From a letter to Paul Rotha from David Flaherty, 29th June, 1959.
[55]
THE INNOCENT EYE
a more direct language in which to speak. Film might provide a lingua
franca, the Esperanto of the eye.
But would be wrong to think that Flaherty was
at this time, it
We did not want for co-operation. The women vied with one
another to be starred.
Igloo-building, conjuring, dances, sledging
and seal-hunting were run off as the sunlit
days of February and
March wore Of course there was occasional bickering, but
on.
[56]
THE BELCHERS AT LAST
posed, and what was finally picked out from the crazy-quilt of
his pidgin English was that she was not
altogether wrong. Two
times in as many days I had given Luliakame's
(her rival's) baby
1
candy, but I 'no see him hers'.
This was one of Flaherty's first lessons in the direction of actors, who
always need handling with sympathy whether acting for fame and
fortune or just for candy and comfits. He was to become one of the
most accomplished directors of natural actors, binding them to him
self with a subtle complex of sympathy and loyalties.
April 1914 came with longer, warmer days. By the end of May
Flaherty made sledge expeditions, one west to the mouth of Fox
Channel 170 miles and another 150 miles east to Lake Harbour.
Hunters came in with tales of deer and two Eskimo knowing he ;
days we travelled far. The thick yellow sun, hanging low in the
northern sky for all the hours save the two at midnight, seemed
to roll along the blue masses of the far-off hills. Deer were every
where, pawing up the mosses deep in the valleys, or in long bands
winding funereally across the white surfaces of little lakes and
ponds. In three days we had climbed to the summit, a wind-swept
boulder plain, of the height of land - the divide of the waters
flowing south into HudsonStrait, and north through unknown
Lake Amadjuak. Behind us lay the welter of the wrinkled hills
through which we had come before us a void of plain.
;
galloped to right and left up the slope. Three kept to the valley.
On we sped, the camera rocking like the mast of a ship at sea.
From the galloping dogs to the deer not two hundred feet
journey's end, crossing the rotten ice of a stream, the sledge broke
1
through. Exit film.
long since passed into the North Atlantic. They rounded Cape Wol-
stenholme and on the third day, sighted the Ottawas, the northern
most of the chain of islands which parallel the east coast of the Hudson
Bay for 400 miles.
In this desolate terrain, they were
surprised, exploring for a harbour,
to find a ship riding at anchor and ashore a hut with a Union Jack
breaking out on the wind.
1
Op. cit.
[58]
THE BELCHERS AT LAST
She was the Active, a veteran whaler out of Dundee. The crew,
having completed winter and summer with little success, were about
This man was lucky. During the winter two of the ship's harpooners
had died of delirium tremens. Two wooden crosses stood out in sil
houette, as the Laddie swung off for the south.
All day an ice 'blink' loomed in the west. By next morning great
banks of fog lay round the Laddie. It thinned to a haze as the morning
rock.
For three days they crept on, with a look-out in the crow's nest and
the leadsman always ready in the bow. There were no suns for latitude,
but the log showed a southing of 200 miles from the Ottawas which
meant they should be approaching the Belchers.
The skipper wanted to lay up in a harbour on the mainland coast
until the visibility cleared. They squared away before a light wind and
laid course through the night, when suddenly there was a Crash!
Bang and
! a wild ground swell broke over the stern, picked up the
Laddie and hurled her into the teeth of a boiling reef.
In that darkness, they could not launch the dories. The sails cracked
and drifting away. With a human chain, all hands raised the ballast
from the hold and dumped it over the rail, and then, there being
nothing more to do, they climbed on deck, provisioned the dories
and waited for dawn.
The wind The sea was smooth as rolled glass, as far as the eye,
died.
in fog, could see. But in an hour or so, the fog dissolving, they saw an
[59]
THE INNOCENT EYE
It was a sorry platform of soil-less bedrock, with a ring of boulders
which showed that some time Eskimo, caught perhaps in a similar
They cached their food and gear and returned to the Laddie to
salvage what they could before she
sank. They found, to their astonish
ment, that though the tide was nearing flood, there was not much
water in the well. They flung overboard the thirty-six casks of oil
which comprised the rest of her heavy cargo, dropped an anchor some
300 feet ahead, put on call sails and opened up the engine. With the
crew winding at the winch, the Laddie came slowly across the reef.
"Tis no place for us, sir/ said the skipper, and he hailed the
mate and two of the crew who had gone off to the island for fresh
water.
'We've seen big land, sir/ they called as they clambered up over
the rail.
off. As they reached shore, a gorgeous silver fox scurried for cover.
But Flaherty had come for iron-ore. And here on this first day, he
found barely exposed, but rich stuff which lay heavy in his hands.
it,
The mockery of it was that the expedition which had been equipped
to spend the winter in the Belchers was now reduced to destitution.
Almost all the food and gear had been jettisoned. The ship was leaking
badly and though Flaherty had proved his point, there was no possi-
1
Op. cit.
[do]
THE BELCHERS AT LAST
bility of conducting a survey. After three days on the island,
they
sailed south, making for Great Whale River.
It was a
great disappointment to Flaherty, but the fact that they
were going to Great Whale meant that he would be seeing old Harold
again, who
'would give him a fine welcome.
The
Laddie picked up the mouth of the Great Whale too late on
the ebb to get over the river bars to the
post. With three of the crew,
Flaherty unlimbered the launch but, confused by the darkness, whilst
threading through the bars, they were caught in a sweep of surf and
thrown up upon a narrow spit of sand, about a mile and a half
away
from the post.
In the distance they could see two
squares of light shining from the
windows of one of the cabins of the post. So to summon help, the
mate lashed a lantern to a long pike pole while fired round
Flaherty
after round from his Winchester.
Michigan.
1
Op. cit.
[61 ]
5
Flaherty took his films, his specimens, maps and notes by canoe
back to Lower Canada to report to Sir William Mackei^ic.
Mrs. Evelyn Lyon-Fellowes of Toronto recalls that when Flaherty
came to that city, she used to chaperon her friend Miss Olive Caven,
whom chaperoned them once at
Flaherty appeared to be courting. 'I
[<!>]
FROM ORE TO AGGIE
spent the first evening with her and left that
night for the United
States.'
1 Ernestine Evans, an old friend of Frances and Robert Flaherty relates this suggestion
of a Ford Agency in Film News (New York), Vol. XI, No. 8, Sept. 1951. It was made, I
imagine, contemptuously, to emphasize how unsuitable the young prospector was as
a
husband for Frances.
[63]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Flaherty spent the winter editing the film he had shot in Baffin Land.
It was too crude to be interesting. But he had learnt something from
itand when he made a second attempt, after finishing his serious work
on the Belchers, he hoped to do better.
Frances and Bob had had no conventional honeymoon. It was im
possible to take a woman to the Belcher Islands. But Bob thought of a
compromise, which could at least give Frances some glimpse of the
country to which he had lost his heart. Instead of going north alone
in the summer of 1915, he went with a party consisting of his father,
his young brother David, Frances and Margaret Thurston, a friend
of hers from Bryn Mawr days.
Together they made the, for Bob familiar, journey to Moose
Factory. There the Laddie was waiting, refitted and ready and together
they sailed to Charlton Island, where Bob left his family party to camp
for several weeks before they returned on the Hudson's Bay Company
steamer Nascopie. In their place, he took aboard Wetalltok, 'his wife
and three children, his two partners, their wives and seven children,
twenty dogs, kayaks, sledges, tents and hunting gear. Their impedi
menta topped the Laddie's deck load, which was already rail high,
while among the boxes and bales in the choking hold, Wetalltok and
his tribe made their temporary home. The dogs, chained in the dories
which swung from the davits over the rails, whined and yelped and
1
chorused to the skies'.
In their approach to the islands, they were favoured with good luck.
The weeks before the sea ice formed were devoted to preparing
the base for winter, getting gear and equipment in shape, making
sledges, bartering for more dogs for sledging and laying in fuel,
even to the extent of sailing the Laddie across to the Great Whale
coast to return kden with driftwood - the preparations for the siege
of winter.
This was work in which Flaherty delighted. It fulfilled his energetic
nature, the communal fight against savage elements which continually
threatened life. demanded the vigour, training, courage and resource
It
him.
[65]
THE INNOCENT EYE
The Skipper of the Laddie, Salty Bill, improvised a
civilizations.
On 2nd January, Eskimo came in from the far west with news
that the sea ice was fit to travel
everywhere to westward. At
noon and two of the crew set off with
Flaherty with Wetalltok
a thirteen-dog team. The Eskimo visitors went with them to a
point less than a sleep away where there was an outcrop of sevick
rocks, enough they thought to load the Kablunak's
ship many many
times.
[66]
FROM ORE TO AGGIE
away from him, not to disturb his hunting. Wetalltok said the man
had been waiting there since dawn. 1
Nightfall that day, they saw the orange square of an igloo window.
Rainbow, its owner, said he had not killed a seal for eight days. Sea
pigeons were all they had to live on. Just before Flaherty arrived, he
had killed one - the first in two days - and his wife, who was plucking
it, held
it
up for Flaherty to see. But though they knew Flaherty had
or nothing to give away, they forgot their troubles in making the
little
bag, pulled off his kooletah and hung it over her feebly burning lamp
so that it would be dry for the morning. As the strangers were eating
their beans and bacon, she kept her children away so that they shouldn't
prove embarrassing and when Flaherty crawled in to
;
sleep, they spoke
in whispers.
Next morning Flaherty told Rainbow that when he returned to
base camp, Rainbow and his family must visit him and he would try
to be hospitable. 'Yes,' added the practical Wetalltok, 'and keep one
eye open for sevick rocks as you come.' 2
the Eskimos. They had a simple courage and nobility which echoed in
himself when he was among them. Farther south one ran into com
plications ; going away and coming
like taking a girl out to dinner,
Much has been written about the birth of Flaherty the film-maker;
most of it pious poppycock. The deepest experience in Flaherty's life
had nothing to do with films, art or for that matter with exploration,
prospecting and the opening up of the North. It was the discovery of
people who in the midst of life were always so close to death
that
2
cit.
Op.
[67]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Greek heroes had it, as did the Vikings, because they were living in
If the finds in the Belchers had been twice, or twenty times as rich,
plans of the deposits covering over 100 square miles and samples
of the ore, two members of the crew of the Laddie crossed the sea ice
to the mainland and made their way south to report to Sir William
Mackenzie. Flaherty requested au expert mission to examine his
made along these lines. Professor Carpenter's notes to this film express
vividly the Eskimo attitude.
Nowhere is life more difficult than in the Arctic, yet when life
there is reduced to its barest essentials, art and poetry turn out to
be among those essentials. Art to the Eskimo is far more than just
an object: it is an act of seeing and expressing life's values; it's a
1Peter Freuchen the explorer met Flaherty in the sub-arctic in 1923. Flaherty was
askedby people at the trading post to play his violin. He said that he would play in the
room next door and they could listen. While he was playing, one of the man out of sheer
love of life got up and started to dance by himself. The man went on dancing after the
music stopped and did not notice Flaherty come in from the other room. Flaherty's eyes
c
were blazing. That wasn't dance music/ he said. 'I didn't play for dancing.' And then,
because the man did not immediately stop, he brought the violin down on the stove and
smashed it to smithereens. (B.B.C. Portrait of Flaherty.)
2 His collection of 360 carvings, considered one of the best in existence, was acquired
by Sir William Mackenzie and donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in 1933. A photo
graph of a typical Eskimo carving is reproduced in the Nanook Section, together with an
Eskimo drawing of Flaherty filming.
In 1915, Flaherty published The Drawings of Enooesweetok of the Sikoslingmit Tribe
of the Eskimo, with the subtitle, "These drawings were made at Amadjuak May, Fox
Land, the winter headquarters of Sir William Mackenzie's Expedition to Baffin Land
and Hudson Bay, 1913-14'. These drawings have now been donated also to the Royal
Ontario Museum, by Mrs. Frances Flaherty.
[<*]
THE INNOCENT EYE
ritual of discovery by which patterns of nature, and of human
nature are revealed by man.
As the carver holds the unworked ivory lightly in his hand
'nouns and verbs' but rather words are forms of the verb 'to
all
use the term. But the Eskimo do not see it this way. They're not
interested in scenery, but in action, existence. This is true to some
extent of many people, but it's almost of a necessity true for the
Eskimo, for nothing in their world easily defines itself and is
separablefrom the general background. What exists, the Eskimo
themselves must struggle to
bring into existence. Theirs is a world
which has to be conquered with each act and
statement, each
carving and song, but which, with each act accomplished, is as
quickly lost. The secret of conquering a world greater than him-
[70]
FROM ORE TO AGGIE
self is not known to the Eskimo. But his role is not passive. Man
is the force that reveals form. He is the force which ultimately
conceals nothingness.
used for?' rather than 'what can I use that for?' made the process of
Flaherty developed the film and he was happy. Everything was there,
including the escape of the walrus.
While waiting for the experts to arrive, supplies of fuel gave out
and they were forced to burn the Laddie spar by spar. As it burned,
Flaherty saw his chances of returning to Hudson Bay going up the
chimney. Sir William Mackenzie could not be expected to supply
another ship for exploration or filming while the war was on.
For the run-back to Moose Factory, Flaherty load to depend upon
the flimsy Nastapoka, which had been but was in poor shape.
refitted
The experts did not arrive until late August, 1916. On the York boat
thatbrought them was a vaguely familiar figure, which proved to be
Robert H. Flaherty hidden beneath two months' growth of beard, and
Dr. Moore, a geologist and surveyor, who besides surveying the
claims was to make astronomical observations on behalf of the
Canadian Government, which was still
sceptical about the size of the
Belcher Islands.
Flaherty was not surprised at the verdict delivered by his father. The
ore was rich, but the difficulties of
extracting and shipping it from
the Belchers made it an uneconomic business. 5
Flaherty returned in the Nastapoka, which had only room for food,
instruments and essential gear. Much that had been
brought by the
1
Prof. Edmund Carpenter : Notes on Eskimo Art Film : based on Haherty's Eskimo
Paintings and Carvings. Robert J. Flaherty Foundation.
2
John Taylor says that on Man ofAran, Flaherty sometimes spent hours shooting with
no film in the camera.
8 As with the deposits in Leaf Bay, the Belchers arc
being currently mined with great
success by the Cyrus Eaton Co.
[72]
about 20
Age
The trading post
at Port Harrison
many insides/
'The thing worked, you'll be surprised to hear/ Mavor
reported to
Flaherty, 'though some of its notes were what Wetalltok called "sick
sounds". 1
1
My Eskimo Friends.
[73]
THE INNOCENT EYE
But before Flaherty heard of these troubles, he had his own. He had
of the Belcher Islands. The Canadian Govern
completed his survey
ment had so far the geographical existence of the group as
recognized
to name the largest island after Flaherty himself. The richness of the
to put the fire out, but succeeded only in landing himself in hospital
with burns.
Among Flahertomanes there has been more nonsense talked about
career than about any other. John Grierson, the
this episode in his
possessor of memory
a even more creative than Flaherty himself, can
remember Flaherty having carried scars all his life on his hands from
this fire. But nobody else, including the authors, detected these life
first Nanook' was a tragedy, even though Flaherty, who was not a
considered the film a failure.
conspicuously modest man,
In fact, of all the providential happenings of Flaherty's career the
destruction of his Baffin Land and Belcher Island negative was die
happiest.
Even if he had known how to shoot film, which he didn't, the
1 74]
PROM ORE TO AGGIE
had survived, Flaherty would have tried to sell his picture to the
theatres and he would either have failed and been convinced that he
[75]
SHOOTING NANOOK
People were so polite, but I could see that what interest they
took in the film was the friendly one of wanting to see where
I had been and what I had done. That wasn't what I wanted at
wanted
all. I to show the Innult.'1 And I wanted to show them,
not from the civilized point of view, but as they saw themselves,
1
Innuit was the name the Eskimo used to describe themselves. Flaherty's translation
'we, the people' implies a contrast with 'them, the masters, the white men, traders and
missionaries' or in terms of United States history, 'the people, against the imperial power*.
It meant originally 'we, human beings, in contrast to nature and brute creation', the
Eskimo at that time being unable to conceive of any other members of the human race.
[76]
SHOOTING NANOOK'
as 'we, the people'. I realized then that I must go to work in an
1
entirely different way.
The film represented to Flaherty his one uncompleted job. He had
found and mapped the Belchers. If others did not
exploit the mineral
riches, that was their concern. But in the course of prospecting,
Flaherty had found a mine of human material as rich as that which
Jack London had discovered in the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. He
could not work it out in words. His diaries were vivid; but
only as
diaries. He didn't possess the novelist's skill,
perhaps because he was
too gifted with speech. (How many story-writers are failed racon
teurs?) And yet for all the stories which he told, which held his
listeners entranced, he knew that what he really wanted to
say about
the Innnit failed to get across. It was all
glorification of Flaherty.
In the film he had hoped to eliminate himself, but he saw he had
not succeeded.
It was utterly
inept, simply a scene of this and that, no relation,
no thread of a story or continuity whatever, and it must have
bored the audience to distraction. Certainly it bored me.
My wife and I thought it over for a long time. At last we
realized why was bad, and we began to get a glimmer that
the film
if I went back to the North ... I could make a film that
perhaps
this time would go. Why not take a ... a
typical Eskimo and his
family and make a biography of their lives throughout the year?
Here is a man who has less resources than any other man in the
world. He lives in a desolation that no other race could possibly
survive. His life is a constant
fight against starvation. Nothing
grows ;
he must depend utterly on what he can kill and all of ;
During the remaining years of the First World War and the terrible
aftermath, the Russian, Hungarian and German revolutions, the blood
shed of the trenches and the even more lethal Spanish 'flu epidemic
that followed, the orgy of hatred and the calculated cruelty of the
Allied Blockade following the Armistice, Robert J. Flaherty went on
plugging away at the need for his film.
1
The World of Robert Flaherty.
2 'Robert Flaherty Talking.' The Cinema, 1950. R. Manvell, Pelican.
[77]
THE INNOCENT EYE
It must have seemed to many of his listeners that he had become
remote from the world scene and the really urgent problems. But in
fact Flaherty knew from personal experience that the message of the
film he wanted to make was even more relevant then than it had been
in his childhood, when he had found the friendship of men against
the hardship of the North the antidote to the class-hatred of industrial
Canada and the United States. In the world of war-time bloodshed
and post-war hatred, the Eskimo struggle for life provided a much-
needed restatement of values.
But nobody wanted to listen to such arguments and the Flahertys ;
rather tersely with his explorations in the North. They extended his
Fr&res meant Fort Chimo and the 'man-killer' Peterboro canoe, the
wonderful rivalry between the Hudson's Bay Company and Revillon
Fr&es to equip him for the east-west traverse of the Ungava Peninsula.
Flaherty opened his charm and eloquence. There were further
up
meetings. Captain Mallett introduced him to Mr. John Revillon. 1 They
*
saw the Harvard' print, the pitiful forerunner of what was to be a
masterpiece, a vision of the northern territories which the Hudson's
Bay Company had for hundreds of years considered their peculiar
province.
The public was not sufficiently aware that Revillon Fibres had for
years been in competition with the Hudson's Bay Company, who
started with the initial advantage of being advertised in every atlas
grease. He was fascinated by these cameras, because they were the first
with a gyro-movement in the tripod-head, whereby one could tilt and
pan the camera without the slightest distracting jar, jerk or vibration.
Today complex camera-movements are commonplace. But in those
days they were little used. D. W. Griffith had pioneered the pan or
inaction and although Nanook did not in fact contain more than a
few pans or tilts, they became an important - indeed vital - feature of
his later work in relating his characters to the natural elements.
Revillon Freres chose for Flaherty's base a post of theirs in the sub-
Arctic at Port Harrison on Cape Dufferin on the north-east coast of
Hudson Bay. To reach there would take two months by schooner and
canoe. But Flaherty was determined to take with him full equipment,
not merely for shooting and lighting, but for developing, printing
and projecting. The zoo-mile trip to Moose Factory was familiar; but
he had never made it so heavily laden. One portage took two days to
across.
pack
[79]
THE INNOCENT EYE
On 15th August, 1920, they dropped anchor in the mouth of the
Innuksuk River. The five gaunt buildings of the Port Harrison post
stood out on a rocky slope less than half a mile away.
Of the Eskimo who were known to the post, a dozen all told
were selected for the film. Of these Nanook, a character famous in
the country, I chose as my chief man. Besides him, and much to
his approval, I took on three younger men as helpers. This also
meant their wives and families, dogs to the number of twenty-
kayaks, and hunting impedimenta,
five, sledges,
As luck would have it, the first film to be made was that of a
walrus hunt. From Nanook I heard of the 'Walrus Island'. On its
south end, a surf-bound beach, there were in summer, he said,
many walrus, judging from signs that had been seen by a winter
sealing crowd of Eskimo who atone time had been caught there
by a break-up of the ice. 'The people do not go out to die island
in summer,' he continued, 'for not only is it out of sight of land,
but is ringed with heavy surf- dangerous landing for kayaks. But
for a long rime I have had my eyes on your whaleboat,' said he,
'and I am sure, if the seas are smooth, it is big enough for crossing
over, and just the thing for landing/
Through the busy weeks that followecl, time and time again
Nanook reminded me of the many, many moons it was since he
had hunted walrus. One morning I woke up to see the profile of
rising ground just beyond my window covered with topeks.
Nanook popped his head in through the door. They were Es
kimo from the north, he said, far away. 'And among them,'
eagerly he continued, 'is the very man who saw the walrus signs
on Walrus Island/
Nanook was off, to return in a moment more leading the great
man through the door. We talked iviuk through the hour. 'Sup
pose we go,' said I in conclusion, 'do you know that you and
your men may have to give up making a with
kill, if it interferes
[80]
SHOOTING NANOOK
side died down. The wind began blowing off the land. We broke
out our leg-o'-mutton. Before the day was half done a -film of
grey far out in the west told us we were in sight of Walrus
Island. By nightfall -we closed in to the
thundering shadow that
was its shore.
For hours we lounged around the luxury of a driftwood fire,
soaking in its warmth and speculating on our chances for the
morrow. When daylight came we made off to where the stranger
had told us he had found the walrus signs. It was a crescent of
beach pounded by the surf. While we looked around, one after
another the heads of a school of walrus, their wicked tusks gleam
ing in the sun, shot up above the sea.
By the night all my stock of film was exposed. The whale-
boat was full of walrus meat and ivory. Nanook never had such
walrus-hunting and never had I such filming, as that on Walrus
Island.
Three days later the post bell clangs out the welcome news that
the kablunak is about to show his iviuk aggie. Men, old men,
women, old women, boys, girls and small children file in to the
factor's house. Soon there is not an inch of space to spare. The
trader turnsdown the lamps. The projector light shoots over the
shocks of heads upon the blanket which is the screen.
Then the picture. A
figure appears. There is silence. They do
not understand. 'See, it is Nanook P the trader cries. The Nanook
in the flesh laughs his embarrassment. 'Ah! ah! ah!' they all
exclaim. Then silence. The figure moves. The silence deepens.
They cannot understand. They turn their heads. They stare at the
projector. They stare at its beam of magic light. They stare at
towards the screen. They follow the figure which now snakes
towards the background. There is something in the background.
The something moves. It lifts its head. Iviuk! iviuk!' shakes the
room. The figure stands up, harpoon poised in hand.
'Be sure of your harpoon! be sure of your harpoon!' the
audience cries.
The figure strikes down; the walrus roll off into the sea. More
figures rush in ; they grab the harpoon line. For dear life they
hold
on.
'Hold him Hold him !' shout the men. 'Hold him hold him !'
! !
[81]
THE INNOCENT EYE
The walrus's mate dives in, and by locking tusks attempts
rescue.
'Hold him gasps the crowd.
!'
light, just the size of the motion picture frame and controlling its
Washing film was even more difficult. All winter a hole had to be
1
My Eskimo Friends.
SHOOTING 'NANOOK
hut. There all hands were used to clear the ice forming in the water,
before it could be poured over the film. Deer-hair falling from, clothing
was as much a worry as the forming ice.
Involving the Innuit in this film work was part of the education he
found necessary for making the picture. It
began by showing them
still-photographs of themselves. 'When I showed them the photo
graph as often as not they would look at it upside down. I'd have to
take the photograph out of their hands and lead them, to the mirror
in hut, then have them look at themselves and the photograph
my
beside their reflections before, suddenly with a smile that spread from
ear to ear, they would understand.' 1
With him, Flaherty had taken one of the old gramophones, with a
square box and a long horn, together with an assortment of records
from Caruso, Farrar, Riccardo, McCormack, Al Jolson and Harry
Lauder. Tothe Innuit, the funniest record was Caruso singing the
1
'Robert Haherty Talking', Cinema, 1950, pp. 13-14. Robert Lewis Taylor in the New
Yorker Profile of Haherty said that the reason why Eskimo held the photographs upside
down was according to Flaherty because they had previously only seen their reflections in a
pool of water. This was a typical Flaherty joke, taken literally by a journalist so sophisti
cated that he had never looked at him self in a pool of water, only at other people on the
far bank. If a journalist was such an ass as to take such stuff literally Flaherty wasn't one
to spoil the joke. The Profile appeared in 3 parts, June n, 18, 25, 1949.
2
The author of the New Yorker Profile, who had obviously never seen Nanook of the
North, said that Haherty stopped filming just before Nanook bit the record. Flaherty didn't
trouble to correct him.
[83]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Flaherty took with him in addition
to essentials, lares andpenates which
were bulky in view of the portages involved in their transport.
One of Flaherty's, or rather Nanook's, difficulties was the building
of an igloo large enough for filming the interior scenes.
[84]
SHOOTING 'NANOOK'
volunteered for the task of
putting it together, and through a long
evening before a nickering candle and with a crowd of Eskimoes
around ejaculating their 'AyeeY and 'AhY, he managed to suc
ceed where I had 1
failed.
white man who wants to show what Eskimo life is like normally has
to manipulate it on film; a degree of organization comes in from out
side. If the Innuit is side-tracked from his
hunting, he must be guar
anteed basic rations. The film unit is
undermining the very pattern of
life it is
trying to film.
But even so there were two ways of working. Flaherty could have
1 Prof. Edmund Carpenter in Eskimo says, "The Aivilik Eskimo are
My Eskimo Friends.
first-class mechanics. They delight in stripping down and re-assembling engines, watches,
all machinery. I have watched them repair instruments which American mechanics,
flown into the Arctic for this purpose, have abandoned in despair/ This is not as surprising
specialist used to working in his own
as it might seem. The American mechanic is a
environment, which is different from the climate in which the Eskimo is a skilled mechanic
of all trades.
[85]
THE INNOCENT EYE
squatted at Port Harrison and said, 'Just go on living ; I'm not going
to help you, except in emergency, until this picture is over. But I'm
going to film you in all your sufferings. Just forget I'm here!'
If he had do that, despite his charm, his violin and
tried to
gramophone, he would have been left high and dry by the Innuit.
They needed powerful inducements to break their winter pattern.
And the whole discipline of filming was the opposite of their pattern.
Ifyou want a walrus, you stalk him and harpoon him. But if you
want a film-sequence of killing a walrus, you have to stalk the walrus
and wait until the director gives the signal for the kill.
Nanook discussed with Flaherty what would be a good 'aggie',
killing a she-bear in her den at Cape Sir Thomas Smith 200 miles to
the north. He described how in early December the she-bear denned
in snow-drifts, with just a tiny vent or airhole melted by the animal's
of eight weeks.Two dogs were lost through starvation. They never saw
escape alive. When they returned, they
a bear and they were lucky to
1
My Eskimo Friends.
[86]
SHOOTING 'NANOOK*
were met by Stewart the post-trader. 'What, no bear?' he asked. 'An'
just to think that a week come Friday two huskies got a she-bear an'
two cubs in a cave. 'T would have made a fine
aggie/
Film critics were to seize on this sort of to the life of the
'falsity'
what he wanted. In the end, they were hunting whales with a fleet of
kayaks. But by August 1921, the film stock now being exhausted
and the yearly ship arriving at Port Harrison, Flaherty had to go back
to civilization to render the account of what he had been doing all
this time. He had to make a film.
A
curious fatality pursued many of those whom Flaherty chose
out of their natural settings. The Belcher series I have outlined. Within
a couple of years Nanook, the great hunter, died of starvation deer-
hunting in the interior of Ungava. Frances Flaherty says that ten years
later in the Berliner Tiergarten she bought an 'Eskimo Pie' called
[87]
PART TWO
7
THE MASTERPIECE THAT PAID
buy that'.
satisfy their regular twice-a-week fans and they could not afford to
show which might disturb that pattern.
films
working with Pathe, who'd made the introduction. 'Wait,' said the
friend, 'we'll show it to the big brass.'
The second audience, which included Madame Brunet, wife of the
Path6 President/caught fire*. Now
it was
only a question of selling the
full version to the or rather to the exhibitors.
general public,
No ordinary exhibitor would handle so off-beat a picture. But
Roxy, who had introduced the three-console electric organ and re
vamped the Victoria Cinema as the Rialto, 'a of Motion temple
1 'Robert Flaherty Talking*, Cinema, 1950.
[92]
THE MASTERPIECE THAT PAID
Pictures; a Shrine of Music and the Allied Arts', might take Nanook,
if properly approved.
[93]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Robert E. Sherwood, who wrote in The Best Moving Pictures of
1922-3-
travel pictures, many gorgeous 'scenics', but there is only one that
deserves to be called great. That one is Nanook of the North. It
stands alone, literally in a class by itself. Indeed, no list of the best
pictures of the year or of all the years in the brief history of the
movies, could be considered complete without it. Here was drama
rendered far more vital than any trumped-up drama could ever
be by the fact that it was all real Nanook was no playboy enacting
a part which could be forgotten as soon as the grease-paint had
been rubbed off; he was himself an Eskimo struggling to survive.
The North was no mechanical affair of wind-machines and paper-
snow it was the North, cruel and terribly strong/
;
minority public waiting anxiously for films which broke new ground.
But there were not enough such films to bring these people into cinemas
twice a week and even if there had been, the numbers of the minority
;
would not have made up for the numbers of the majority, who would
have stayed away. Nanook might be a masterpiece, but it was dan
gerously, uncommercially different. 1
Nanook of the North did not do good business in the United States.
But then in London and in Paris, where the exhibition machinery was
more flexible, Nanook of the North ran for six months and the prestige
of its metropolitan success created a demand for it in the
provinces.
There was a kind of specialized form of exhibition in the United
States, the system of 'road-showing' such as was used for The Birth
2
of a Nation or Intolerance. But for these pictures there was the financial
1 Of all the films shown in 1922, the only one re-issued twenty-five years later was
Natiook of the North. In 1947 it was shown at the London Pavilion in a sound version and
inNew York, it played at the Sutton Theatre shortly before the premiere of Louisiana
Story in 1948. In 1950-51 this version was released for i<5mm. distribution. It has been
televised in the United States, Britain, Western and Scandinavia.
Germany, Italy
*
Compare Gone with the Wind or more recendy Spartacus and Ben-Hur.
[94]
THE MASTERPIECE THAT PAID
had been very high; and the studios
justification that production costs
were able to put pressure upon their distribution affiliates. Nanook, on
the other hand, had cost comparatively little to make; and what little
it had cost had been advanced not by a commercial film company but
by Revillon Frres. So there was no inducement for the American
industry to give it
special treatment.
A summary of Nanookis
given in Appendix One. From what has
already been said about the shooting of the picture and about Flaherty's
adoption of the Eskimo approach to the nature of its originality
art,
down and never up to his subject/ wrote Flaherty. 'He is always the
big man from New York or from London. But I have been dependent
on these people/
But there was one aspect of Flaherty's originality which was mis
understood in Nanook and also in his subsequent pictures. It was due
partly to the intimacy with which Flaherty used the film medium.
He made a greater demand upon the viewer than any previous film
maker, because he did not state in advance what the viewer was going
to see. This was famously demonstrated in the sequence of Nanook
spearing the During his enormous fight, there is no indication of
seal.
what is
struggling at the end of the line with such tremendous force
until the seal is
finally hauled on to the ice. Jean Renoir described this
method of engaging our curiosity as if the director was making the
picture for each individual member of the audience.
Because Flaherty makes each of us the witness of something taking
place before our eyes (rather than something which happened at the
time of filming), it has an impact of actuality in some ways greater
than that, for example, of Ponting's With Scott to the South Pole. The
statement is not 'This happened to us* but 'this is how life is with
Nanook and his family*.
As I have said, the mere fact of filming Nanook automatically
changed the actuality of the lives of Nanook and his characters. It was
not a newsreel record, nor even a re-enactment of daily life. It was a
distillation of reality into a form of poetry; and though the raw
material appeared to be the Eskimo, the poetic echoes resonated around
the world.
We fail to understand Nanook, if we think only of what was on
[95]
THE INNOCENT EYE
the screen; an almost equally important part of the film was what
was in the minds of the audience. Few of the audience were as near
to death by starvation, by exposure to the elements, by the caprice of
nature. And few of the audience were as free from fear of their fellow
men, generous and loyal and brave. The pure simplicity
as naturally
o Nanook a gentle reminder that our anxieties are luxuries that can
is
be dispensed with.
But of course such a reminder, though it may be inspiring, does
not solve the problems of a slum mother in the windy city of Chicago
in the depth of winter when fellow creatures, equally driven, have
A miner out of work in the Ruhr or the Rhondda
lost their generosity.
Valley was in no position to go out and kill a seal. And a child running
barefoot to the compulsory school could not hide beneath the skins
on the snow-bed of an igloo.
A certain resentment built up against Nanook, which found its
work for Professor Vilhjalmur Stefansson before she became the film
critic of the London Daily Mail. In Let's Go to the Pictures, she described
arctic. She added that Vilhjalmur Stefansson said it was 'a most inexact
1
picture of the Eskimo's life'.
Stefansson had done nothing of the sort. In his book The Standardiza
tion he showed great understanding of the sort of difficulties
of Error
under which Flaherty had laboured and was most generous as propa
1
On the revival of Nanook in1947, Campbell Dixon, film critic of the Daily Telegraph
wrote an Nanook a Fake? which resurrected the criticism in its distorted form.
article Is
He quoted from a letter which said, 'To put it mildly, Nanook is a phoney ... I can still
remember with what delight I came across Stefansson's exposure of the impostor / . .
[96]
THE MASTERPIECE THAT PAID
large enough and with enough light for his family plus the camera,
so as Flaherty had admitted in My Eskimo Friends, part of the igloo
had to be cut away and one could see the steaming of the family's
breath, as one wouldn't if they had really been inside an igloo. The
seal fishing was unauthentic in that part of Ungava; the seal when
landed was patently dead.
spirit.'
But all this was in the future. In 1923, having launched Nanook of
the North, Bob Flaherty settled down with the help of Frances to
[97]
8
M,
Famous-Players-Lasky,
Jesse M. Lasky, the production head of
.r.
[98]
IN SEARCH OF SEA MONSTERS
of the son of a mining
prospector, who became a mining
sistent life
prospector and then because he loved the North so much went back
there to make a film..
From this moment on, Flaherty was a film director, an
explorer in
search of film subjects and the money to make them.
One can understand the
feelings of Frances Flaherty. She had
married Bob because she loved the primitive life. But for nine
years,
she had been stuck at home while Bob had done all the exploring.
Why couldn't Bob select a part of the world oyster in which she and
the girls could be with him?
'Why not?' said Bob and they both went to New York to see
Frederick O'Brien, the author of White Shadows in the South Seas, at
The Coffee House Club.
O'Brien brought along George Biddle, a rich American who had
been painting in Tahiti, and Grace Moore, who was
beginning to sing
in the Metropolitan Opera House.
According to the New Yorker Profile, ipth June, 1949, O'Brien said
that after years in the frozen North,
'Flaherty should go south to
Polynesia.' Grace Moore and Biddle agreed. Samoa was the only place
with a truly Polynesian culture. 'Go to Safune on the island of Savaii,'
O'Brien said. 'You still may be in time to catch some of that beautiful
old culture before it
passes entirely away.'
'What about the children?' Frances asked. They were aged six,
four and two. 'Of course,' said
Flaherty, 'we'll all go. They shall be
schooled in the ways of nature. The world is our oyster.'
Frances Flaherty was a very active woman - and indeed still is.
[99]
THE INNOCENT EYE
weeks, I had joined Bob and his family in New Canaan and a few
weeks later we were on the bosom of the broad Pacific, far from snow
and ice, coal-dust and clinkers/
Frances and David Flaherty were to become the hands and organ
in the North.
izing brains of what had been single operation
a
Frances, David, the three girls and a red-headed nursery maid. Before
he left New York, Flaherty had been given a glowing description of
Savaiiby Frederick O'Brien. It was the last remaining island uncor-
rupted by Western civilization. The inhabitants were an almost
Grecian race, as beautiful as their landscape. In the village of Safune,
[100]
IN SEARCH OF SEA MONSTERS
complex of government, missionary and trading endeavour in Savaii
and its effects upon the people; a film of great anthropological-
sociological-political-and-whatnotical interest. But Flaherty was no
more interested than Jesse Lasky in that stuff. He wanted to find Felix
David, Frederick O'Brien's contact man with his finger on the pulse
of Polynesia.
long slender wharf, we could see the man we had come so far
to meet. From the upper veranda he gazed at us through binoculars,
The natives streamed down the wharf and gave us the friendly
welcome that so endears one to the Polynesians 1 .
[101]
THE INNOCENT EYE
than he had, having left the Fatherland in 1896. David indicated that
if one was shown to his subjects, he would be prepared to watch it.
But films, he intimated, weren't what the Savaii people really liked.
It was an astonishing thing. They loved opera. And that was what was
so marvellous. When he was a young man, he had been trained to
sing baritone. 'But his father,' and he looked up at the only
painting
among the photographs, 'his father didn't approve.'
So he had come out to Samoa, which in those days was German,
and settled down as a trader and had sold and bought during the day
and he sang opera to his 'subjects'. His tour-de-force was
at nights
Sieg
death scene from Gotterddmmemng, which according to
fried's
Flaherty
had been heard by some of the older inhabitants of Safune some
five thousand times.
It
might have been thought that this German film would appeal
most to Felix David for patriotic reasons. But on it he came to con
centrate the fury provoked by Flaherty, who overshadowed him with
his dominant personality, undermined him with the excitement of
his film
project and deprived him of his operatic audience by providing
more popular entertainment.
This however was not
immediately apparent. Felix David promised
full
co-operation, with the guarantee that if he said so, there would
be no trouble.
Before they arrived at Safune, sixteen tons of
equipment had been
landed, the Hghting-generator, projector and other apparatus for the
laboratory. For insurance purposes they had been labelled with high-
priced values and Flaherty was known as the 'Melikani Millionea'.
For days a chain of natives carried boxes and bales to an old,
up
disused and overgrown trading post, which was to be used as their
headquarters when it had been made habitable by a second team. This
house, where Frederick O'Brien had lived, was sited
among giant
[102]
IN SEARCH OF SEA MONSTERS
They began by trying to tell the islanders in a booklet about the Eski
mo and the purpose behind filming Nanook. Through Herr David,
Flaherty spoke of how he lived with the Eskimo people, won their
friendship and confidence, made his picture because love overflowed
in his heart for the people of that country, on account of their kindli
ness, etc.'
1
The men in New
York saw that Mr. Flaherty had done a
very useful thing. 'Such pictures as this will create love and friendship
among the people of the world/ So the men in New York had
all
Though Jesse L. Lasky would have been surprised to learn that his
motive for sending Flaherty to Samoa was so that 'misunderstandings
1
Mrs. Flaherty, quoted in The World of Robert Flaherty.
THE INNOCENT EYE
and quarrels between the nations will cease' and though this statement
made as little impression on the islanders as the screening of Nanook
some weeks later, it is confirmation that Flaherty saw his first picture
as a contribution to world peace, at least after the event.
'civilization'. The money the film unit would pay him for his services
might give him the chance he had been waiting for. 'Ach Gott! the
new art! Are we not brothers in the craft?' As the beer flowed, he
grew maudlin about the operatic triumphs that had been denied him.
But between depressive bouts, he was very helpful at the outset,
sending his servants scouring the island for whatever Flaherty wanted.
The trouble was Flaherty didn't know what he wanted. For weeks
he searched the deep-sea caverns underlying the reefs for the giant
reported that a giant octopus had been spotted in the passage of the
reef at Sataua. Its body was as big as one of the Safune
village houses.
This did not surprise the Flahertys. Hadn't an been washed
octopus
up on the of Madagascar with a carcase bigger than that of any
coast
known whale? There was also talk of tiger-shark in the deep-water
reef at Asau Bay on the way to Sataua.
They decided to go and see
for themselves, sending word in advance of their arrival.
But when they reached Asau, what awaited them was a formal
ceremony with speeches and drinks which had to be gone through
before the business of tiger-sharks could be broached; and
though
the chiefs agreed that it would be the easiest
thing next morning to
lure sharks with
bait placed on the rocks and
spearsmen ready to kill
them, meanwhile what about the dance that had been arranged in their
honour?
[104]
MO ANA 1923-25
The village ofSafune
Flaherty on the way back from Tufii
haughty, albeit canny, chiefs of Sasina, and she and her handmaid
came
THE INNOCENT EYE
up the palm-lined trail to Safune, the old women here told her between
1
their teeth that they would see that she was killed by dawn.'
to solve the difficulty. Taioa was
Flaherty appealed to Felix David
given space for her sleeping-mat
on the Flahertys' veranda. She sur
vived the night and submitted to film tests, smiling and strumming
her guitar.
*How did you fix it?' asked Flaherty.
*I
just asked them if they wanted you to go and make the picture
at Sasina,' David answered.
Having solved that difficulty, Flaherty turned his mind to other
problems. But within a month Taioa had vanished
from the veranda;
and from the village one of the boys had vanished too. "The Safune
chiefs just laughed and laughed.'
Undeterred, Flaherty found another girl, Saulelia, not quite as
hair. The tests were good
fascinating as Taioa but with beautiful long
and altogether Flaherty shot thousands of feet on her.
Then one morning she arrived with her hair cropped like a man's.
Flaherty exploded with rage. Weeping, the girl explained that she
had been deserted by her lover and, fa'a Samoa, she had to crop her
hair.
With his third girl, Fa'angase, Flaherty succeeded. She was almost
when the unit first arrived in Safune and had followed Flaherty
a child
around shyly wherever he had been filming. Sometimes she brought
him a flower. Now with the months, she had blossomed.
She came from the other end of the village. Her father was an
important chief. He might take part in the
agreed that his daughter
film provided 'Lopati' as they called Flaherty treated her like his own
daughter. The chief explained that his end of Safune was high in rank
but where Lopati lived was low and always had been. The village boys
round Lopati's house were low-class and Flaherty must see they
behaved when Fa'angase was around.
Flaherty promised. Filming restarted. But the low-class' boys were
to restrain. Flaherty had trained two of them to work in the
difficult
[106]
IN SEARCH OF SEA MONSTERS
bowed . . . and her eyes . . . one looks one way and the other looks
the other way.'
Fa'angase took the teasing in good part. But her father got news of
it and one day there was a meeting in the high-class end of the village.
It sounded angry, and Flaherty went to ask Herr David what was
happening.
There was trouble between the two ends of the village, David said,
and the chiefs from the high-class end were coming to take Fa'angase
away from the film. To lose his third leading lady seemed the end
to Flaherty. He stopped shooting and waited to see what would
happen.
A small river divided the high-class end from the low-class end
and that night a deputation of chiefs came across the bridge towards
Flaherty's house. It was obvious to him that they had come to take
away ; and he must have been debating whether
his third leading lady
[107]
THE INNOCENT EYE
the not-so-young-or-very-beautiful, but high-class taupou whom
Flaherty had rejected as his first leading lady.
acters to come to him. He was conscious that he hadn't got all the
time in the world and he was deliberately trying to make a Polynesian
Nanook and yet every experience he had had since landing on Savaii
;
the hard and limited way of personal experience. Samoa was difficult to
absorb. 1 If he had been a
younger man, conditioned
by earlier
less
[108]
IN SEARCH OF SEA MONSTERS
sensitive. When
the Prizma broke down, Flaherty loaded an
Akeley
with a of panchromatic, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps feeling
roll
of Moana? This was that Flaherty shot the picture in either early
morning or late afternoon, when the sun was low and its rays threw
long shadows to create an effect of depth and perspective.
But before Flaherty achieved this technical triumph, there were
physical setbacks. The first was a personal one. Used to endure ex
treme cold, he was distressed by the exposure to extreme heat. While
the Flahertys were still hunting for strange sea-monsters, he was
[109]
THE INNOCENT EYE
suddenly taken ill in a little village called Tufu. It "was a distance from
Safune. He couldn't eat anything, could only take doses of some pain
killer. He grew too weak to move.
A messenger was dispatched to Fagamalo, whence a radio message
was flashed to Apia to send a boat immediately to Falealupo, the port
days for the boat to reach Falealupo ; but Mrs. Flaherty gave instruc
be made to carry her husband to Newton Rowe's
tions for a litter to
house there. Rowe headed the progress mounted on his horse, followed
by a native Samoan missionary, Mrs. Flaherty and Bob in his litter.
(See Illustration.)
At one point, Rowe found that he had ridden ahead without any
one following. When he
turned back, he saw that the procession had
agree seeing that all the Samoans advised it. He did not learn till later
that Flaherty had to walk because he could not be carried across the
spirit-path which led to a rock from which the dead
spirits dived
into the sea to Polutu, the land of their dead.
It is ironic that Flaherty, who had come to Savaii in order to film
the rich of the ancient Polynesians before traders, missionaries and
life
[no]
IN SEARCH OF SEA MONSTERS
Hollywood and then to Eastman Kodak to find out what the trouble
might be.
But while Clark was away, David Flaherty discovered what had
spoilt the film and poisoned Bob. A Government chemist in Apia
on the other island had suggested that the water in the laboratory cave
had been too salty and gave him some silver nitrate with which to
make a salinity test.
David Flaherty found that all the time they had been developing
film, the silver nitrate instead of being washed away by the tide had
been accumulating in the bottom of the pool in ever-increasing
quantities. This was the reason why the film had developed the dark
flashes. It was the cause also of Bob's mysterious illness, because he had
[in]
9
MOANA
utter waste
TJLb twelve months' shooting had not been an
of time. Flaherty had accumulated the experience and
characters from which he was to make his final picture.
First there was TVungaita, who was to
play the part of the mother
of Moana's family. She first came to the Flaherty house selling baskets
she had made from strips of sun-dried pandanus leaf. Frances thought
it would be good if her daughters learned how to make them and
Tu'ungaita stayed on as their teacher.
The old lady proved equally skilled in making tapa, a bark-cloth
from which lava-lavas had been made in earlier times. It was a dying
craft, as most lava-lavas were made of cotton, woven and printed in
Manchester or Japan. But when the old lady made this tapa, the
Flaherty, with his love of traditional skills, filmed it with care to detail.
[112]
MOANA
discipline for the formation of character. And for some time, Flaherty
was at a loss for a
fitting climax. He found it in the tattooing ceremony,
an idea suggested by Newton Rowe. In Samoa under the Sailing Gods,
Rowe writes
C
A Samoan who is not tattooed ... it extends almost
:
solidfrom the hips to the knees ... it has been remarked, appears
naked beside one who is and in no way can the custom be considered
;
2
Quoted in The World of Robert Flaherty.
["3]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Deeper than that, however, is its spring in a common human need, the
need for some test of endurance, some supreme mark of individual
worth and proof of the quality of the man.' How valid this was, or
had been, of the Samoan cultural pattern is hard to say. But
certainly
it is true of
Flaherty's symbolism.
Ta'avale would never have been tattooed if it hadn't been for the
film. He dreaded the ordeal. It meant six weeks of torture with
Flaherty filming at each stage and another fortnight of recovery. But
after some hesitation he endured it 1
according to Frances Flaherty
because it 'was not only his own pride that was at stake but the honour
of all Samoa* and also more plausibly because 'he was certainly the
hero of the film now'.
It would not be add that Ta'avale was well paid by
cynical to
Flaherty to undergo the traditions of his race.
In all, Flaherty shot some 240,000 feet of film,
making Moana. By
modern standards this would not be much for a major-feature picture,
but it was
a fantastic footage for a
single director-cameraman on a
2
single location. Mr. Lasky did not complain. Never had such footage
been so cheaply developed and printed two native byin a cave boys
remote from any labs.
But during the final weeks of production, the film was nearly
wrecked because of these two lab boys, Samuelo and Imo.
A travelling from Sataua with a government party which
youth
spent night in Safune on a tour of the island made advances to a girl
a
who was the wife of the native missionary's son. Imo and Samuelo
took it up as a violation of fa'a Samoa. In the
quarrel that ensued Imo
stabbed the youth in the neck with a
'bullet-tipped cane'. The thrust
reached his spine and twenty-four hours later he was dead.
Samoan native law demanded an eye for an eye, a life for a life.
Women and children were evacuated from Safune, while the men
patrolled the village all night expecting a counter-attack. The Flahertys
bolted themselves into their
bungalow. The immense footage of film
was stored in camphor-wood chests on the veranda and the three adult
Flahertys took turns to stand guard over it with a shotgun.
iQp. cit.
2
It should be remembered though that of this 40,000 feet of orthochromatic was
scrapped and an unknown quantity of panchromatic ruined by 'fogging*.
["4]
MOANA
Robert Lewis Taylor in his Profile of Flaherty (New Yorker, i8th
June, 1949) stated that Felix David had begun the trouble by making
the two lab boys drunk. In notes to the authors, David Flaherty flatly
contradicted this.
On the other hand, the continued presence of the Flaherty unit had
undermined the German trader. His kingship of the village had been
[H6]
MOANA'
Flaherty knew Moana was good, but it was different from the usual
run of films, and given the same type of publicity, it was bound to
if
In Moana 1
Flaherty for the first time used close-ups, sometimes very
large indeed, in a succession of shots, not in isolation but
in continuity
- and beautiful
usually, in order to show a process. Three outstanding
examples are the making of the bark-cloth, the preparation of the meal
and the tattooing. In the last especially, the contraction of Moana' s
facialmuscles at the pain of the bone-needles, the anguish on his
mother's face as she fans the tortured waist and limbs, shown large on
the screen provided for audiences of the time an agonizing experience
of actuality. The way these sequences were shot could not be bettered
today and Flaherty himself never surpassed this choice of camera set
many others in Moana, including that final slow pan-shot which relates
the parents in their hut to their sleeping son.
Long-focus lenses were also used more daringly than before, perhaps
When he found
a corollary of Flaherty's development of the close-up.
thathe could not approach an object he was filming by moving his
camera nearer (as when shooting the giant waves breaking over the
reef and canoes coming in on the surf), he brought it close with the
long-focus lens. No professional cinematographer, Flaherty learned by
trial and error; and in all the films he made as director-cameraman, he
used only two filters.
The visual quality of Moana is very lovely. Seeing the film today on
copies taken from dupe-negatives, we still feel no need for colour,
even though some of the original quality has been lost.
The film has a wonderful organic unity. Every incident is an integral
part of the family's everyday life. It is a lyric of calm and peace. Even
the dances and the tattooing have no violent or aggressive
qualities.
For all its human feeling and warmth of approach, Nanook had a
detachment, as if the characters were being watched from outside. The
triumph of Moana was its intimacy. The audience felt they were really
there with Moana, Fa'angase and the others on Savaii. Apart from
the use of close-ups, etc., mentioned above, this
intimacy was achieved
because Flaherty was his own cameraman. His unit was so small the
natural actors were not Today with the complications of
inhibited.
perceptive and laudatory notice appeared in the New York Sun over
the pen-name of The
Moviegoer. It was written by John Grierson, who
used for the first time an adjective which was
subsequently to take
different shades of meaning. 'Moana, being a visual account of events
in the daily life of a
Polynesian youth, has documentary value/ The
[118]
*MOANA'
word documentary in this sentence was a translation of the French
documentaire, used to describe serious traveland expedition films as
opposed to boring travelogues. Grierson had only one point of
criticism. 'Lacking in the film was the pictorial transcription
of the
sex-life of these people. It is
rarely referred to. Its absence mars its
scrapers, radio-receivers?
The chiefs from Safune saw it in Apia. According to Mr. C. H. Hall
who was it was 'good exceed
present at the screening, they said that
ingly' 'fa'a Samoa' and something sacred! beyond the comprehension
of the alien papalangi!
The alien papalangi in France thought very highly of the picture. In
Britain, its
protagonists were members of the documentary
movement
that was to follow. While Bryher in Close-up 1928 recommended it
as a film for children, Rotha wrote in The Film Till Now (Cape, 1930)
[120]
IO
I.^t
the terrifying experience of the film director that
is
he is at the
mercy of a financier. Flaherty's earlier career of prospector
had been hazardous enough. But his new career was far more dan
gerous. Between the completion of Moana and its
premiere in New
York, Flaherty divided his time between New York and his home
in New Canaan, Connecticut. As his reputation sagged in Hollywood,
it rose
among the lovers of film art in New York, who unfortunately
were less rich.
In 1926, Flaherty made two short sponsored films. The first, financed
to raise the finance for a colour film based on Kipling's Kim. The
[MI]
THE INNOCENT EYE
project fell through, but it shows that Flaherty was already thinking
of India as a future location.
His second project in 1926 was Twenty-four Dollar Island, a film of
1
Manhattan in two reels 'financed by a wealthy socialite' for a purpose
which is not clear. This journalistic commission was outside his com
petence. He shot a lot of material from the tops of skyscrapers, pro
ducing a curious, flat, foreshortened effect. 'The film had a viewpoint
of New York that people in the streets never have,' he is
reported to
have said, ignoring the fact that many of the people in the streets of
New York worked in those high buildings. It gave the effect of deep,
narrow canyons thronged with the minute creatures who had created
this amazing city.'
1
Film IndexSeries, No. 6 (Supplement to Sight and Sound, pub. British Film Institute,
May 1946)by Herman G. Wemberg. David Flaherty says the film was financed by
Pictorial Clubs, of which the moving forces were Mrs. Ada de Acosta Root, Col. Breckin-
[122]
SHADOWS, WHITE AND DARK
Arrived in Hollywood, Flaherty found Thalberg had bought
O'Brien's book not for its denunciation of the degrading impact of
white civilization on the Marquesans but for its intriguing box-office
title. Laurence S tailings, author of the successful play and later film
story'.
The producer assigned to White Shadows was Hunt Stromberg, who
invited Flaherty to give a showing of Moana. When it was over, the
yes-men who filled the theatre waited for Stromberg' s reaction. 'Boys,
I've got a great idea!' he is
supposed to have exclaimed. 'Let's fill
make a film about the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico. This seemed a
genuine Flaherty project and he went down with Frances and David
and started to make a picture of Acoma Indians, based upon their tribal
lifeand ceremonies with a small Indian boy as his hero.
Towards the end of 1928 David Flaherty was recalled to Hollywood
before being sent as technical adviser on a film that Fox intended to
make in Tahiti, based on a story-outline Bob and David put up about
Trader Felix David. Berthold Viertel was working on the script.
THE INNOCENT EYE
the great German director, F. W. Murnau,
Through, him David met
who was most complimentary about Bob. 'Your brother makes the
best films/ he said. What Murnau went on to say about Hollywood
was not so complimentary.
Fox did not mix happily with Murnau' s sincerity. The Four Devils, to
which a dialogue sequence was added at the last moment, was even
less successful.
He was also going to Samoa. I'll give you letters there too/ David
said.
[124]
SHADOWS, WHITE AND DARK
David said he'd give his right arm to, but he'd got to go hack to
New Mexico and the Pueblo film.
Fox was just about to call the Pueblo i.1m off, Murnau said. The
camp at Tucson had been burned out. Flaherty and Fox weren't seeing
eye to eye. Fox wanted to write in a love story and Bob refused,
Murnau unfolded his plan. Flaherty was through in Hollywood. He,
Murnau, was fed up with it. Why not join forces, go to Tahiti, Samoa,
Bali and make the films they wanted to make and to hell with Holly
wood? Murnau was sure he could get the finance.
Then and there they put in a call to Tucson and fixed to drive down
the 500 miles to see Bob
Flaherty next day.
At Tucson, Bob told Murnau
the story of a pearl diver which he
had heard during his unfortunate White Shadows experience in Tahiti.
Murnau was enthusiastic. 'This,' he said, 'will be the first Murnau-
Flaherty Production.'
Murnau had business He
put out the news story that Murnau
flair.
and Flaherty were shaking the dust of Hollywood off their feet in
order to make films in far-off places. The combination of Murnau's
1 Frances Flaherty claims that she anticipated the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the
Second World War in I938 t says Newton Rowe. Though it altered her residence in each
feelings. To this restraint was added the burden of the effort to live.
With the entire Marquesan economic and social system disrupted, food
was not so easily procurable, and they were driven to work by com
mands, taxes, fines and the novel and killing incentives of rum and
opium. The whites taught the men to sell their lives, and the women
to sell their charms. Happiness and health were
destroyed because the
white man came here only to gratify his cupidity.' 1 This was the story,
1 Frederick O'Brien, White Shadows in the South Seas, Grosset & Dunlap, 1928.
[126]
SHADOWS, WHITE AND DARK
as true of Tahiti as of the Marquesas, that Flaherty was now ready
to tell.
But Murnau, fresh to the South Seas, was still, so to speak, in the
is forbidden to men. If any man violates the tabu, even from the motive
of the deepest love, tragedy will overwhelm him. So the young pearl-
fisher who falls in love with the sacred virgin is consumed by the sea.
contracted for'
There was nothing Flaherty could say. Murnau was financing the
film. He was a most gifted film-maker and Flaherty admired his work.
trip to
Tucson when Crosby was acting as second cameraman on the
Next
day, a schooner arrived
from Papeete with a cable, addressed
to Murnau-Flaherty: JUST FINISHED FILMING IN CARIBBEAN STOP MAY
I JOIN YOU FLOYD CROSBY. 1
His arrival on the next mail steamer enabled Flaherty to recede into
the background even further. That retirement was made still easier by
1 documentaries, Crosby photographed The River, The Fight for Life,
Among many
parts ofThe Land and Man Power and the Land. One of the finest realist cameramen in the
U.S.A. he includes in his feature credits The Brave Bulls, High Noon and The Wonderful
Country.
[127]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Viscount Hastings, 1 who met Flaherty and Murnau and sized up the
2
situation. 'Both my wife and I fell under Flaherty's spell, were
charmed and loved to listen by the hour to his stories. He related
see Flaherty driving his team of
them so vividly that I can still clearly
huskies with the inevitable violin tied to the top of the load. ... I was
simple. He had combed the seas around Samoa for tiger-sharks and
Arctic for mother-bears. Supposing that
octopuses and scoured the
that is to say that he
Flaherty had been in Murnau's shoes, supposing
had ever saved money
enough to invest it all in a film
(as
indeed he
life? Even if Murnau had been urging him to do so, I doubt it. But
the real conflict was between two personalities, both dominant, and
still in Tahiti. 'As I had call on some capital from a small film company
of which I was a director, I decided to join Murnau and get the consent
of the other directors to invest in this project/
1 Now the Earl of Huntingdon.
2 Rome.
Cristina, daughter of the Marchese Casati,
[128]
SHADOWS, WHITE AND DARK
By a strange irony Flaherty disapproved of Tabu because it elevated
an ancient superstition to the level of truth,while Murnau, not
ancient tabu on the dedicated maiden had lapsed, this tabu was
'Film stock was lost. Schooners failed to arrive. Reri (our leading
[129]
II
they could cut anything they disliked but put nothing in, while
The Soviet flirtation proved even less rewarding than the Holly
wood. So a group called the Porza tried to set up a film for Flaherty
Bell and all ... by people with every reason to know it well. Likewise,
if it was a return to "reality", it was a return not unconnected with
Clydeside movements, the Independent Labour Party, the Great
Depression, not to mention our Lord Keynes, the London School of
Economics, P.E.P. and such. Documentary was born and nurtured on
the bandwagon of uprising social democracy everywhere; in Western
With the night porter bringing fresh supplies as needed, they talked
and drank and laughed and smoked and coughed till it was light next
morning. Rowe says that men were already working on the road, when
he and Preston left; and Preston regaled them on the riches of his
political understanding.
Who paid that bill, one wonders ?
Certainly not Flaherty, who was
broke. Not Mrs. Flaherty, who was out of town. So it must have been
one of the first charges on Industrial Britain.
[134]
BERLIN AND INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN
Grierson knew Flaherty's methods; 2,500 might be exhausted
in preliminary shooting before a foot of usable film was taken. He
knew that he could only employ Flaherty for a short period and
he devised a way of using him to the best purpose,
limit-jug his ex
penditure.
Basil Wright was going out to shoot his first film, finally known as
The Country Comes to Town, some of the locations of which were in
Devonshire. Grierson said that it would help Flaherty in
shooting a
film about Industrial Britain to go to Devon and watch Basil Wright
shoot his film about cows. He was as much concerned with what
Flaherty could teach his young men as he was with what Flaherty
might ultimately shoot.
'So I found myself,' recalls Wright, 'driving Flaherty I whom
regarded with immense awe - in a dilapidated Buick two-seater
roadster from London to Exeter and He was extremely
points west.
nervous and round about Runnymede he said this was because he had
been deeply affected by Murnau's death in California.
'But when he reached Camberley, he said he was in need of refresh
ment. I
pulled into a pub and here the unpredictability of the great
man hit me for the first time. I wanted to reach our Devon location
as as possible but over pints of bitter (which I think he didn't
soon ;
[135]
THE INNOCENT EYE
in admiration, gazing at it from a variety of angles. Then lie went
inside and took one look round. an exterior job," he said.
'It's
4
We
pressed on towards Devon, but on the outskirts of Salisbury,
where the road crosses the railway and heads for open country,
there were a lot of chaps looking over a wall. "Stop!" cried Flaherty.
"What's going on?"
It was a cricket match.
Tiger King
Seaweed
Sharks
Mikeleen
Tiger King
The Aran Islanders make Broadway, October 18, 1934
BERLIN AND INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN
and people in terms of movie in a way that ten million dollars would
not buy. Incidentally when I was actually shooting, he went as far
away as possible. He never advised or interfered. But he opened up
for me a new field of revelation every day/
Back
in London, Flaherty found that Grierson had
engaged as his
production manager, J. P. R. Golightly, an estate manager from the
West of England who had had no previous experience of film-making.
With Golightly at the wheel of an old Austin and in the back a
Newman-Sinclair camera and, for an E.M.B. film, a generous amount
of film stock, they set out for Devon to film the steel bridge at Saltash
near Plymouth.
'Mydear John/ Flaherty said. 'Those weren't rushes. They were just
[137]
THE INNOCENT EYE
paper, the first and fourth were blank. On the second in Flaherty's
1
heavy hand was written
INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN
a film about craftsmen
by Robert J. Flaherty
A SCENARIO
Scenes of Industrial Britain
quixotically tilted his camera wasn't in the script since there was no
script for it to be in.
except the immediate participants. The important thing was that while
Flaherty was filming, he brought to the British scene his Eskimo eye,
that wonderfully humble exploration of human skills. Perhaps, most
of all, was exemplified in the pottery sequence in which because
this
Flaherty was so engaged not merely in the process of making pots but
in the mind and body of the potter that the camera was in a
way
governed by what was happening inside the potter himself, the
camera did not follow his movements. It
anticipated them.
1
Flaherty, who was left-handed, wrote in a strange way with pen between first and
second fingers. See Illustration.
2
an example of the sort of anecdote which accumulated round this period of
I tell this as
Flaherty's have had at least one different version from everyone who told me this
life. I
story and from one of them. I have heard three different versions. Since these anecdotes
throw more light on their narrators than on Haherty, I have used them
sparingly. .C.-M.A
[138]
BERLIN AND INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN
This was the vision of Nanook and Moana
brought right home in
Stoke-on-Trent, the beauty of a craftsman intent on his craft. It was
the legacy which Flaherty left with British
documentary directors,
the beauty of men working skilfully.
The lesson has been learnt so well both by film-makers and by the
public that today it appears absurd to emphasize it. But in the class-
thing. A potter
ridden society of the thirties it was a revolutionary
was a potter; his pots might be admired as beautiful; but to
Flaherty
what was far more beautiful than the finished pot was the making of it.
It was ocular equipment which enabled, for
this
example, Basil
Wright to
go to Ceylon and within a short time to make a film of
lasting beauty in Song of Ceylon. Nanook and Moana were exotic and
remote. The same eye innocently roving over Industrial Britain taught
the lesson more immediately. It was like the modern teaching of
geography, compared with the ancient. If one understands one's own
city and the complexity of the country within its watershed, one has
learnt the grammar of geography. Any other city in the world is easy
to understand. Flaherty in the same way had taught the grammar of
sight and this, as Grierson recognized, was far more important than
completing a picture.
In that early makeshift of Grierson' s unit, what happened after
Flaherty stopped shooting was that Basil Wright was sent off to shoot
footage on waterways and flying-boats and Elton was sent down a
coal-mine. Edgar Anstey was made assistant editor and all the material
was removed to Grierson's house in Merrick Square, south of the
Thames, which had been fixed up with primitive editing equipment
and a hand-turned projector.
he wanted to say. Even when he was confined to his bed with illness
he continued to supervise the editing by eye. The whole future of
Grierson and his unit depended on the Flaherty gamble succeeding.
That was probably the reason why at no time during the editing did
1
Anstey see Flaherty himself or Flaherty see the film.
The film lay fallow during the whole of the next year, 1932. Grierson
1
Anstey, however, in the trip he made in 1932 to Labrador on H.M.S. Challenger
during which he filmed Eskimo Village considers that he owes a debt to Flaherty both for
subject matter and film approach.
[139]
THE INNOCENT EYE
on found himself up against the same distribution
his smaller scale
had encountered with Nanook and Moana,
problems which Flaherty
A single picture was more difficult to sell than a group. So Grierson
stockpiled half a dozen two-reel documentaries, which he was able
to sellto Gaumont-British Distributors in a package deal as 'The
Human Factor remains the Final Factor/ 'Behind the smoke beautiful
5
[140]
12
SHOOTING MAN OF ARAN
Q
looming over Europe.
f
n the boat coming over from the States to
Europe, the talk had turned on the Wall Street crash and the depression
A
young Irishman had broken in impatiently.
He knew an island off the West Coast of Ireland, he said, where hie
was so primitive that the islanders had to make soil by
hauling sea
weed up the cliffs and mixing it with sand to join a top-soil in which
to grow their potatoes where ; the curraghs which they used were little
better than the coracles of the ancient Britons and the struggle for
bare subsistencemade booms and slumps look silly.
This impressed nobody except Flaherty. After all, these
people were
only peasants, a genus one stage lower than pheasants. But this was
the obvious location for the film of Man against the Sea, which
Flaherty had hoped to make in Samoa. 'Where is this place? What's
it called?'
'The Aran Islands/ the young man said.
When Flaherty came over to work on Industrial Britain, he had the
arriere pensfa that this might be the chance of mounting a Man against
the Sea feature.
At the York Hotel, Flaherty talked with Grierson about this project.
THE INNOCENT EYE
Grierson pointed out that the Aran Islands were not entirely unknown
and gave him J. M. Synge's Riders
to the Sea and The Aran Islanders.
acting.
In July 1932, there was a harassing attack by C. A. Lejeune (The
[142]
SHOOTING 'MAN OF ARAN*
prepared to let Flaherty have his head without a script. In the autumn
of 1931, he arranged for Bob and Frances Flaherty to go to Ireland to
make their investigation. They were accompanied by J. N. G.
Davidson of the E.M.B. Film Unit, who was familiar with the Aran
Islands.
potato-bread.
Davidson kept telling Flaherty what he knew of the Aran Islands,
but the old man talked of making the film in Achill Island, using a
Flaherty was nervous. He had made Nanook from the depth of his
being. He had made Moana sincerely but from a more superficial level
of experience. Everything since then had been either downright failure
or imperfect. The Aran Island film was to be his test.
They reached Galway and spent some days there sight-seeing waiting
for tie Dun-Aengus, the steamer plying to the islands. Even the sight
of Galway had banished all thoughts of using Achill Island. Flaherty
started to ask questions about the Aran Islands. 'Get a bottle of whisky
to give the priest/ Flaherty said.
'That wouldn't be diplomatic/ Norris Davidson said.
'Buy it all the same/ Flaherty said. 'It'll come in useful.' It did, but
not with the priest.
When they reached Kilronan harbour, the first man Flaherty spotted
was Pat Mullen's father. 'The dignity of a dook!' Flaherty said. Frances
recorded it with her observant Leica.
Pat Mullen himself had been back from the States seven or eight
years. He was known as The Socialist and the islanders who had not
been away thought it bad of Davidson to have The Socialist drive the
Flahertys around.
Davidson without success to interest Flaherty in a village
tried
Flaherty had seen enough for his first view. He returned to Inishmore
in January 1932, with his wife and children and the seventeen-year-old
SHOOTING 'MAN OF ARAN'
John Taylor, whose job was ostensibly film-processing and extra
camera-work, but proved to involve accountancy as well
They settled in to the best house in the island, owned by a Mrs.
Sharman living in London. There were two freshwater springs near
an old stone wharf-house, which was to serve as laboratory. As the
main house was only large living quarters, another was
enough for
built from, hard grey limestone as a studio, with a turf-covered roof
thatched with straw. Pat Mullen engaged the labour and while the
studio wasa-building, he drove the Flahertys around, looking for
possible film types and incidents which might be built into a film
about the typical Flaherty film family.*
'Every other person in the Aran Islands/ Flaherty said, *has the
name Flaherty or O'Flaherty, including Liam O'Flaherty, who was
born there. There were some who were quite sure we had assumed
the namein order to gain their confidence.'
It did not win the confidence of Mikeleen Dillane's parents. Though
they were as poor as peat, the boy's mother wouldn't let the boy leave
Killeany to work for Flaherty in Kilmurvy. Pat Mullen pleaded in
vain. Mrs. Flaherty pleaded in vain, though the money offered was a
little fortune to the Dillanes. But the tests Flaherty had shot of Mikeleen
vinced that it was a policy of the DeviL Then there was the story
that the studio building was really an orphanage to convert the
parendess to Protestantism.
The first member of the cast to be recruited was Mikeleen. While
1 In Man
of Aran (E. P. Dutton, 1935), Pat Mullen has a full acount of the making
of the picture. We have drawn from it, but even more from Flaherty's own account,
unused except in a B.B.C. Talk, 1st October, 1949.
[145]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Flaherty was searching for other natural actors, he was consciously
binding the boy more and more to himself, so that he would not be
self-conscious in front of the camera. With each of his successive films
-with the exception of The Land, which had no family story-
Flaherty's interest shifted more and more from the father of the family
to the son.
There has been the suggestion that Flaherty's boy heroes were due
to disappointment because hehad produced only daughters. Certainly
ifJohn Taylor is to be believed, while they were shooting Man ofAran,
Flaherty proposed adopting him (John Taylor) as his son. Taylor
replied that he had two satisfactory parents of his own. Flaherty clearly
would have felt more fulfilled paternally if he had had a boy. But I
do not think it is accurate to talk of his boy-children purely and
simply as son-compensations.
be true to say that his art would have been different, if he had had a
son, is that he might then have identified himself with the father
figures and expressed his love towards a boy who was the symbol of
his son, rather than of himself in youth.
There is another aspect. That innocent eye of Flaherty's caught box-
office takings in a sidelong glance. A beautiful boy, like a beautiful
Maggie's three children were all dressed as girls, though one in fact
was a boy, the reason being according to Flaherty that 'fairies don't
steal girls'. 1
The most difficult character, not to find but to catch, was Tiger
King, whom Flaherty wanted as the father, the Nanook of his picture.
Flaherty was not a Roman Catholic, for all his German mother's
devotion, and wild rumours about him circulated among the islanders.
He carried a bottle of water, the rumour went, with which he would
sprinkle children and turn them into Protestants. And since the unit
landed a flower had started to
grow, which if it spread would lead the
people to damnation.
Tiger King believed these stories. He refused every invitation to
meet Flaherty and if he had to pass his house, he rode at a
gallop. But
Pat Mullen finally collared him at a
wedding and captured him hal-
seas-over to make a film test.
Meeting Flaherty at last, Tiger King was
captivated by the old man's charm.
1
According to John Taylor, Maggie wasn't the dimwit Haherty made her out to
She had worked ten years in Dublin and was one of the few islanders, male or female,
be.
who could swim. As well as taking a leading role in the film, she did all the housekeeping
for the Hahertys. The film did not make
Maggie's fortune, because three months after
the unit left she handed all her earnings over to a
missionary-father from the mainland.
According to Newton Rowe, who at Flaherty's invitation stayed some months on
Aran trying to write a novel, Maggie was in the habit of taking the slops out in a bucket
and, having emptied it, coming back with it full of well-water. Frances put a stop to this,
as soon as Rowe it out. But Bob would temper his love of the Irish
pointed thereafter,
with qualifications.
[147]
THE INNOCENT EYE
At last he had his characters. The theme of his story was the sea,
a sea he made more fabulous and inimical even than the great seas
off Ungava. This is how Flaherty saw that sea.
The Aran Islander in order to survive has to fight the sea. The
sea around Aran is one of the most dangerous in the world. The
craft he uses is a curragh - one of the oldest and most primitive
craft that man anywhere has devised. In the old days it was a
framework of ribs of thin wood covered with hides and it was
propelled with long thin oars, with an extremely narrow blade
so as not to *trip* in the heavy seas. But the curraghs used in Aran
they couldn't make a landing on the island at all but had to keep
on and on and finally landed at the head of Galway Bay some
thirty miles away. I have never anywhere in the world seen men
so brave who would undertake such risks with the sea. Yet the
Aran Islander can't swim a stroke. If he touches the water, he
gives up and goes down like a stone.
We lived one and a half winters on Aran, and during the
second winter the storms were incredible. On the seaward side of
the island was a cliff-face that in its
highest parts was over 300 feet,
high. Often after a storm, walking along the top of these cliffs
we picked up pebbles and seaweed thrown right up there by the
fury of the sea. In one of the culminating scenes of our film, the
sea soars
up against one of these cliffs and not
only rises up to its
head but keeps on rising until it reaches a height of some 450 feet
from water-level ... a towering white wall of wrack and spume,
which then slowly bends in like a wraith or ghost over the island
itself.
because they were the symbols which he wanted for a film poem of
m^n against the sea.
But there was something lacking film-poetically. Summer was just
boringly hard work. If he had been a of the documentary
social realist
swimming in the cove just below their house. Here were the sea
monsters he had sought in vain in Samoa.
foot, maybe two feet, above the water. It was slowly swimming
around in the clear green water. We got a curragh and rowed out
to it. It didn't seem to be at all bothered by us. It came slowly
alongside and passed by the curragh, not four feet away. Its huge
mouth was open - like the mouth of a cavern, at least two feet in
diameter. I asked Pat Mullen what it was. He said it was a sunfish.
This puzzled me because the sunfish, as I knew it, was a different
creature. This monster, judging by the length of the curragh
which was 18 feet long, must have been at least 26 or 27 feet
in length. Pat went on to tell me that soon there would be a lot
of them there. were to be seen every Spring, hundreds and
They
hundreds of them, so that the sea 'would be filled with them'.
an explorer
Staying with, us was my friend, Captain Munn,
and hunter, who had been prettywell round the world. When he
leftto go back to London, I asked him to call at the National
Pat Mullen called
Library in Dublin and find out more about what
a sunfish. He finally dug up a book written in 1848 by J. Wallop
Brabazon. At the time it had been written, there were sunfish
fisheries all along the West Coast of Ireland. The sunfish was
known as the basking-shark and it was hunted for its liver which,
as is common in sharks, was enormous. Out of the liver of one
much 100 gallons of oil.
basking-shark could be rendered as
as
This oil was used for illumination. It was poured into a small
[149]
THE INNOCENT EYE
sb.eUwith a rush for a wick. The shark was hunted with harpoons
and in the old way of hunting whales.
lines,
Sure enough, as Pat Mullen had foretold, the basking-sharks
soon began to come in in schools. One Sunday we sailed through
one of these schools in Galway Bay. The sharks averaged a length
of about 27 feet, the tail being about 6 feet across. The school
was four miles long. Looking down into the water, we could see
that they were in - in tiers, tier after tier of them until
layers
we could see no deeper. There were thousands and thousands of
them. They come every year to the west coast, approach the
islands, and then pass farther up the coast to the Hebrides and the
Faroes, up the coast of Norway and out beyond the Arctic Circle.
pursue the sharks and give the crew practice in harpooning. As in the
old days, look-outs were posted on high points. As soon as shark were
spotted, the sentinel raced down to the boat and out it went. But the
season had passed before the harpooners had learnt
proficiency enough
for filming; and the shooting schedule had to be extended until the
summer of 1933.
To help with it, Flaherty called in his old friend, Captain Murray,
now retired and living in Scotland. Murray had captained the whaler
Active and could train the islanders in
harpooning. He brought with
him a harpoon-gun, made in 1840, which Tiger King seized upon
2
eagerly.
1
The Aran Islanders did not revive a shark industry. But the Achill islanders catch
them with nets for fish fertilizer. Flaherty had the liver oil analysed,
hoping that, like
cod and halibut liver oil, it would be rich in vitamins. But it wasn't.
2
Captain Murray was very popular with everyone except Flaherty, who resented the
old boy interrupting his with protests that it didn't happen that
stories, way at all.
[150]
SHOOTING 'MAN OF ARAN'
There are more reminiscences of working with Flaherty on Man of
Aran than of any of the earlier pictures. Apart from Davidson and John
Taylor, Grierson seconded another young man, Harry Watt from
the E.M.B. Film Unit. There was an idea for a film to be made in
Ceylon and Watt was being considered for running its field laboratory .
In return for making himself generally useful, Watt might learn a lot
from the Flaherty set-up.
John Taylor had been processing thousands of feet of film. In all
Flaherty was to shoot over 200,000 feet of film for Man of Aran. On
Christmas Eve, with Taylor loading, Flaherty shot 5,600 feet of film
with two cameras between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. But though in a sense
this was wild over-shooting, it did not add greatly to the cost of the
do the
this
by camera rather than by cutting. His feeling was always
for the camera. This wanting to do it all in and through the camera
was one of the main causes of his great expenditure of film - so often
[151]
THE INNOCENT EYE
'Bob on the job was not only bereft of all humour and wit,' says
Goldman, 'but was utterly concentrated on the film. His being was,
as it were, both wrapped around the subject and at the same time
fog gathered round and the tension grew again and stretched and
brooded. And there was no relief.'
He was an intolerable man to work for. In the course of eighteen
months John Taylor was fired twice and quit once, but never stopped
working. The members of the unit recognized that Flaherty was not
an angry man; but he was one whose creative power was *the tremen
dous power of a force of nature'. They were lucky as they could sneak
away and sit on the cliff on a peaceful sunny day. 'But Flaherty could
never escape from himself, from his brooding and passion. God! how
that man suffered!' 1
Goldman says there were times when Flaherty hated the film like
'a
living monster with greater endurance and greater powers of
evil than any human
being possesses', and he pays tribute to
Frances Flaherty's endurance and understanding. 'I can think of
no other woman who
could have lived through it. others, after We
all, could come and we could go. But she stayed. She coped.
With infinite patience and extraordinary courage, she endured and
saw it
through.'
The
others could go. But they didn't.
They were young men,
gripped in a creative experience, which Goldman best expresses.
'There was a strange light in his eyes. He was as a man possessed. The
smell of this possessedness
pervaded and spread through the unit. We
aQ felt it. We were all touched by
it. There was
nothing rational about
There was nothing rational about
making a film with Flaherty
it.
1
John Goldman notes to Paul Rotha. July - December, 1959.
SHOOTING 'MAN OF ARAN*
from beginning When I heard him talking of the making of
to end.
his earlier films, Icould recognize the same
atmosphere, the same
irrational forces at work. When he told us of his troubles
during
Moana, the accidents, the passions, the murders, I could understand
them for they were the product of the tensions generated/
Looking back, Flaherty said: 'I should have been shot for what
I asked these superb people to do for the film, for the enormous risks
I exposed them to, and all for the sake of a keg of porter and .5 apiece.
But they were so intensely proud of the fact that
they had been chosen
to act in a film that might be shown all over the world that there was
'We had picked three skilled men to be the crew of the curragh
I am
in the film. appalled at the dangers I asked them to run.
There was one scene which took place so quietly in the finished
film that most possibly it wasn't noticed. When the curragh is
eyes/
One result of that would have been that the film would have stopped
production. The enthusiasm which Flaherty had commanded would
l
Filtn News (New York). Vol. 13, No. 3, 1953.
THE INNOCENT EYE
have turned to hatred and his family been either lynched or driven
from the island. It is even possible that Flaherty might have killed
himself.
I don't think so. I am quite sure that the islanders and the members
of the unit would never have given their loyalty, if they had ever
thought so. John Goldman's phrase 'both wrapped around the subject
and at the same time engulfed in the subject', offers only a clue.
Flaherty was never his own theorist. He would talk about making a
picture. But he never discussed what he was really trying to do. In this
he was like most great creative artists. Doing was hard enough,
respect,
he had no time left over to explain exactly what he was doing, nor
was he interested in gathering round himself a group of evangelists or
disciples.
Flaherty was a film poet. He used images out of real life. But it was
the images with which he was concerned, not the social-economic
situation. The actual making of the picture was in the true Greek sense
a 'poiesis', a
making, a creative act. Man of Aran was something which
Flaherty, his unit, Maggie, Mikeleen, Tiger Bang, Pat Mullen and
all the rest had done together. It was not a denunciation of social
conditions. It had no remote association with the I.L.P., Lord Keynes,
P.E.P., the London School of Economics or John Grierson. In fact,
if there was an impure motive in it, it was to rub Grierson's nose in
basking-sharks. They didn't fit in to the documentary pattern. But
[154]
SHOOTING MAN OF ARAN*
they symbolized superbly the sort of hazard which Flaherty had
wanted to make his central theme.
would be interesting to know what sort of reception Flaherty's
It
picture would have got if called Man against the Sea, instead of Man
ofAran.
Though Flaherty may have raged against Gaumont-British, he had
in Michael Balcon a loyal producer. Man of Aran became known as
'Balcon' s folly' and back in London Balcon used to screen the seem
;
pulsion.
Industrial Britain, Flaherty had been his own with help from
editor,
Frances and a junior assistant. Now in John Goldman, he had a pro
fessional editor.
Goldman, like most editors, believed that the real work of a film
started on the cutting bench. Flaherty, as Goldman
rightly pointed
out, tried to make the film in the camera. Balcon, knowing that
Goldman had come back from Union with pronounced
the Soviet
views about left Flaherty and Goldman to work it out
editing,
between them.
He knew that Goldman had a for Flaherty, as well
great admiration
as an aesthetic sympathy which wasn't bound by doctrinaire principles.
He was far too busy a man to act as arbiter between director and
[155]
THE INNOCENT EYE
editor; and he thought that Goldman would learn something valuable
from working with Flaherty.
In the editing of Man ofAran, one sees the first major encounter
between Flaherty's Eskimo way of film-making, fumbling, intuitive
and exploratory, treating the material as if it contained some inner
nature which needed to be understood and the American or European
attitude which from the start tried to visualize what would appear on
the screen in its totality.
similar. There was a story idea, a full treatment of the story, a break
makers, producer, director, editor, etc., could see how the film was
coming along.
were continual changes, as ideas
Inevitably in such a process, there
which had appeared good proved wrong and new values were dis
covered in the material at each stage. But from the start, everybody's
eyes and ears were concentrated on the final picture, including music,
sound-effects and the dramatic use of silence.
This method was as different from Flaherty's as Sir
Christopher
Wren's building St. Paul's from Christopher Columbus'
discovering
America.
Flaherty was ever looking at the film through the camera. Goldman
was thinking of what would be on the screen. 'Cut away to
something
else,' Flaherty would say, but if there was
nothing to cut away to,
Flaherty would reluctantly agree to shoot a link.
1
particular way.
And yet, as will be seen in the following chapter, the process was
not nearly as simple as that. It was a matter not of intellect or of film-
theory, but of intuitive awareness.
13
STORMS OVER ARAN
showmanship .
berately pose his camera. The camera was set-up and he peered
it. Either what he saw
through through it was right, or absolutely
Either what he saw had its own life and existence, or it
wrong.
was dead and lifeless, meaningless in its own terms.
When seeing rushes, it is easy to see and reject the shots which
are failures, which are lifeless. And Flaherty had a very high pro
During this lofig, tedious process there was no shape to the film,
no beginning, no end. Imperceptibly shots would start to sort
themselves, migrating from film-can to film-can and gathering
like molecules round a nucleus. But there was no conscious
[159]
THE INNOCENT EYE
individual shot, then the internal life in the sequence. I recall one
sequence growing this way into life and then it seemed to wilt
5
and die, 'We've been preconceiving, Flaherty said. And
stillborn.
so every shot had to be broken down and shuffled up and the reel
[160]
STORMS OVER ARAN
1
the last possible moment. He was very careful about this exact
moment of the resolution of the suspense. This had to be cut as
short as possible. He was afraid of anti-climax. One of his maxims
was 'Never reveal anything'. In close-ups of
people, he hated
full-face shots. He preferred three-quarter profiles, heads shot
from behind, anything which did not reveal the full-face. The
full-face showed too much. He disliked medium and mid-long
shots because they revealed without hiding. In all his films after
Nanook, he proceeds from dose-ups eventually to a long-shot as
*
a pay-off. If they want to know more/ he would say, 'you know
you have got them/
He also believed that it is not the task of a film to do all the
work. The audience must meet the film, at least half-way. This
relationship between the film and audience was never absent from
his mind.
The bigger the thing he had finally to reveal, the longer he
could keep the audience in suspense. The shark sequence in Man
of Aran is an example. The whole sequence is built up on this
method, from the moment of Mikeleen seeing something, we are
not shown what, while he is fishing on the cliff-top to the launch
ing of the boats, to the first sight of something indefinable in the
2
sea, to the harpooning, the fish being twice lost, until finally
the revelation of the basking-shark in all its length and turbulence.
The last sequence of the film, the great storm sequence, appears
to me to be quite different from anything else in Flaherty's work.
In this sequence Flaherty hinted at and started to develop an en
tirely new breadth and splendour of expression.
Here was some
thing that was new and deeper than anything he had previously
attempted. Technically, too, it was different because no tricks,
none of his stylistic habits, play any part in its construction. And
the sustained power and drama owe nothing to his previous ideas
of suspense and revelation.
It stems, of course, from the final sequence of Nanook, where
the blizzard howls round the igloo and the dogs get covered in
1 Nanook
fishing in a hole in the ice without the audience knowing what he is fishing
for; the little boy searching for the crab in Moana* and many similar examples in
Louisiana Story.
2 The one illegitimate element of the suspense build-up is the look of terror on Mikeleen's
face on seeing the indefinable monster. The basking-shark is a plankton-feeder not a
man-eater. Sight of it would inspire not terror, but joy that the oil-yielding sharks have
at last arrived.
[161]
THE INNOCENT EYE
snow, but in Man of Aran the storm is utterly transformed. It
Tiger King, Maggie, Mikeleen and others were brought over to the
of dialogue which could be added to a
studios to record snatches
sound-effects track. What
they said was dictated largely by their
exclamations as they watched the silent film. But the recording of
these exclamations was made indoors and produced an artificial effect
when added to visuals shot out of doors.
The visit of these Aran Islanders was, with Flaherty's full approval,
There was some difficulty with the British Board of Film Censors.
Brooke Wilkinson, secretary of the Board, told Goldman 'it is not
1
the policy of the Board to let films show poverty on the screen'.
1 This
was taken at the time to show how reactionary the British Board of Film Censors
was. Perhaps that was the intention of the Board. But the effect was opposite. The sight
THE INNOCENT EYE
On 25th April, 1934, Man of Aran had its
premiere at the New
Gallery, London, with the Irish Guards playing folk-music, the
audience wearing evening dress and the actors home-spuns. No pub
licityangle had been neglected. A basking-shark had been brought
over to be stuffed by a North London taxidermist and placed in the
has no story, not even the trace of a story that was to be found in
Moana and Tabu. It
barely recounts the movements of a nameless
1 a truncated basking-shark would find its spiritual home immediately at
Today such
a Butlin camp. Then it went back to the taxidermist who charged 2 los. a week for
its lodging until Hugh Findlay hit on the idea of passing the shark to the Brighton
Aquarium, presented by the starlet Anna Lee.
of extreme poverty reconciled the poor to their less extreme poverty. The most revolu
shown on the screen were the super-glossies of Hollywood, London
tionary pictures ever
and Neubabelsberg High Life which created an envy far more powerful than the dynamic
Soviet or Documentary propaganda.
[164]
STORMS OVER ARAN
gathering,
Man ofAran is a sealed document, the key to which is still in Flaherty's
mind/ 1
This provoked a protest from Huntley Carter, author of several
books about the theatre, especially the Soviet theatre, protesting that
Miss Lejeune had missed the 'soul' of the picture. 'If there had been a
better picture of a little community fashioned and impassioned by
2
constant and close contact with Nature, I have never seen it.'
Miss Lejeune, who had talked with Flaherty about the economic
the screen. 'The real story of Aran, as he sees and tells it, is the fight
to hold the land against eviction
- the women and children gathering,
out through the storm in open boats, with orders to pull the roofs
from the cottages He calls the present picture"an idealized cross-
section of life on the island" and says frankly that it is designed"to
pique the curiosity of the audience and make them want to know
3
more."
'In that sense, as a kind of "trailer" to a bigger picture, I agree that
Man ofAran is a brilliant, if overlong essay. . . But if Man ofAran is,
[165]
THE INNOCENT EYE
poetic drama. By itself, it make arty cinema. Man of Aran
can only
was a glaring example of how affected and wearisome were
this ;
Flaherty has left out than what he has put in. ... Man of Aran is
2
escapist in tendency, more so probably than any other previous
Flaherty production. Flaherty would have us believe that there is no
class-struggle on Aran.'
There was also on the Aran Islands a as well as a
religious struggle
class one. Both were ignored. If he had included them,
Flaherty might
have made a far better film. But today we are concerned with the
film he made and wanted to make, rather than what he could and
perhaps ought to have made.
But before considering that, we must look at one further contem
porary view, that of Grierson and the documentary movement which
he had founded. As Rotha said, thanks to
Grierson, 'Here was the
father of documentary with an honest break to do
something big in
a manner after his own heart. Two long years in the making, month
after month of waiting for us poor folk who knock out a living at
back-door documentary, and the film is here to
give us more or less
what we expected and
something else beyond . . .
wet seaweed across the shore, beautiful in itself to behold, does not
tend to weaken the main shape of the picture. It might be that two
minds have disagreed, each seeking the major issue of the theme and
each finding a different answer. Either the dramatic grandeur of the
sea or the thrill of the sharks must take precedence, but they disturb
approach is
wholly impersonal. What
really happens on Inishmore is
5l
not his or our concern in this conception. . . .
This was a slap in several eyes. Man ofAran hadn't been selected by the
British Film Industry for submission. It was requested by the Italians.
And the British documentarians would certainly not have chosen it
either. The Venice Gold Prize was discounted as Mussolini's Gilt
[167]
THE INNOCENT EYE
names or personalities in Man of Aran because he did not want to
focus on some remote islands off the west coast of Ireland. He was
inventing a myth of a folk way of life which would apply to people
all over the world. He was
saying something terribly unpopular;
that the world was an untamed place and that to tame it all human
creatures should work together. He was addressing the whole of
humanity.
His critics were concerned with the Aran Islands. Here was a
perfect
example of absentee landlordism, eviction, the class struggle, the sort
of sorrow caused by people so near to death that potheen was the
short cut to paradise.
Flaherty had his tribute as soon as he got away from British critics.
In the New York Herald Tribune, Richard Watts,
Jnr., nominated the
film as the best of the year while James
Shelley Hamilton in the
National Board of Review Magazine, in a long rave notice, wrote:
'The whole effect a heartening, thrilling effect of a unit of life - man,
is
woman and child, the continuing link in the human race winning
survival in an unending war with the grim impersonality of the
elements/
But Richard Griffith, later to become Flaherty's staunchest champion
in the United States, wrote in 1935 'Man of Aran finally arrived and
:
[168]
STORMS OVER ARAN
nature to wrest from her his means of subsistence has lost importance
today. It is his struggle for the right to divert what he has produced
to the interests of humanity that is the vital question. And it is there
that documentary has its justification, in truthfully
depicting modern
relationships, in rendering audiences conscious of their interests, of
the economic claims, aware of their remedy. . . .
system breeds such types But let us now realize, clearly and finally,
. . .
damning with faint praise, but the time is over-ripe to attack evasive
documentary for the menace it really is.'
Grierson immediately came to the defence of Flaherty. While Man
of Aran was being shot, he had the hope that 'the Neo-Rousseauism
implicit in Flaherty's work dies with his exceptional self', but he was
not prepared to stand by and see a great artist attacked for not doing
what he did not want to do.
'One may not - whatever one's difference in theory -' he wrote
in the same number of Cinema Quarterly as David Schrire, 'be dis
pomegranate.
'I call it futile, too, to ask of Flaherty an which cannot under
article
[169]
THE INNOCENT EYE
commercial cinema. He Las of necessity to obey its rules. These rules
are not always articulated but they are understood. . . .
'Man ofAran has been blamed for distorting the life of the islanders,
for going back into time for its
shark-hunting and dangers, for its
telling a false story. But is it unreasonable for the artist to distil life
over a period of time and deliver only the essence of it? Seen as the
sea, and stand otherwise than against the sky. I imagine they shine as
bravely in the pursuit of Irish landlords as in the pursuit of Irish sharks/
This was a most skilful exercise in the art of an old friend
defending
without alienating followers. As a practical politician, working within
his own disciplines, accepted though stretched to the limit, Grierson
knew perfectly well that his low budget 'independence' would not
have allowed him to make at that time any film denouncing landlords.
Man of Aran however gave him the chance of beginning the
propa
ganda which later made possible the sponsorship of Housing Problems
by the Gas Industry.
[170]
STORMS OVER ARAN
Grierson called a 'dialectical pub-crawl across half the world*. There
were frequent explosions. One was during a visit by the
Flahertys to
the Blackheath Studio to see what Grierson was
doing with his film
unit, now under the aegis of the G.P.O.
Grierson was using public money not
merely for documentary
experiments such as Night Mail, using Cavalcanti, Wright, Watt,
Britton and Auden for making a commonplace theme 1
exciting, but
also for encouraging non-documentary av ant-gardistes such as Len
Lye.
Flaherty had heard that Alistair Cooke was going to give a film
talk on the B.B.C., in which Man of Aran was to be discussed. He
insisted that the tour of the studio should be so timed that he and
Frances could listen to it.
This was arranged; and I've no doubt that Grierson provided suit
Grierson grinned. 'I didn't know a word about it, Bob.' It was true.
He hadn't fixed it. But in another deeper sense he had. He had called
'
than most. Today Grierson still thinks that Man of Aran was sensa
tionalized in order to get the box-office success, which Flaherty wanted
passionately.
172]
14
FLAHERTY OF THE ELEPHANTS
entered his
O,
fifties.
n i6th February, 1934, Robert
At such an age the pattern of a man's
J. Flaherty
life is estab
lished. His ways are set and there is little likelihood of change, except
that the grooves with the revolution of the years will grow deeper.
worthwhile examining him at leisure, while he, still on the
It is
the North, all those years in Hudson Bay, Ungava and Baffin Island,
became with each year more vivid. Then it was joy to be alive. And
with each re-living it became more joyful. This was the purity of
himself.
living, the explorer finding
Ontop of that was the delight of making Nanook,
of discovering
creation through the camera, a form of exploration which in a curious
way repeated his early romantic thrill of seeing for the first time what
THE INNOCENT EYE
no white man had ever seen before. His eye was innocent in the sense
that it saw no evil. It was also exploring, in that it saw things that
But these two different artists in him, the film-maker and the story
teller, were never united. As I have said, his early diaries showed that
paid commercial film director, but he had not learnt the disciplines of
the industry. He had never made two films for the same
company.
1 It
very possible that if broadcasting had come twenty years earlier, Flaherty
is would
have been paid to entertain millions, instead of
entertaining hundreds at his own
expense.
As it was, in 1949, when Michael Bell tried recording his stories for the B.B.C., he ex
perienced appalling difficulty. The sight of the microphone inhibited Haherty. The
spontaneous flow dried up.
FLAHERTY OF THE ELEPHANTS
He was a prestige director. Just as a young man, coming of age, was
There is some truth in the saying that if you are broke, the only
way to get a job isto look as if you don't want one. Flaherty would
have believed it, even if it wasn't true. He considered the lilies of the
field and entertained all and sundry at the Cafe Royal. He no longer
patronized Grierson's documentary pubs. Epstein, Hayter Preston,
Augustus John, James Agate and Liam O
'Flaherty belonged more in
his age group than Arthur Elton, John Taylor, Edgar Anstey, Paul
Rotha and Basil Wright. But if any of them had walked in to the
Brasserie, they'd have been waved in to the group. 'You must listen
to this,'and he'd have gone back to the beginning of the story and
ten to one, if he observed the attention of the others flagging, he would
think up a fresh detail to refresh the story for them. And if it was an
effective detail, it would be incorporated in the saga.
invitation to Flaherty.
THE INNOCENT EYE
While they were making the Acoma Indian picture, Flaherty had
gone down to Mexico to find a suitable boy star. He found instead a
story which had appealed to him; a bull during a fight had been
reprieved by the acclaim of the spectators. He had written it up as
Bonito the Bull, a short story of the friendship of a boy and a bull which
he hoped to sell to Hollywood. When he went to Europe, this same
idea was furbished up as a Spanish picture. Then at some unspecified
Since the world-success of The Private Life ofHenry the Eighth (193 3 ),
a modest budget picture which made a fortune, Alexander Korda had
become the great white hope of the British film industry. With the
backing of the Prudential, Korda built costly studios at Denham
and gathered a glittering series of star directors and actors around
Tiim T
[176]
FLAHERTY OF THE ELEPHANTS
Michael Balcon had done the same. But Korda understood his
really
documentary conception.
The truth is that Elephant Boy, as the Korda film was
called, was
Flaherty's one sustained effort to make a box-office feature He
picture.
had resigned from White Shadows in the South Seas. He had dug his
toes in on the Acoma Indians film and the
production had been
shelved. He had withdrawn from Tabu.
His other three pictures, Nanook, Moana and Man of Aran had all
stages of a film; and when productions ran into trouble, they had
reached a stage when the scripthad been forgotten.
While these conferences went on, David Flaherty and a production
His Excellency, ran the story, had been most cordial and suggested
that he might
play the part of Petersen Sahib! Flaherty accepted an
invitation to make his picture in Mysore, the Dewan of the Maharajah
1
Borradaile had spent ten years with Jesse Lasky at Paramount, as lab-technician,
assistant and operating cameraman, before coming to England to shoot exteriors for
Alexander Korda's Private Life of Henry Eighth and Zoltan Korda's Sanders of the River.
He later shot HarryWatt's The Overlanders and Charles Trend's Scott of the Antarctic.
[177]
THE INNOCENT EYE
placing at his disposal the animals of the Royal Zoo and as living
quarters the Chittaranjan Mahal, a disused palace which was cleared
of cobras to make room for the unit and their equipment. The old
servants' quarters were converted into a laboratory, where in shallow
tanks on 2OO-feet racks all film except the sound-tracks 1 was developed.
Mrs. Flaherty has given her own story of the making of Elephant
a stills department with two assistants and I don't know how many
still-cameras thousands [sic!] of carpenters, electricians, tailors,
;
optimism, but you know, when you spend money for eight, nine
. . .
[178]
FLAHERTY OF THE ELEPHANTS
intellect. He took in facts through his eyes and his sensibilities rather
than his brain. India was a new continent and there were two worlds
to master, that of the and that of the elephants
elephants in the jungle
He had to find his elephant
in the stables.
boy and having found htm
he had to bind the boy to him with a chain of devotion.
There was a genuine Flaherty theme in the oneness of created
life,
the love of boy and elephant. But
apart from the general theme, if he
was going to film an elephant-boy story, there was a
great deal of
The love had to be built up. The elephant had to be
rehearsal.
taught
how to act, to pick Sabu up and place him on head or back according
to the script. Even the blondest film-actress from Scandinavia can
learn faster than an elephant.
Mr. Biro ever since we first started the story has been nursing
a pet scene which I was rather reluctant to undertake. The scene
in question is one in which, while Little Toomai is
proceeding
through a crowded street on his elephant, the elephant inadver
baby's ankles.
THE INNOCENT EYE
I never heard such a yell in my life as that which came up from
Someone swept the baby
the hundreds of staring native onlookers.
pened and before we had the cameras struck, the car came racing
;
back from hospital, The baby was smiling and the mother was
smiling,
When we ran the picture that night, we could see that the
elephant, as soon as he had felt the touch of the child's feet, had
1
thrown all his weight on the outer rim of his foot.
hand, says that Bell told Korda about a book just published in New
York, called Siamese White, about a ghost elephant. Korda liked this
idea and sent Bell out to incorporate the
ghost in the script. 'If it had
not been such a tragic mistake, the whole affair would have been
comic. Monta Bell didn't like the jungle and wanted to return to the
bright lights as soon as possible. But he didn't get away before Flaherty
received and read a copy of Siamese White, which turned out to be
a story of a man named White, who lived in Siam ~ a bit embarrassing
because an elephant had actually been white-washed to
play the ghost.
1
Reproduced in The World of Robert Flaherty.
[180]
PLAHERTY OF THE ELEPHANTS
All the footage shot on this blunder - and a good chunk it was - went
into the ash-can.'
Korda's brother, Zoltan, followed ostensibly to
keep an eye on
Monta Bell or Flaherty or both. And in the spring of 1936 there was a
steady build-up of Denham technicians, cameramen and production
staff, until at the end there were according to David Flaherty three
they were far easier to film leaving the kheddah than entering it.
e
*When we saw the rushes,' Mrs. Flaherty wrote the girls, a miracle
-
appeared on the screen no semblance of a drive but instead these most
extraordinary creatures, as if in the heart of their mysterious jungle,
"going places". Where were they going? Why, to the Elephant Dance
of course, just as it is in Kipling's story. So we re-wove our story all
round this elephant dance. All we need to complete the illusion is their
feet in action. All our camp of twenty-five elephants has gone into
traininglike a ballet chorus - to learn to dance. Isn't it a life?'
1
quaint
After all the units were recalled in June 1936, life was to become
even quainter with the model men at Den Kara making good the
deficiencies of the tame elephant ballet chorus with dummy elephant
feet.
Mawr, Elephant Boy was a wonderful experience, with the visit from
Sir Mahomed Zafrulla Khan of the Viceroy's Council accompanied
by the Maharajah of Mysore's Prime Minister, Sir Mirza Ismail, with
the constant supplies of superfluous native labour and the apparatus of,
at last, a
'major production'.
This is
exactly what one would expect the old Flaherty oNanook,
Moana, White Shadows in theSouth Seas, Tabu, and even Man ofAran
to find nauseating. To have not one but two co-directors sent out to
shoot film in contradiction to his would have infuriated him, if he
had really believed in the picture.
1
Elephant Dance.
[181]
THE INNOCENT EYE
But he didn't. He was just a man with a knack, expensive
tastes and was a repeat of the situation in which
a high salary. This
he had found himself on White Shadows. But this time he did not
resign.
When they sailed for England in June 1936, they had shot 300,000
feet, plus synchronized sound and dialogue scenes, which was a
Flaherty record. Remembering the stuffed basking-shark, Fkherty
suggested to Korda that they should bring an elephant with them as
well as Sabu.
A great showman, Korda might have agreed if his fortunes had not
changed meanwhile. The brilliance of the cheap success of The Private
Life of Henry the Eighth had been dulled by many costlier failures. The
current need was to turn the Flaherty prestige liability into a com
mercial asset as soon as possible.
[182]
FLAHERTY OF THE ELEPHANTS
Flaherty stuck with the film till the bitter end, even lending the
assistance of the bottle of whisky in his pocket to the
shivering tech
nicians shooting night shots in Denham Woods. It
may be that he
had a semi-paternal interest in seeing that the
boy he had translated
from the Maharajah's stables to the mad world of films came to no
harm. But it was also the that with Korda he had
knowledge
come to the end of the film possibilities available in Britain. He
had no future in Hollywood. With Hitler in power, the chance of
quantity or quality with what Mr. Basil Wright brought back from
1
Ceylon after a stay of a few weeks. Elephant Boy has gone the same
way as Man of Aran: an enormous advance publicity, director out
of touch with the Press for months, rumours of great epics sealed in
tins, and then the disappointing achievement.'
end of his tether, came to his defence. Dismissing Capra as 'slick as the
devil' and acknowledgingGriffith, Eisenstein and Pudovkin
as striking
*a
gong in film history' and teaching 'us a new command of the
medium', he paid homage to the old master. 'The greatest film directors
-
provide us with a whole philosophy of cinema a fresh vision which,
glancing past all
questions of skill and technique and even sometimes
past success itself gives us an inspired insight of things. Of these is
Flaherty. Vertov talks of the kino-eye, but Flaherty, who never talks of
has it. Those who like myself have known him for a
it,
long time remain
We can whack him in theory and outdistance
in this sense his students.
him in economics but the maestro has caught the eye of the gods.' 1
Grierson went on to a half-hearted defence of
Elephant Boy, using
every sophistry of which his eloquence was capable, to prove that the
badness of the film was due not to
Flaherty but to Korda.
But that did little to sell Flaherty to another
producer ; because there
wasn't another producer to sell him to.
1 World Film News, March, 1937.
[i8 4 ]
Sc&u before Jain
ELEPHANT BOY 1935-37
15
THE LAND
Elephant Boy was over. There was no weekly cheque coming in.
There was little
prospect of any major film. Frances was writing
Elephant Dance for Faber & Faber and Flaherty signed up to write a
novel for Hodder & Stoughton, based upon his Eskimo stories. It was
published in May 1938, under the title The Captains Chair, StoryA
of the North and its dedication was 'To my wife and my brother David
with whose great help this book was written'.
The dedication was correct. The natural writer who had penned the
early travel diaries had become imprisoned by his anecdotage. The very
perfection of his verbal narrative, the pause, the change of voice or of
expression, the stopping to have a drink or light a cigarette, which had
become the instinctive reaction to the mood of his audience, could not
be recaptured in the written word.
THE INNOCENT EYE
The faults of The Captain's Chair reflect the limitations of Flaherty's
film narration. There is the sustaining device of suspense. *Who is the
the documentary film pub in Dean Street, The Highlander, and at the
Star Club, run by Mr. Castano over his restaurant in Greek Street.
The British documentary movement had expanded meanwhile. The
G.P.O. Film Unit was at 21 Soho Square. In the oldE.M.B. offices at
37 Oxford Street was the Strand Film Company and a second offshoot
of the movement was the Realist Film Unit, at 62 Oxford Street,
initiatedby Basil Wright. Flaherty became a director of Realist and
remained one for the rest of his life. But this was just an act of grace :
it
brought him in no money. And he grew desperately in need of it.
Denis Johnston, the Irish playwright, who had met Flaherty in Aran
adapted The Captains Chair as a play for television, with John Laurie
as
Captain Grant and Flaherty himself as narrator. *It was quite a
small landmark in T.V. technique,' according to Johnston, 'and Bob's
[186]
THE LAND
publisher's advance. Frances kept writing to urge him to join her in
America; but though the dreaded war appeared to grow closer, he
did not want to be swallowed in Vermont. In London, the chances of
films were greater. He sold
George Routledge the idea for another
novel of the Canadian sub-arctic, White Master.
Olwen Vaughan, a British Film Institute
employee who had met
the Flaherty family over a showing she had
given oNanook, became
his unpaid secretary, typing in the
evenings what he had written
during the day. 'He was so worried about David and money and the
coming war,' she recalls, 'he couldn't have written a good novel, even
had
if he it in him.'
White Master was as clumsily constructed as Wuthering Heights, with
A listening to B about what B heard from C. MacWhirter, the mono
maniac white master, is crude as any Jack London villain and the
as
Cecil Day Lewis and Basil Wright worked the treatment up into a
full-length dialogue script and after a series of tests a boy was chosen.
But the imminence of war closed the project down.
Once or twice in this anxious contracting time, his world opened
up. Olwen Vaughan gave a film-show for Jean Renoir, at which
Renoir complained of the dubbing of his pictures. The reception after
wards was given at Flaherty's studio with something of the old lavish-
ness;and in return the Renoirs and Olwen Vaughan arranged a
showing in Paris of Flaherty pictures at the Cinematheque Fran$aise.
Jean and Marguerite Renoir felt an immediate sympathy with Flaherty,
1
transcending the limitations of language,
1 In
the highest echelons of art, this sympathy spreads from one art to another. La
London, Augustus John and Jacob Epstein immediately recognized Flaherty as a fellow
artist. The same was true in France of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Matisse, speaking
in French, in the B.B.C. tribute to Raherty, described the sympathy which leapt across
the barriers of language.
THE INNOCENT EYE
But despite these interludes in the larger sanity, everything seemed
to he closing in. The continent of Europe in which he had found him
self in many ways more at home than in his native United States
peas. Flaherty went in and buried his face in them. 'They are lovely,'
he said, Til take them.'
'How many?' asked the girl.
'The lot/ said Flaherty.
It was over five pounds. 'While enjoying tea and the scent of sweet
peas/ said Borradaile, 'I hoped that the expected funds would arrive
before the blooms faded and needed replacing/
Howirresponsible this was it is impossible to say without knowing
exactly what remittances Flaherty was expecting. But it was certainly
a gesture more characteristic of the highly paid film director which
he had been, than of a novelist beating out a commissioned book.
So was the scale of his studio parties. 'Sometimes it was necessary
to stay the night/ says Hayter Preston, 'which one did by sleeping on
the floor. Next morning you would always find a new toothbrush
and a box of fifty Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, placed beside you by
the host/
Lorentz had already made a name for himself with two Whit-
manesque pictures, The River and The Plow that Broke the Plains shot
[188]
THE LAND
with U.S. Government finance in furtherance of the New Deal. He
had recently been appointed Head of the U.S. Film Service. Grierson,
in New York en route for Australia where he was to make a film
report for the Imperial Relations Trust, met Mrs. Flaherty who asked
him how she could induce Bob to come back It was Grierson who
suggested to Lorentz that Flaherty was a man he should use. Flaherty
accepted immediately. Here was a chance to leave Europe which was
going to blow itself to smithereens ; and the chance to make another
picture.
they were simple homesteaders who had been hit by something far
more puzzling than famine. They were the victims of 'over-produc
near to starving in a land where farmers were being paid by the
tion',
Government not to raise hogs.
The plight of these people had been movingly portrayed in John
Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, 1939. Pare Lorentz's two
films The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River had posed some of
the problems on the screen. But both Steinbeck and Lorentz had shied
1
Because the film has been seen by so few people, its narrative spoken by Flaherty him
self and a description of the visuals are given in Appendix 4.
[189]
THE INNOCENT EYE
away from the stark horror, the former into romantic sentiment and
the latter into an incantatory use of Indian names. The sordid suffering
was covered in the aspic of Art.
It was this situation on which Flaherty was called to report; or
rather he was to make a film to meet the needs of the U.S. Film Service
tinder Pare Lorentz.
[190]
THE LAND
In all, Flaherty made three big journeys to
get his film. Mrs.
Flaherty accompanied her husband for the shooting in the south and
in the east, when Flaherty did his own camera-work. Russell Lord
also went with them part of the time. He writes :
wailing against the roar and beat of the sea?' Flaherty was feeling
low in mind the day this question was put to him. He lifted his
arms and replied with simple dignity, 'God knows. There is too
much to this land. Our picture is no good now. It stinks !'
But later: It's coming to life! I distinctly feel that gentle
5
Flaherty spent two years making The Land. Throughout it, he was
harassed. It was the first time that he had really explored his native
country. He had hitherto regarded his films of primitive life as an
answer to the complex problems of the civilized world. Nanook with
his perennial nearness to starvation was much worse off than the
people
of Europe exhausted by a war of their own making. Man of Aran
had made the worries of the Wall Street
tycoon ridiculous. But the
Okies had a problem for which there was no primitive solution. They
were starving in a land of plenty, homeless in a land of open spaces.
This was industrial madness, and the enemy appeared to be the
machine, the combine harvester and its robot relatives.
But all he did was groan and say, 'My God, what are we
going to
do with all this stuff?'
way.
Helen van Dongen had been overawed by Flaherty's reputation;
she had felt that she had to serve his intentions. But now she began
to think for him, to, if the neologism will be allowed, cine-analyse
him. 'It suddenly occurred to me that his worrying about the war,
or his preoccupation with machines, were simply a different way of
saying what he wanted to express in his film.
'Why did I not discover this before? Because it takes time to enter
into an mind; but when you do, you
artist's of
discover a rich field
which, though not myown, had in each shot a special meaning that
Flaherty wanted to put in it.
It was worthwhile listening to all he said. There were certain
inflexions, remarks, preoccupations, of which I was at once reminded
when looking at his film material. Shots which had no meaning now
looked different. I had to discover how to look at them through
Flaherty's eyes.'
Helen van Dongen had a strong personal style of editing, which
she deliberately suppressed in order to make The Land according to
what she intuited was Flaherty's purpose. Some people have said that
she 'ruined Flaherty's material because she did not understand his
method of shooting'. This is nonsense. The truth is that Flaherty had
bearing in mind that it was going
never learnt to shoot a picture to
The Land as it was shot was nothing more than a series of cries of
pain. Europe and the United States, Flaherty had taken for granted,
were civilized, needing perhaps to be recalled to simplicity by re
collectionof the epic virtues of primitive peoples, but threatened
only
the decadence of luxury and affluence. The war in
by Europe and the
hopeless vagabondage of the United States' unemployed shattered
Flaherty's Cafe Royal and Coffee House Club concept of the civilized
world.
This may seem a lesson which it had taken an American of fifty-
four a long while to learn. But it must be remembered that since the
age ofnine, Flaherty had never had any contact with industrial strife. He
had turned to primitive people whose
instinctively away struggles
were, at least in his Even in Industrial Britain his eyes
view, exterior.
had been turned to the skilled craftsmen at work and not to the
workless and dispossessed.
make a film which spread across the United States centre on one
family? A
film producer might have
guided him, suggesting a
thematic treatment with the of music. But he had no such pro
logic
ducer. He just went off shooting like mad and sending the stuff back
to Helen van Dongen for her to sort it out.
It was impossible to sort out, because it did not make coherent
sense. There were unforgettable moments, such as the
boy moving
uneasily in his sleep and his
mother looking out from screen,
explain
ing, 'He thinks he's shucking peas.' That moment, John Huston
thought, was worth the whole of the film they made from The Grapes
of Wrath. But the impact of the shot material as a whole was nothing
more than the agonized despair of a man, certain of what was wrong,
but unclear how it happened or could be put right.
[196]
THE LAND
Helen van Dongen made of it the only thing she possibly could. It
was not a film in the sense that it had an argument or even a con
structed pattern. It was a personal record of a
journey, or series of
journeys, across the United States. The only thing that would bind
it
together was the voice of the man who made it, who talked about
it
passionately as ifwas a haunting nightmare. The visuals them
it
[198]
THE LAND
Library trying to enlist support for general exhibition. And then came
Pearl Harbor and the subject was blocked.
Until 1944, it was allowed limited circulation in the U.S.A. Then
it was withdrawn, though a print was made available to the Robert
Flaherty Foundation 'in
recognition of the historic and artistic con
tributions made by Mr. Flaherty to the film medium'.
I find it hard to criticize The Land because I have not seen it since
1943, when by a caprice of Lend -Lease Paul Rotha
managed to get a
catch-crop farming had already been told in Fascist and Nazi pro
paganda for years before the war. If The Land had been circulated by
the State Department, it could have caused incalculable damage to the
1
Allies.
I cannot agree with Rotha that Flaherty 'fully faced up to the socio
cause of this wasteful plunder was poverty. The pioneer could not
afford to put back in the earth as much as he took out of it.
Richard Griffith tried to make a virtue out of the film's technical
'The picture lacks that wholeness and gradual building towards
defects.
do to end
help, can only shout at us at the the fihn to do something. of
To many people the tragic beauty of The Land will not be sufficient
to compensate for the fact that it provides no blueprint. But I have
been thinking a long time that films should pose the problem and leave
it in the lap of the audience, for it is we who must answer for our
1
lives, not our teachers, not our artists. . . .'
Helen van Dongen has a different story. When she ran the print for
Flaherty just before the premiere, "groans were now and then audible,
but not a word was said. When the lights went up, he slapped me
hard in the back and said, "Now we know. We could go back to
morrow and really make this film." This view is endorsed by Olwen
Vaughan, who begged a copy of the picture for the National Film
Archive. Flaherty refused and when asked what he thought of the
picture said, 'Oh, I suppose it's worth looking at, if it comes your
way.' He was not a man to depreciate his own achievement.
1 News Letter, Vol IU, No.
Documentary 2, 1942.
[200]
6
It's amazing what the wash of rain can do!'
"
jtf '"
* :
f'>,
>
"? ,
""-%^ '*$<*
'
I/I/e found this in Tennessee'
C
A new world stands before him
THE LAND
think that Basil Wright is correct in
seeing The Land as a 'water
I
[201]
i6
IN RETREAT
[202]
IN RETREAT
all available sources of finance. At least while the war was on,
nobody
would want his sort of film.
Griffith himself went into the U.S.
army, but in a few weeks was
seconded to the newly-formed War Department Film Division, under
the command of Col. Frank Capra, the director of It
Happened One
Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. 1 One of the first members of
Capra's staff he met was Flaherty, 'rovin' again.
'What in the name of God are you doing here?' Griffith asked.
'Me?' Bob said. on the war effort.'
'I'm putting balls
Nobody in fact knew what anyone was doing there at that moment.
Capra, a master of story-pictures, knew nothing of documentary and
was shopping for experience. When he took on a young man who
had worked for Department of Agriculture films and who suggested
that Flaherty should be called in, Capra agreed.
Eric Knight, who had also joined Capra, wrote Rotha, 2yth June,
1942 'Old Bob Flaherty is with us, and out on a job of work ... a big
:
job. We
took him to a conference lunch and Bob shook bis head like
an innocent baby when a cocktail was suggested.'
Flaherty got on well with Capra, but nobody knew what to give
Flaherty to do. Capra had no professional production unit in Washing
ton and had to borrow one from U.S. Signal Corps, the personnel of
which resented the new Capra unit. Col. W. B. Gillette of U.S.
Signal Corps had been making military training films for years;
and like any other military drill, these films had been made by
numbers.
So when Eric Knight dreamed up a weekly newsreel, called The
State of the Nation, to be shown to civilians in public theatres and
U.S. Signal Unit and found to his fury that he couldn't tell his
second lieutenant.
Through July, August and September 1942, Flaherty and his unit
covered defence factories, parades and war-bond drives throughout
the Eastern States, in the intervals between complaining to Capra and
Gillette of mutual lack of co-operation. Flaherty and his unit provided
[203]
THE INNOCENT EYE
the point of maximum contact, and therefore of maximum friction,
between the rival organizations.
was not in it. In spite of his jokes about adding to the virility of the
war effort, he loathed all war propaganda, however innocuous, and
hated being part of it. There was also the simple stupidity of putting
a man of Flaherty's gifts and calibre to work on a newsreel/
I think this should be taken further. Flaherty's gifts and calibre
were not the reason why he failed as a newsreel director. The reason
for that was that he had never learnt professionally to tell a story in
silent pictures, this deficiency was covered
film; in up by the use of
sub-titles and in later
pictures by the agony and bloody sweat of
editors such as John Goldman and Helen van Dongen. He was not a
good enough technician to shoot a newsreel story.
Then again though Griffith is right that Lis soul revolted against
war propaganda, the use of words and films to build up hatred be
tween one race of men and another, it is equally true that he hated
all forms of
propaganda, the use of art to produce the sort of social
and political conditioning advocated by Grierson and his social-
1 The Newsreel was later successfully revived by Major Spigelgass as the Army-Navy
Magazine,
[204]
IN MTREAT
welfare group, by the Soviet directors or in a different way by Leni
Riefenstal in the cult of Nazism.
The footage shot by Flaherty, despite Griffith's efforts, was never
used. But it was no great 'Most of the shooting was frankly
loss. as
competent.
Flaherty returned to Vermont. On a conscious level he wanted to
work for the Office of War Information or one of the other agencies.
But same time he did not want to do any of the sort of jobs
at the
'"Nothing of the sort," Bob said. "And put that knife away this
opportunity, I swung on him, knocking him down. The knife fell out
[205]
THE INNOCENT EYE
of his hand and I picked it up. It was the kind where you touch a
button to release a double-edged blade. It was for cutting throats . . .
else.
nothing
'Bob helped the little dark man to his feet. "You ought to be
ashamed," Bob said. "Pulling a knife! What made you do such a
thing?"
'"He called me a nigger."
'"No such thing," Bob said. "This gentleman," indicating me, "is
without racial prejudice."
'"The hell we will," I said. "I'm tired and I want to go to bed and
this little
ape is coked to the eyeballs, can't you see?"
'
"See what I mean? He thinks he is better than I am."
'"Have you been taking drugs?" Bob asked.
'The little man nodded.
'"Get into the cab," Bob said. "You too, John, We'll drop you off."
'He told the driver my address. His manner towards me was a little
cold, as though I were the culprit . . . which, according to Bob's
morality I was, for Iwas being ungenerous towards a human being
in distress. I felt sure Bob was thinking that it had not been necessary
for me to blow; the little man would have put his knife away
strike a
[206]
IN RETREAT
'Naturally Bob was on the litde dark man's side. He was the miser
able one. He was wet from the rain, his brother was in jail, he was a
victim of the drug habit, he was of an underprivileged race, and he
had lost his knife.
'"Give his knife back to him, John," Bob said. It was his way of
giving me the chance to redeem myself for having added to the litde
dark man's misfortunes and perhaps for the sin of occupying a cab
. . .
with it/
'"Sure, I promise," he said.
'Bob took the toad-stabber out of my hand and gave it to him.
'"I will get out on isth Street, and go to the all-night picture
show," said the litde man.
I was getting out, Bob
'By this time we'd reached my door. As
said, "How about lunch tomorrow at the Coffee House Club?"
'"Sure," I said, "And if by chance you don't show up, I can tell
Oliver and everybody just how it happened."
'Bob ignored this and leaning forward to the driver, said: "Down
to I4th Street'." 1
quantities of
various brands of whisky. When he was met at the
station Frances Frances picked up the suitcase and remark
by Flaherty,
him what contained. 'Oh, it's some
ing on heaviness asked
its it just
to Ottawa,' he said.
equipment I'm taking back
That evening he and Flaherty drank long after Frances retired to
1
Sequence, No. 14, 1952.
[207]
THE INNOCENT EYE
bed. But at last Grierson turned in and as he did so, he heard heated
voices corning from the Flahertys' bedroom.
There was then footsteps along the passage and Grierson's
silence ;
door opened. 'Jdm/ Bob said, 'you drink too much/ And the door
closed.
charmed, bought Flaherty's original story Bonito the Bull in 1942 for
$12,000. He incorporated it in a documentary trilogy called Ifs All
True. It was shot on 16 mm. Kodachrome (for later enlargement to
35 mm.), during a Latin-American tour made by Orson Welles and
underwritten by the Office of the Co-ordinator of Inter- American
Affairs to the tune of $300,000. Though RKO undertook the release,
the film was never finished. But this didn't affect
Flaherty's $12,000.
It enabled him to go to New York, stay at the Concord Hotel on
Lexington Avenue, renew his contacts at the Coffee House Club and
Costello's Bar.
In 1943, the National Board of Review devoted the New Year
number of 1
magazine to a Tribute to Flaherty, It was flattering
its
[208]
IN RETREAT
which was partly responsible for the wrecking of our recent
past and
which holds out so much hope for the future. But not alone do the
movies need Flaherty today for this picture and the others he can make.
What is needed more is a new respect for his quality and character as
a film-maker. We might even forget for a while his brilliant way with
cameras, and imitate instead the adventurer in him, the explorer who,
like a child, findsnewness and beauty in every ordinary thing, who
sees the world and its creatures with a wondering and sentient eye,
and finds in its exotic diversity one final unifying
thing our . . .
plain that he was not ready to make another film There is a curious
parallel between the two wars. In the latter part of the First World
War he was ostensibly unemployed. But he was forced to do the
him to make the film that Griffith said he wanted to make about
the Machine, he couldn't have made it.
There a providence which looks after freelances, almost the only
is
people who consider the lilies of the field. Flaherty did not starve.
In 1944, he was commissioned by the Sugar Research Foundation to
make a tour of the sugar-producing areas of the U.S. and report on
1 True as this may have been with regard to ham sandwiches, prestige did in fact bring
in all Flaherty's contracts, including, if we take the word in its widest sense, the contract
for Nanook.
[209]
THE INNOCENT EYE
the use the Foundation might make of films. His report was accepted
and he undertook to supervise three films to be made by his brother,
David.
in 1945 of footage at
Another little assignment was the shooting
theMuseum of the Rhode Island School of Design about the John
Howard Benson technique of calligraphy. It never came to anything
viewable as a completed film. Benson and Flaherty did not get on.
[210]
I?
LOUISIANA STORY
Oil
N,
of New
egotiations between Flaherty and the Standard
Company Jersey began in 1944 with the suggestion that
he might make a film dramatizing to the public the risk and difficulties
of getting oil from beneath the earth. From the point of view of
Standard Oil, the important thing was to make the public aware of
the work which went on, often fruitlessly, before oil was struck. An
unimaginative board would have insisted on one of those vast, com
prehensive and unviewable surveys of the risk capital which was sunk
before the oil began to flow.
But Roy Stryker, the imaginative public relations officer of Standard
Oil (NJ.) believed that given his head, Flaherty would produce an
idea, not yet perceived, which would discover in the romance of oil-
drilling a theme so compelling that it would play the commercial
theatres. In so doing, itwould create a general goodwill for the oil-
industry as a whole; no acknowledgement would be given on the
screen to Standard Oil, but the credit
given in the Press and by word
of mouth to Standard Oil for its sponsorship of a film which was a
work of art would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in good
will
[211]
THE INNOCENT EYE
The terms proposed were by the standards of 'sponsored*
incredibly generous. The cost of production was to be underwritten
by Standard Oil, but all receipts from the picture were to go to
Flaherty. There had never been a contract like this; the conjunction
of a firm as imaginative as Standard Oil and a director as implacably
At the outset of his career Revillon Freres had given him as free a
hand and had produced his greatest masterpiece. That had followed
the meditative idleness ofthe Fkst World War. Now Standard Oil after
the meditative idleness of the Second World War gave him a similar
opportunity. In the first case, he went back to make once again the
film of the primitive North which he had botched in the Belcher
he was given the chance to make the film.
Islands. In the second,
use the cant term of the time ; but artistically it was muddled and
confused, in my
opinion.
At the expense of Standard Oil, Flaherty and his wife set out to
make a survey in order, for the first time in his career, to find a story,
which could be submitted to a sponsor. They headed for the south
west, driving thousands of miles, looking at boom-towns and ghost-
towns. There were limitless plains dotted with derricks, static struc
tures above the earth connecting deposits of oil laid millions of years
ago with the refineries which produced the gasoline to power their
cars across the fields of Oklahoma and Texas. But nothing moved
for a movie.
In the course of their travels, they reached the bayou
country of
Louisiana and were enchanted by the gentle, gay people of French
[212]
'LOUISIANA STORY*
ture suddenly became poetry, its slim lines rising clean and taut above
the unending flatness of the marshes.
1 looked at Frances. She looked at me. We knew then that we had
our picture.
'Almost immediately a story began to take shape in our minds,
built around that derrick which moved so majestically into the wilder
ness, probed for beneath the watery ooze and then moved on,
oil
got an okay from Jersey's board of directors. Only at that point did
we make a definite deal to go ahead with the film/
There are simplifications in this account, published originally as a
1
publicity leaflet. But it is no simplification that Flaherty immediately
conceived his film as mirrored in the mind of the half-wild Cajun boy,
entering the boy's world, a strange world in which there were were
wolves and mermaids co-existing through group memory with ra
coons, alligators, catfish, parents and even oil-derricks.
Production began in May 1946, with the usual tests and background
- the only legacy of Elephant Boy -
atmospheric material. But perhaps
there was an outline story down on paper and on paper, it was a good
;
story and the way the machine was to be equated with the primitive
animism of mermaids and werewolves in the consciousness of the
Cajun boy.
But when Helen van Dongen joined the unit in August, she dis
covered that this apparently logical story had not been broken down
into a script and couldn't be, because Flaherty resisted any attempt
to translate mood indicatives into photographic imperatives. she When
tried to press Flaherty, he said: 'What is the longest distance between
two points?'
His answer was 'A motion-picture.*
We are indebted to Helen van Dongen for access to the diary which
she kept while working on the film. On I2th August she noted:
'Screened six reels of unassembled alligator material. . .
Very .
[214]
LOUISIANA STORY'
the artistes were Frances and Bob, with Barbara sitting in a corner
drawing a picture of the father pkying the fiddle. The Sonata continued
for at least Tialf an hour, with the humidity so great that the fiddle
was slightly out of tune. And I think the piano was too.'
This alligator sequence was the one which gave most trouble in the
bait. Alligator grabs bait, gets hook in his mouth, but refuses to put
1
up a fight even though Sidney admitted that he put a big plank
on its tail and was dancing up and down on it to make him mad.
2
Nothing doing. Lionel Le Blanc puts a beam between the alligator's
jaws and frees him from hook.'
Two days kter, the Colonel himself arrived and forbade Flaherty's
killingan alligator, though he had previously given permission for one
to be killed provided it was replaced.
While this purely physical problem awaited solution Helen van
Dongen tried to sort out what was supposed to be happening in all
From her diary one can see her bewilderment. There are too many
variations on the same symbols. There is an alligator in the opening
sequence of the completed picture; and that may be the same alligator
which appears later. There is a wild racoon in the opening sequence -
but that certainly isn't the same as the Cajun boy's tame racoon which
lively and might distract attention from J.C., Coon in pirogue when
1 an
Sidney Smith, just demobbed from the navy was hanging around as assistant until
2 Lionel Le Blanc, a hunter and trapper, who was overseer on Col. Mcflhenny's estate
also played the part ofJoseph's father in the film. He looked Flaherty's double.
THE INNOCENT EYE
J.C. in pond looking for alligator. Disappears when J.C. disturbs
eat it? Question unsolved. J.C. takes
alligator's nest. Did alligator
revenge on alligator for eating his coon? Or does J.C. only think
so? Does J.C. tell his parents that coon has disappeared? Most prob
When does coon appear again? Does J.C. go on looking for him?
As planned, J.C. gets coon back at end of film. It is Tom Smith who
finds and returns him to J.C. But what causes Tom Smith to find
coon? Coon got lost in pond or cypress swamp. Torn Smith is driller
- has no reason to be in forest, nor would coon think of going
cypress
to vicinity of oil-derrick. Does J.C.'s persistence make him find coon
himself. . . .'
This entry is
typical of many, problems which arose
illustrating the
from Flaherty's method of shooting off the cuff. The desperation of
the newsreel editor presented with a shot of a man bowling ninepins
with no reverse angle was multiplied a thousandfold for Helen van
Dongen.
Frances Flaherty was equally worried about the waste of time. On
2pth August, she discussed the problem with Helen van Dongen. It
would take two years to make the film at this rate, because sequences
were planned and thought out after shooting, instead of beforehand.
Helen did not agree. They were also thought out before, but in no
organized manner.
Two days kter, Flaherty flung another spanner in the works. In
place of J.C.'s actual pirogue, Flaherty had commissioned a beautiful
new pirogue. J.C. would have to learn to paddle it and the shots of the
new one wouldn't match the old, already photographed.
As if that wasn't enough, Flaherty wanted the craftsman to make
another pirogue out of the other, and better, half of the cypress trunk
and incorporate the making in the film as well. 'Are we going to make
the same mistakes as Hollywood,' Helen asked, 'cramming six stories
and three generations into one picture?'
She adds: 'Went out yesterday to location. Saw place where
cypress swamps were filmed earlier, and alligators i and 2's nest.
Was expecting to be dragged into Louisiana wilds. Instead to Avery
Island,Colonel Mcllhenny's home, branched off to tropical jungle -
park with mown lawns and beautifully cultivated flowers and bushes.
London,
"*
f -
f*$ .*,
'
Just
before the unrealized 'Cinerama' world tour in 1951
difficult.'
This entry, made two months after Helen had started work on the
picture, would have been made within the first week if Flaherty had
been a self-conscious artist. As it was, Helen recorded it not as part
of Flaherty's purpose - it was she who had made him try these
other shots which didn't work - but as a discovery which she had
made for herself and she went on to write an undelivered letter to
Flaherty.
'Dear Mr. Director:
'Please invent some other way of shooting little boy and give
him something to do. He is
always wiggling his head from one side
to another, and he is always 'looking" - looking looking at alligators,
at nests,
looking at the coon, looking at trees, looking at birds . . .
[218]
LOUISIANA STORY*
see things through his eyes. In each he is fine.
sequence separately
But if you string all the sequences together, I'm getting DAMNED
tired of him! Will you please think of something
- - to
anything
keep him busy in the film? I know I'm a nuisance, but
please think
up something. . . .
'Your Editor.'
Tension had mounted high between Flaherty and his editor, when
in December Helen went into her cutting-room and found Frances
Flaherty tried to calm her down and persuade her that the whole
thing was just a storm in a tea-cup. But to Helen this was not good
enough. Either Mrs. Flaherty must be forbidden the cutting-room, or
she quit the picture. Flaherty, who had never drawn any very firm
distinctions about anybody's role except his own, wanted to temporize.
But Helen, who had been out shopping for Mrs. Flaherty, was beyond
temporizing. She packed her bags and left Abbeville immediately for
New York.
Flaherty spent the next three weeks waiting for Helen van Dongen,
that Dutch mule, to see reason. A
series of long-distance telephone
calls, however, failed to break down her resistance. It was only after
Flaherty saw reason and gave his word that no one should enter her
cutting-room that she returned to Abbeville on 1 4th January, 1947.
The quarrel had its advantages. Flaherty realized that he could not
make the picture without Helen van Dongen and Helen had had time
to think how to turn Flaherty's weakness into fantastic strength. She
had already gone some of the way in her recognition that the camera
had to appear 'accidentally present' - as indeed it so often was. It
needed only a twist to turn that lack of continuity into a dream-like
logic. The very qualities which had troubled her orderly sense were
to become advantages.
Now veryslowly Flaherty and Helen began to evolve a common
language. One finds in her diary phrases like 'phantasmagoria of oil-
world, like dream-world where nothing is
impossible'. Helen started
attacking Flaherty's script not for its unreality, but for its falsity to
[219]
THE INNOCENT EYE
dream. And gradually Flaherty, fighting all the way, began to admit
her tightness.
the discussions began about the use of sound in die
By ipth March,
picture. Could commentary be dispensed with altogether? If not, what
was the minimum necessary for clarity? Frances Flaherty had wanted
sequences cut in certain ways to heighten suspense; but Helen had
argued that unless the audience broadly understood what was happen
ing suspense could not be built up. 'Not to know at all and revealing
much too kte throws an audience into confusion'. How much could
be revealed?
In the completed picture, that argument remain* unresolved. There
is a great deal which Flaherty expected to come across in a first view
ing, which doesn't come across,such as the twin magical objects
kept
beneath the boy's the bag of salt which blesses his
shirt, fishing and the
frog, tokeep the werewolves away; and yet this very obscurity is
something which makes Louisiana Story a film one wants to see over
and over of style - in the way that books can have
again. It has depth
-
depths of style which can only be plumbed through repeated study.
If Helen van
Dongen had prevailed, she would have made the film
more widely popular, but shorter-lived.
The silent footage was shot with twoArriflex cameras and at the
end a sound-crew with a Mitchell camera moved in for the
synch-
dialogue sequences. This posed a problem which Flaherty did not have
time to solve.
He hadtaken enormous pains with the silent
shooting, both in
training his natural actors and in discovering the most dramatic
way
of presenting the material, such as
drilling.
4
We worked day after day shooting reams of
stuff. But somehow
we never could make come alive. We could not
that pesky derrick
[220]
LOUISIANA STORY'
though one wonders 'Why do they have to pay overtime
the hell
happened is the one "played" in the kitchen after the well has struck oil.
'Flaherty told the group of "actors" that, to celebrate the event, the
father went on one of his rare visits to the nearest village to do some
necessary shopping. He has now un
returned to the kitchen, starts
packing the food and then remarks that he has also brought some
presents. He asks the boy to hand one of the packages from the brx-
box to his mother, who unpacks it and finds a new double-boiler.
The boy gets a little impatient waiting for his own present, and asks
the father what he has brought for him? The father scolds him, at first
for being unruly and then eventually hands him the present. (This is
[221]
THE INNOCENT EYE
'Itwas only when starting to edit the "presents-in-the-kitchen"
sequence that I became acutely
aware that, although the dialogue in
each retake was similar in content, not once did the "actors" use
the same words or sentence-formation. / . .
exactly
Helen van Dongen managed to solve some of these problems in the
could have been avoided
cutting-room. They were problems which
in some cases by the use of more than one camera. But there was the
insuperable problem that the dialogue sequences
were like blocks of
concrete that had to be set in a structure as pliant as woven bamboo and
be very interested. I think that this may well have been true, but that
when it came to editing and mixing the sound-tracks, especially in the
oil-derrick scenes, Flaherty became excited in the new dimension
added to his film.
Flaherty would ring up friends not only all over the United States
but even in Europe, roaring down the telephone invitations to get on
the next boat, train or plane and come out and see the location. Quite
a number did. Edward Sammis of Standard Oil who went down
several times writes : *I don't think anyone ever counted the manifold
rooms in the Flaherty's old house on the edge of Abbeville. Certainly
no one ever counted the guests that inhabited them, a heterogeneous
lot, drawn from all warmth and compulsion
over the world by the
of Bob's personality. One would be no one for dinner,
night there
all
having vanished into the vastness of the bayous. The next, there
might be seventeen, appearing as suddenly and mysteriously as the
guests had disappeared the night before.' At any caution that the
money was running out, Flaherty would roar, 'There's millions more
where this came from.' He knew that Standard Oil, having sunk
$175,000 in shooting the picture? wouldn't write the project off for
the sake of a few grand.
[222 ]
LOUISIANA STORY
His gamble was right, though the supplementary budget brought
the total cost of the production up to 25 8,000.
The of music to natural sound was clearly going to be very
relation
[223]
THE INNOCENT EYE
The film had its world premiere on 2nd August, 1948, at the
Edinburgh Festival at the Caley Cinema to an audience of 2,000 people.
Its
reception was tremendous. Flaherty, on
the line from New York,
couldn't believe the reports of its ovation. At Venice, later the same
year, it was awarded a prize for its lyrical valour'. And in 1949, Virgil
Thomson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music on the strength of
his score, the first time that this prize had ever been awarded for music
written to film. In New York City, it opened at the Sutton Theatre in
September 1948, and in the United Kingdom, it was taken for dis
tribution by the British Lion Corporation in a version slightly shorter
than that shown at Edinburgh and Venice, but with Flaherty's
1
approval
Financially brought no returns proportionate to its cost. For world
it
Denmark, Norway, Germany, Austria, Korea and Japan, for seven years,
Korda's British Lion paid an advance of only ^5,000 and no more
[224]
LOUISIANA STORY'
film achievement, but all Grierson
had to say was 'Yet another brilliant
evocation of the damn-fool sense of innocence this wonderful old
character pursues his eye keener than ever, sensibility sorter and so
:
71
on. . . .Grierson's eye was less keen and his artistic sensibility
'Flaherty has pitched away the last mechanics of prose, and the
result ispure poetry. . . . This is elegy. Its theme is the wonder of
childhood- Wordsworth's great theme; the setting, the swampland
of Louisiana the players, American oil-men and a family of French
;
Canadians who have settled among the bayous. "With the clear, true
vision of a child, Flaherty contemplates place, people, animal and
machine; and the lyrical intensity of his art evolves a slow statement
of the marvel of life. How inadequate is the word "documentary" to
3
describe such a work. It is like calling an ode "an article in verse".
'Thereno comment, no propaganda, no uplift. There is scarcely
is
1 No.
Documentary Film News, Vol. 7, 68, August 1948.
3 This depends, comment Rotha and Wright, on the interpretation of the word,
'documentary*. I would agree, only adding that the public image of documentary in
1948 was not merely prosaic, but journalistic. A. C-M.
[225]
THE INNOCENT EYE
would have us glued body and soul to the hot hob of our political
and economic existence, will rage at its
"escapism". But he is con
cerned with the false world. Here, from a remote corner of a remote
- and it is
Flaherty showing us the true world, the source
state, is
bathed, like the work of any true poet, in "the master light of our
seeing". The allusion is not extravagant. Works like this redeem the
cinema and burn up like chaff the memory of its screaming vulgarities,
its too solid mediocrities.' 1
Of
the contemporary views, laian Hamilton's came nearest to
to describe it as a fable, in the sense that the people, the animals and
the actions have a fabulous significance transcending the particular.
Many people have observed that the film takes place within the con
of the Cajun Boy; but it is significant that the boy is not
sciousness
And he does not live in 'a remote corner of a remote state' in 1946-7,
he lives in a place which compresses the history of the human race
almost from the Garden of Eden to this very instant, and the history
of the earth from long before the emergence of man.
His childhood is not just that of all children; it is also on another
level, the childhood of the human race. The snakes and alligators which
live in the swamp are the symbols of the predators which threaten the
life of primitive man; and the mermaids and werewolves are the local
spirits
of good and evil which dwell in the minds, and rule the world,
of stone-age people. It is a world of terror and magic and
danger. But
it is also a world of
beauty and love and achievement the beauty of a ;
[226]
'LOUISIANA STORY'
Ulysses is free to
wander and. conquer; but on Jean Latour and his
wife, the shades of the prison-house have closed. Jean is just a trapper,
sceptical
that the oil-men will find oil but careful to safeguard that he
will not lose out, if they do. He and the oil-men live in a narrow
adult world. But to the boy that world of launches, oil-derricks and
machines is far easier to accept, because the boy's little world is already
so much fuller than his father's.
which the boy inhabits, when before ever man emerged, the mineral
oil deposits were trapped.
To the boy, this drilling is at first a terrifying thing and the oil-men ;
who jeer at his magic, his spit, the bag of salt within his shirt and the
frog-familiar, seem to have no more understanding of what things
are really like than
any other adults.
But with time he becomes familiar both with the men and their
Yet this does not mean that he accepts their narrow attitude to the
hidden beneath the earth, more dangerous, more powerful than those
to flow.
As soon as one begins to make explicit what is expressed in symbols,
one begins to For me, part of the emotional impact of that
falsify.
Latour
magnificent final scene with Alexander Napoleon Ulysses
astride the 'Christmas tree' is that through the pipe up which the oil
symbolism is unconscious.
On the other hand, the film is resonant with deliberate symbols.
THE INNOCENT EYE
The boy begins with a rusty old rifle, he ends with a new one. The
wild racoon is
placed at the beginning to establish it as part of the
wild before we find the boy with a pet one. What happens to the
Latour family apart from a few presents from town does not matter ;
the boy is conqueror and hero of all the kingdoms of the world,
Alexander, Napoleon and Ulysses rolled in one, waving to the friendly
twentieth century while the riches of prehistoric time flow between
his legs. 1
[228]
18
THE END
JL
A JLfter the Hollywood premiere of Louisiana Story,
Charles Chaplin, Jean Renoir and Dudley Nichols sent Flaherty what
was intended as a congratulatory telegram. It read:
what went to make it a brilHant success was the four years dialectical
meditation, following the failure of The Land, upon the simplicities
and the complexity of the machine.
studied in the earlier films
[229]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Supposing Croesus had presented him with all the money in his
treasury to make the greatest film of his life, Flaherty would have
found it impossible to do so, because he had already made it.
About a lonely, limited genius such as Flaherty there congregates
always a group of defenders, who find in his commercial failure, a
justification for their own. But in fact, artistically Flaherty's life was
remarkably free from failure. Apart from the farce of Elephant Boy
and the misfiring of Industrial Britain and The Land, the only two
pictures in which he was tied to government agencies, he had a
wonderful run for other people's money.
Ah, but if only the cinema industry had been differently organized!
say the self-appointed defenders of Flaherty. 'What would have
happened then?'
What would probably have happened, if any Flaherty picture had
made so much money that even he couldn't have squandered it, would
have been that he would have ceased to be an inspired, but
infuriating
director and become a fuddled, but even more
infuriating, producer.
As it was, he remained in director's harness. The tests he made for
a film interpretation of Picasso's Guernica
picture for the Museum of
Modern Art in 1948 led to his presentation for the United States of
The time had come for Flaherty to 'dun rovin' and retire to the
seclusion of the farm Brattleboro or if that was too
at
great a sacrifice
of the social life he loved among friends like Oliver St.
John Gogarty,
1
Grierson's and Helen van Dongen's information to Rotha and Wright.
[230]
THE END
John Huston and others at least to have cut down the financial part
Edinburgh, Paris and Cannes, the last named for the Film Festival. It
was over ten years since they had been in Europe and in that time the
continent had changed even more than they had. But it was a wonder
ful return for Flaherty, who had left England so broke and now
Club Francais, which Olwen Vaughan had founded for the Free French
during the war and which had (and still has) the atmosphere of shabby,
comfortable bohemianism in which Flaherty loved to relax, upstairs
in the restauranton the first floor or in the ground-floor bar.
It was there in a party given to welcome Flaherty, as I understood,
1
Where Wolfgang Suschitsky took a fine scries of portraits of which two are repro
duced in this book.
THE INNOCENT EYE
documentary from its inception as an outsider and from 1941 to 194x5
had worked very closely with the movement as a member of the
Ministry of Information Films Division. In 1949 my connection with
the movement was sufficiently close for me to be invited to the
Flaherty party. But as soon as I went inside, I knew that I didn't belong.
There was handsome over-life-size man with the
this large Irishly
wonderful blue eyes and an outflow of human love which was almost
insensitive because it gave out so much that it took very little in. And
Flaherty had come over from Berlin as schoolmaster. The party was
not to celebrate Flaherty's triumph in Louisiana Story. It was a senti
mental reunion with a friend from the past. But Flaherty so irradiated
that thiswas not the final or lasting impression of that meeting. I recall
phrases from Oliver St. John Gogarty's word portrait: 'a big, expan
sive man with a face florid with enthusiasm and
eyes clear as the
Northern Ice ... further removed from the mediocre than any man
I've ever known.'
1 often regret thatI never met "Walt Whitman,'
Gogarty wrote in
that portrait, which had been published in Tomorrow a couple of years
before. 1 'But there is a lot of him reincarnated in Bob Flaherty. He,
too, can take you into peace- "to behold the birth of stars, to learn one
of the meanings, to launch off with absolute faith and never be
quiet
again", and the more faith we have the easier it will be for us, when
our time comes, to glide down the slips.
'But absolute faith in what, you may ask? Absolute faith in the
^Reprinted in Mourning became Mrs. S$endlove (Creative Age Press, New York, 1948).
[232]
THE END
nature and the fate of man, a belief that there is a hero hidden in all
men, and that when we are all in the same boat the hero will steer
And so is Oliver St. John Gogarty, vaguer and more abstract than
magnanimous man I've ever met. It is his power of making you forget
the trivial things in life and look only at the elemental things that build
up the dignity of man. "If only men were honest, there would be no
wars." His face glows with the wonder of a child when he tells of the
hidden paradises on the earth or when he meets a friend. His finger
;
never mutes the strings that vibrate in eternity. He has in him the
towards me ... slowly ... on his hind legs with his paws weaving.
I had just managed by this time to get my pack-sack off before
there he was in front of me, weaving and
sparring.
Well, I don't expect you to believe me, but I was getting
desperate . . . therewas only one thing to do. To hit him. And
I did it. I hit him hard on the chin and down he went. By
. . .
God!
It was sickeningto hear the thud as he fell to the
ground. And
as I looked down at him I never felt so sorry for anything in my
did when I saw that bear on the
ground. He was looking
life as I
only one eye. One eye had gone, no doubt in some fight long
ago and he kept looking up at me with his one good eye in the
;
how I felt.
He was trying to talk and he almost could. He almost called
. . .
all that sort of thing, you know. When we got back that evening,
Bozo was still there all right. I had kept him tethered, though
there was no need to really ... it was more for appearance sake.
And that sort of thing went on for several days our friendship . . .
Chief was white with anger. He told me, through my Indian boy,
that they knew all about this bear. He had an evil name ... he
was the durndest bear in the country and they weren't going
. . .
his daughter who was by now out of the bear's arms and examin
at me
ing her scratches, I slipped across to Bozo. Bozo looked
with that in his one eye. I could
again reproachful expression
see the situation was going to be pretty serious unless something
was done quickly so I told Bozo I was very ashamed of him
;
and he'd have to go without food for his bad behaviour unless he
apologized. Well, I managed somehow to quieten
all the others,
but the Chief I could not quieten. He said, 'Look here, you've
got to get that bear out of this country at once.
don't want We
[235]
THE INNOCENT EYE
him around here any more. We know all about him everyone . . .
the coach, and called him but there were no signs of him, not
. . .
[238]
THE END
On loth November, 1950, Flaherty submitted to the International
Motion Picture Division, Department of State, a memorandum for a
film. East is West, of which the purpose was:
purpose.
The main target area must not be lost sight o Peoples of the
Far East must see their descendants portrayed with sympathy and
they induce any bank to advance the money on the strength of the
StateDepartment contract. Though a State Department contract
[240]
THE END
Griffith describes a scene with Flaherty about this time in his suite
The shabby old rooms were stacked with the loot of years of
travel. Sunshine filtered in through dusty windows on cameras
and tripods lined against the walls. Stills from the films were
propped up on the mantelpiece for me to look at. On the cofiee-
stained work-table was a pile of messages from passers-by through
New York who wanted to give him a hail. He had lived there
six years, on and off, but it all looked like a camp that might be
struck at dawn. As ever, he was poised for flight.
Where to, this time? He paced the room as I quizzed Kim on
future film plans about which he was vague. I was persistent;
I wanted to know exactly what he saw ahead of him. Suddenly he
sat down and looked at me and said, 'Well, say what you will,
there's one thing they can't take away from us, the way we've
lived these thirty years.' 1
Flaherty was sixty-seven. He had lived hard and he had not really
recovered from bronchial pneumonia. The Hawaiian film might have
might have set him up, if he could have endured that seclusion. As it
was, he was approached by the late Mike Todd and the travel-film
commentator Lowell Thomas, to make films all over the world,
a two-ton
using Cinerama, a gigantic and complicated device, using
camera, designed to protect the movie industry from the inroads of
television by making films to be projected on the wide screen by three
projectors.
Grierson who was not with Flaherty at this time thinks that despite
the fact that this method of film-making was contrary to all Flaherty's
about "Cinerama" in itself
previous practice, Flaherty 'was as excited
as he was when he discovered a 17 in. lens'. Griffith says that Flaherty
[241]
THE INNOCENT EYE
who represented the exact opposite to all that Bob believed in and had
worked for/
The reader must reach own conclusion. Perhaps the motivation
his
The first
assignment was a sixty-minute newsreel of General
MacArthur's triumphal return from Korea to Chicago. Apart from
the fact that it was in 3-D, wide-screen colour, was just like another
it
newsreel. But while filming it, Flaherty caught a cold, which turned to
virus-pneumonia.
He seemed to throw it off and according to Herman G. Weinberg
he continued with his plans for the world tour. Weinberg recalls
an evening in the Coffee House Club about a week before he was
due to was in high spirits
leave. 'Flaherty the setting was the . . .
day after day, and night after night. He couldn't he in bed, the
pain was so bad, and he had to sit out the night in an arm-chair.
When finally we all caught on to what was happening, and
Frances came down to New York from the farm, he rallied, fought
off the arthritis - and then came down with
shingles, equally
painful and equally requiring constant drugs.
I visited him
every day. While he would welcome me and
follow conversation with his eyes and
occasionally say a pertinent
[242]
THE END
word or two, he had really withdrawn to some region of his own
where none could follow him.
All this we attributed to the morphine, and when Frances told
me one day, the tears ofjoy in her eyes, that a new 'miracle' drug
had been found which had cleared up everything, I felt safe in
taking a few days off, Frances's intention being to take Bob up
1
to the farm at once.
he had heard this sort of thing before in black moods. But when he
Chelsea -
got back, he found that Flaherty had been moved from the
not to the farm but to the hospital. When Griffith telephoned to ex
any of that stuff/ He seemed much better but did not want to see
anyone.
Frances moved him But though the specific diseases
to the farm.
1
In a letter to Paul Rotha, 27th July, 1951.
19
EPILOGUE
goodwill.
However extravagant Flaherty may have been in his expenditure,
he knew that he had to try to give value for money. Within the limits
of bis integrity, he tried to fulfil the requirements of his different
backers. It was always a difficult equation; and in his lifetime it can
only be said to have succeeded aesthetically twice, with his first major
film and his last.
These were the only two occasions when he found sponsors who
[244]
EPILOGUE
bi a sum of money to make the sort of -film that he wanted,
gave
relying on the goodwill which accrued from the financing of a work
of art.
Flaherty's scant production is sometimes cited as a denunciation of
our society. But G. "W. Pabst, when himself complaining that if he
had lowered his standards he could have made more than twenty
films, replied to someone who cited Flaherty's six pictures in thirty
years, *Yet
what films!' In terms of the celluloid medium Flaherty's
long-distance telephoning. No
film-production of his could stand up
to the inquisitorial eye of an accountant, demanding 'Was this neces
sary in terms of the film?' He was not an austere artist. He was a large
profligate man, who made films
which appealed to millions over years
instead of to millions over months. His slow tempo was wrong for the
big money.
Consequently he suffered.
suffering. This was especially true of Flaherty who was a double artist.
first command the menu and the wine-list, selecting what was best for
champagne and sweet champagne, because in his day the ladies liked
their champagne sweet.
And then he would begin to hold forth with that wonderful com
mand of eloquence, the bright blue eyes effulgent, the face like a sun
and the hair The dinner would be forgotten and the walls
like a halo.
of the restaurant would fall away and his guests would be in Hudson
Bay or the South Pacific or India. But not his own guests only. Con
versation at tables within earshot would cease. Everybody would be
[245]
THE INNOCENT EYE
listening, leaning nearer, those
hard of hearing cupping their ears.
Even the waiters stopped waiting. They hovered round listening, not
bill
This sort of entertainment was meat and drink to Flaherty as a
new things as long as he could. The various retreats which his wife
found for him were unwilling, but necessary refuges. A more dis
ciplined man would have drawn aside to think what his next steps
should be. But while he had a dollar left of his own, he kept on hoping
that something would turn up to postpone the need for thought.
Frances Flaherty, with her small private income and her inflexible
puritan standards, played in his life an unenviable, but key, role. She
had to get him back to her home, not merely to prevent financial dis
aster but also to build up the creative thought and energy for the next
film. It was an invidious position because Flaherty was constantly
trying to escape and to his drinking friends she appeared as a dis
approving chatelaine.
But there is no doubt that herinflexibility gave Flaherty the polarity
he needed. Without it, he would have talked himself out in the Coffee
1
Charles Dickens had a similar duality. His acting and his
readings produced an
immediate effect which he found far more
satisfying than his writing and he killed him
;
[246]
EPILOGUE
House and Little French Club to become a legendary figure as fragile
as Oliver St.
John Gogarty.
John Grierson says that Flaherty had no knowledge of governance.
In truth Frances Flaherty was his governance the grim knowledge that
;
but with Flaherty, you felt as if you had had a transfusion. And Clare
Lawson Dick, who with her family saw much of the Flahertys when
they were in England after Louisiana Story, put it still
more positively.
The Lawson Dicks and the Flahertys had arranged one afternoon to
it was full
go to see Bicycle Thieves, but when they got to the cinema
and they had to kill three hours till the next performance. 'With any
c
one else that would have been sheer agony/ she said, but with Flaherty,
it was sheer delight/
She told me also that when he returned to the United States,
an old man. The effulgence of his personality shone out, making other
people seem dim.
Effulgence is the key-word. He was like a light shining, his power
raisedby the people he met. He did not have enemies, apart from the
monstrous caricatures of the tycoons who had let him down. There
were some people for whom he had little use, small, mean-minded
men. But for most people, he just shone.
This is the reason why when one talks to him,
people who knew
very emerges which is precise. There were the stories, the same
little
stories snowballing over the years; there was the generosity, the
shines?
There must have been an intimate personality or rather personalities.
Frances Flaherty, though less prominent, is a great person in her own
Their private life with its quarrels and reconciliations, its conflicts
right.
and harmonies remained discreetly private. He never discussed his
private affairs. At the same time the most voluble and the most reticent
of men, he had the chivalry of a Very parfit knight'. It is not within
my scope to try to penetrate that reticence or to explore the complica
tions of paternity. It must have been difficult for Flaherty to combine
this wandering with the duties of fatherhood; and equally difficult
life
figure. But it is the public figure which is important for this study, not
the private man with his despairs and the lonely despondence which
follows social elation.
The effect of Flaherty as a film-maker was as pronounced and vague
as was a person. John Huston says that he and John Ford
his effect as
and William Wyler and Billy Wilder were all profoundly influenced
by Flaherty. But how is a different matter. 'Flaherty was not the type
of artist we can consider as the teacher,' said Jean Renoir. 'There will be
no Flaherty School. Many people will try to imitate him, but they
[248]
EPILOGUE
won't succeed; he had no system. His system was just to love the
world, to love humanity, to love animals, and love is something you
cannot teach/
Love cannot be taught. But it can be experienced. Flaherty's films
are not just moving pictures. They are experiences, similar in a geogra
phical sense to visiting Paris or Rome or seeing the dawn rise over the
Sinai desert. Flaherty is a country, which having once seen one never
forgets.
But though one thinks of the places in which he filmed, Hudson Bay,
Samoa, the Aran Islands, India, the United States, the Flaherty Country
is of the mind, as charactertistic in its climate as the Kafka Continent,
force that men must work together if they are to survive ; hunger,
a
blizzard, a break in the ice or shipwreck may any moment bring death,
so we must live purely under the shadow of eternity.
The Flaherty world was distasteful to people, because its
many
of modern science in which
symbols belonged not to the proud world
Nature, licked, was on the run and Everyman was master of his fate
1 Huston's and Renoir's reminiscences were recorded for the B.B.C.'s Portrait ofFlaherty,
but not used in the programme broadcast. The full recordings are in the Museum
of
Modern Art, New York.
[249]
THE INNOCENT EYE
of love and he could not admit human evil into his world. There is no
villain in hisworld except the natural elements. For him there was no
Fall in the Garden of Eden. The expulsion would have been caused
mitted not merely to Basil Wright and others who had had the benefit
of working with Flaherty. Though Jean Renoir was quite right to say
that Flaherty was not the of master to create a school (because he
sort
[250]
EPILOGUE
But the thought that anything he had done might inspire, as it still
does, someone else to go out and do something quite different would
have delighted him. After all, that is in the true tradition; to tread for
the first time a path never previously trodden, to discover a territory
unknown or record a way of life about to sink into an oblivion.
APPENDICES
Appendices by Paul
Rotha and Basil Wright
i
Appendix
NANOOK OF THE NORTH
I
^t is a very simple picture. The sub-tides, written by
Carl Stearns Clancy, inform the audience that the film was made at
and his
Hopewell Sound, Northern Ungava. Nanook, the hunter,
numbers. use moss
family emerge from their kayak in surprising They
for fuel. They carry a krge boat down to the water. (The launching is
not shown.) They go to a trading post. Nanook kills a polar-bear with
only his He hangs out his fox- and bear-skins which are bar
harpoon.
tered for beads and knives. (The exterior of the trading-post is seen in
the distance only.) In the post Nanook plays the old gramophone and
tries to bite the record. One child is given castor oil and swallows
it
with relish.
two bits
Nanook then goes off on floating ice to catch fish, using
of ivory as bait on
a seal-string line. He spears salmon with a trident
and kills them with his teeth. News comes that walrus have been
found. Nanook joins other hunters in a fleet ofkayaks. They meet rough
seas. The walrus are sighted. Nanook harpoons one and after a
terrific struggle it is hauled ashore. The walrus weighs two tons. The
hunters kill it and carve it
up and begin eating it on the spot, using
seen in close-up.)
ivory knives. (The flesh
is
[255]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Winter sets in. A blizzard envelops the trading-post. Nanook goes
the sledge with difficulty
hunting with his family. The dog-team drags
over rough ice-crags. Nanook stalks and traps a white fox.
Nanook builds an igloo, carving it from blocks of frozen snow with
his walrus-ivory knife, licking the blade so that it will freeze to make
a cutting edge.
His children play slides. One has a miniature sledge. Everyone is gay
and smiling.
With great care and skill Nanook makes the window for the igloo
out of a block of ice and fixes a wedge of snow to reflect the light
through the window. The family furnishes the igloo with their scanty
treasures and then Nanook teaches his small son to use a bow and
breakfast, smiling. Nyla washes the baby with her saliva. They prepare
to set off for the seal-grounds, glazing the runners of the sledge with
ice. Before they depart, there is
savage scrapping among the dogs.
Nanook finds a breathing hole in the ice. Down it he thrusts his
and the seal under the ice. Nanook loses his balance and falls head over
heels, but other members of the family come to the rescue and help
Nanook haul the seal out. (The seal, as critics noticed, is very dead.)
They cut it
up and throw scraps to the dogs. In their fight over them,
the dogs tangle their traces and so the departure for home is delayed.
They are forced to take refuge in a deserted igloo. The snow drifts up
and the dogs, covered, become scarcely visible. But some small pups
are given a little
igloo kennel, specially made for them. Nanook and
his family bed down naked inside their furs and hide sleeping-bags.
Outside the blizzard rages but within Nanook is seen (in close-up) fast
asleep.
[256]
Appendix 2
MOANA
The camera tilts down from the sky through luxuriant foliage to reveal
Fa'angase. A little boy, Pe'a (Flying Fox), is there too. Moana himself
is taro roots.
prilling
They move off to the village, carrying the food they have gathered.
A trap is set for a wild boar. The village of Safune is introduced by a
lovely vista shot. A
boar has been caught in the trap and there is a
[w]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Sea breaks over the reef into the lagoon, white spume shooting
up
through blow-holes. Moana, his elder brother Leupenga and young
Pe'a breast the waves in their out-rigger canoe. The canoe is
swamped
and the brothers swim in the sea. They go fishing along the rocky
shore, the waves breaking over them.
Among the rocks the little boy is
searching intently. He rubs two
sticks together and makes a fire of coconut husks. A big mystery is
created out of what he is
trying to catch. It turns out to be a giant
robber-crab.
There follows a turtle-hunt. A turtle is
speared and after a hard
struggle it is hauled into the canoe. When they reach shore Moana
drills a hole in the turtle's shell and tethers it to a tree.
Fa'angase
strokes it like a pet.
Back in the village, Tu'ungaita is
preparing a meal with great care,
Coconuts are shredded, breadfruit made ready and strange foods,
wrapped in palm leaves, are baked in an oven of hot stones. All is
shown in detail (with big close-ups).
Moana is now anointed with oil in preparation for his ornate
dressing for the siva dance. He and his betrothed, Fa'angase, perform
their dance, the camera concentrating almost wholly on the
boy,
following his beautiful rhythmic movements.
The villagers gather for the ceremonial of the tattoo. The old tufunga
(tattooer) makes ready. A long sequence shows the gradual tattooing
of Moana, the tap-tapping of the needle points, the rubbing in of the
dye, sweat being wiped away from the boy's brow, his mother fanning
him with a palm-leaf while the tufunga works with grave, impassive
face.
Meanwhile, the ritual of making the kava goes on. When made, the
coconut shell from which it is drunk is passed
by the chiefs from
hand to hand in order of precedence. The
people of Safune are now in
fulldance with their siva. The sun is sinking. The
dancing gets faster
and faster.
Inside their hut, the
camera pans from Moana's parents across to
Pe'a, who is asleep.
Tu'ungaita covers him tenderly with a tapa cloth.
Outside Moana and Fa'angase dance their betrothal dance as the sun
sinks behind the mountains.
[258]
Appendix 3
MAN OF ARAN
curragh is half-wrecked but the men get ashore. They all but lose their
net but Maggie saves it. Thus right in the first sequence the ferocity of
the sea and the islanders fight against it is made clear.
A tide tells us how the people are dependent on what potatoes they
can grow and how they scrape together the soil and seaweed for them
to grow in. Tiger is seen breaking up rocks, while Maggie gathers sea
weed. Tiger then patches and caulks his battered curragh. Mikeleen is
up on die cliff-top fishing with a line which he holds between his toes.
Suddenly he sees something down below and begins to scramble down
thecliff. It turns out that he has spotted a basking-shark. A title tells us
about the sharks - that they are the biggest fish found in the Adantic.
Then follows a sequence of the men in their curraghs harpooning
[259]
THE INNOCENT EYE
the sharks in a comparatively calm sea. At the same time, we see
Maggie and Mikeleen - staring out at the wrath of the sea - their
eternal enemy.
[260]
Appendix 4
THE LAND
worded by
T J^he film begins with a tide as stipulated and
the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
FOREWORD
The strength that is America comes from the land. Our mighty
war effort is the product of its land and people. Land: our soil,
our minerals, our forests, our water-power. People: their skills,
their inventiveness, their resourcefulness, their education, their
health. Land and people, in war or in peace, this is our national
wealth.
From then on, and for the only time in all the films of Robert Flaherty,
words matter a great deal to the film. Instead, therefore, of synopsizing
the contents of The Land - as has been done with previous films - we
[261]
THE INNOCENT BYE
believe that a faker idea of the picture will be given if we alternate
The film opens with a farmer, his wife and child, strolling around
their fine old stone farmhouse, built to kst centuries, with roomy
great barns and outhouses : rich country, rich grazing, rich crops.
Good people,
Of the solid old stock
That settled in this country
Three hundred years ago.
They built their houses to last forever.
In the distance men walk across eroded land: the worn-out soil and
farmers staring at it. Elsewhere, people wait in the shade,
waiting for
surplus food. Then to a meeting of farmers; they are discussing their
many problems. Close-ups of their anxious, worried faces as they talk
or listen.
[262]
APPENDIX 4
Big storm clouds in a black sky, the countryside darkened by cloud
shadows. Fields with furrows made by trickling water. Rushing water
meeting more rushing water together they make a
:
torrential stream.
The soil is washed away - and so erosion starts.
sides,scarred and pitted by rushing water. Deep gullies and torn soil
side.
bell and slowly touches the clapper to its side. He looks around ques-
tioningly.
Desert land with bashed wire-fences. Black naked land, streaked with
erosion white. Cows scrabble for food in the far distance. And more
dilapidated houses, on the verge of collapse, stand isolated in the
barren landscape.
Wasted land,
Wasted rivers.
hide, its rimmed with black, crops at the stunted bush. It can
eyes
hardly drag one leg after another.
[265]
THE INNOCENT EYE
We carne to a town that cotton farmers founded
Not so many years ago.
*Go Forth,' they called it,
'Go Forth, Texas'
It died with the soil,
Three migrants, an old man, wife and a young man, squat around
his
a fixe, trying to warm themselves in the early dawn. They are just
like an old covered-wagon,
passing through. Their car-trailer, looking
has a chair tied on the back. The old woman's face is pitted with
-
They had fire but no food.
formed and eventually the hill-sides are eroded. Billboards are erected
on the useless dustbowl land - advertising this, selling that - but to
whom? Migrants have no money. And over all, and all the time, the
fine dust blows
[266]
APPENDIX 4
Let grow instead of wheat,
thistles
Encampment of migrants beside the road - with bleak tired faces and
holloweyes. Some of them look up at us, as if they are animals being
stared at:and then they look away. A mother prepares food for a
girl
sleeping under a tent attached to a battered Model T Ford. A thin little
girl moves
her hand in her sleep. Families on wheels - in broken-
living
down cars and old trailers. The Wilder family of eight - seven of them
children . . . live in this old trailer. Their Ford is completely collapsed.
A little ragged boy stirs beans in a pot and upsets them. A little blonde
girlchews gum. Another little boy has his arm in a sling. Their father
on an upturned box absently smoking a cigarette. They have no
sits
mother. They have been living this way - 'on wheels* - for six years.
Homeless people.
watching. The father begins to load the wagon with bits and pieces of
furniture from the cabin. Their Ford has broken down for good. The
mother nurses a baby. A little boy pkys with a scooter. When the
wagon is loaded and the family has dambered on to it, the father takes
the reins. For a moment he looks back to what was their home, from
which they have been evicted.They couldn't pay the rent any more.
The wagon drives away. The cabin-door stands open. The Model T
stands derelict. A broken chair and a doll are in a corner of one of
the rooms. The wagon
disappears into the distance. The man leaning
the tree stares after it.
1
against
1 -
Perhaps one of the most moving and beautiful sequences ever shot by Flaherty. P.R.
[267]
THE INNOCENT EYE
We came to this family moving out :
Great vistas of empty desert, with low hills on the horizon. A few
stunted cactus. A solitary steer. A distant train sends out a
plume of
smoke across the sky. A big mountain stands across the valley. Twisted
trees stand up from a plain,
Migrants fill
up their Ford roadster with water from a ditch. Three of
them are packed in front. Two girls are in the rumble-seat. Their
Arizona!
[268]
APPENDIX 4
They went into the mountains,
Built dams, and impounded it ...
Great reservoirs of water!
Water, and sun that never fails
lettuces, throwing them up into waiting trucks that move with them
down the long rows.
pluck them off the ever-moving belt. The work is monotonous and
hard.
In the sheds
[269]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Vast carrot-fields, with whole families of Mexicans picking at great
And here
Women get the work,
And gkd they are to get it
One day it
may be picking
Every boll of cotton in the world.
seems.
THE INNOCENT EYE
An acre cleared in an hour
That'show fast it goes.
The man who drives it owns it.
He clears his neighbours' farms with it
tgainst
the sky.
ii rich Iowa, the fields are filled with crops and the barns are stacked
tvith corn. There are fine fat cattle and hogs. A group of plump bulls
A.
hay-wagon draws up a barn. The hay is hoisted in. A team of
at
right horses stands in a field. Other teams are ploughing. And then a
small tractor skirts the
edge of a field.
This is Iowa.
Nowhere is there better land.
Good cattle, well fed.
Good homes,
Good farms.
But even here in this rich state
There is trouble.
For years farmers have been struggling
With prices too low
To pay for the things they have to buy.
It's been hard for them
To make both ends meet,
To clothe and educate the children,
To pay taxes, to meet the notes at the bank.
THE INNOCENT EYE
Here and everywhere,
So many don't own their homes any more,
Nor the land either.
A huge cornfield. Above the high corn in the distance is seen just the
head of a corn-picker advancing towards us. It approaches like some
monster through the corn until it is revealed in full as it passes close
by us a picker and husker combined driven by one man. Its metal
head is reared up like some pterodactyl as it goes relentlessly through
the high corn-stalks.
1 These were stock shots, the only ones used in the film-
[274]
APPENDIX 4
Thousands upon thousands
Only a few years ago
Harvested wheat.
Thousands more
Harvested corn.
More pouring wheat and then grain rising up moving elevators into
an 'ever-normal* granary, its aluminum shining in the sun. Row
upon
row of these cylindrical granaries with grain being fed up into them.
A shepherd and his dog. The old man wipes his forehead and opens
his collar. A flock of white
sheep moves across a krge valley. A great
river of sheep flows over a hill-side. A cowhand on a beautiful horse
watches a far-away
moving herd of cattle. Snowcapped mountains are
in the far distance. Other men on horses ride behind the cattle on the
Beef on the hoof. Then grain-boats on the river
plain.
again. Trains
[276]
APPENDIX 4
shunting in the yards. Wheat-machines on the far horizon of the
wheat-fields.
A white horse is
ploughing contours in a field. Two tractors are
a pattern
It is
It is a new design.
[
2 77]
THE INNOCENT EYE
We are now back at the farmers' meeting in Pennsylvania where we
were near the opening. A farmer is talking about the new methods of
contour-ploughing: others listen. Some nod
their assent. Others
join
in the speaking. The farmer seen in the opening sequence listens. And
It looks practical,
It is
practical.
Six million farmers,
Six million strong,
Are beginning to firm together,
To think together,
To act together.
We see again the stone farmhouse in Pennsylvania. Our farmer and his
wife are looking over their land, talking with each other. We sec
a hill-side of bkck earth with young plants growing in contour
formation. A white horse is busy at the spring planting. Young corn-
[278]
APPENDIX 4
food to be doled out - the hungry, the poor, the displaced. Waiting
for food for work - for help of any and every kind
And now we are back with the great wheat-machines, their blades
[279]
Appendix 5
LOUISIANA STORY
birds, alligators
T
he film opens in a dark, eerie swamp, with strange
and many, many fantastic growths. Huge water-
lily leaves float on the surface of the bayous. Giant cypress trees drape
their beard-like streamers of Spanish moss. Everywhere there is dark
with green hair who swim into these lagoons from the sea. And to
protect himself from their evils, he carries a little bag of salt tied to
his waist and a mysterious
something which he keeps inside his shirt.
A huge water-snake zigzags through the water. An alligator rears
its snout. The boy hears something, is worried, and looks around him
[280]
APPENDIX 5
Then lie smiles. It is only a false alarm. Presently he
furtively. sees a
wild raccoon in the branches of a cypress tree. He calls to it,
imitating
makes. Then he leaves the swamp,
tying up his canoe. He
the noise it
takes his rusty rifle with him and sets out on a hunting expedition
among the tall reeds. He sees something and raises his rifle to take aim.
Just as he is about to fire, an explosion. Before he has time to
there is
There are more explosions. Latour hangs out his raccoon-skins, taking
little notice of it all. One day the boy is climbing around in the cypress
trees, playing with Jo-Jo, his new pet raccoon. Suddenly he looks up.
He sees something towering high above the tallest trees. A graceful,
slender structure has appeared, its metal girders glinting like silver in
the sun. It moves slowly and majestically up the bayou towards him.
He races to the cabin to tell his father.
Finally, the oil derrick comes to
bayou not far from Latour's cabin. It's going to probe deep
rest in the
through the water into the earth - two, maybe three miles down.
For some time the boy is too shy to go near the derrick but one day
he approaches cautiously in his canoe. Two of the oil-men call out to
1
The same song, curiously enough, the tinkers sing in No Resting Place, although I did
not know it at the time. P. R.
[281]
THE INNOCENT EYE
him to 'Come aboard'. But he is too scared. After some banter between
theboy and the oil-driller and his boiler-man on the derrick, the boy
shows them a big catfish he has caught. One of the men says, 'You
must have used some bait to catch that fellow.' The boy replies, It's
not the bait. Watch! I to catch a big catfish.' He spits
show you how
on his hook, drops the line and in a moment pulls up a fish, but only
a tiny one. The men have a good laugh. The boy refuses their invitation
to come aboard and paddles away in his pirogue.
One evening, however, he plucks up enough courage to approach
joined end-to-end and driven through the water down into the earth.
The boy stealthily climbs aboard. Tom Smith, the driller, calls out.
'Come on over!'
In the deafening noise, the boy goes over fearfully and apprehen
sively watches the long pipes, one after another, plunging down into
the earth. He is struck with wonder at the magic of this monster, but
he wants Tom to know that he, too, has some magic. He shows his
bag of salt to the driller. But the boy's father has been searching for
him and appears on the derrick to scold him. Tom, however, cries out
that he's glad tohave the boy aboard.
Then we back again in the cypress swamp. The boy is paddling
are
his pirogue with him is Jo-Jo, his pet coon. The boy is obviously on
;
[282]
APPENDIX 5
at Him the boy jumps clear just in time and runs for
alligator lunges
his life.
When he gets back to his pirogue, he finds it empty. Jo-Jo has broken
the forest searching everywhere for the
away. The boy goes back into
coon and calling to him. But all he hears are the birds mocking back
at him. With tears in his eyes for the loss of his pet, the boy returns
to ike pirogue. Suddenly, he sees an alligator rushing through the water
like a speed-boat towards a large bird standing on a branch in the
water. The alligator's jaws snap and the egret is between them. As the
his cries and the noise of the battle and comes to the rescue just in
time to prevent the boy from being pulled under the water. As he
leads him away, the boy says, 'He killed my coon.' 'Never mind/ says
his father, 'we'll him', and he points in the direction of the escaped
get
alligator.
All this while, the oil-crew have been drilling deeper and deeper.
In their launch Latour and the boy go by. The boy displays the alli
the father. 'All himself,
gator s hide. 'The boy here got him/ calls by
too.' Then one day die boy, who is
quite at home now aboard this
machine which once terrified him, is out on the derrick fishing. The
boiler-man grins at him as the boy spits
on his bait and throws
the hook into the water. Out on the marshes, Latour is setting his
traps.
Tom Smith, the driller, has been telling the boy stories of the mis
man still watching him. Suddenly the boy looks up. The boiler-man
[283]
THE INNOCENT EYE
looks up too. He begins to run. Other men run. Is it possible? It's
The derrick is now lying idle, with the crew standing by waiting
to hear whether or not it is going to be abandoned. The boy is wander
ing about on the slippery derrick. He's very sad. His father calls out
to him from the bank to come along home and goes off himself. But
the boy creeps down on to the deserted floor of the derrick. He walks
slowly across to the abandoned bore-hole down which they were
drilling. He looks round to see that
he is not being watched. Then he
takes out his little
bag of salt and lets it stream down into the bore
hole. Then he puts his hand into his shirt-front
and takes out the
'something* we have been wondering about for a long time. It is a
live frog - his extra protection against the werewolves. For one
moment he thinks he will drop this precious charm down the bore
hole as welL But he can't bring himself to do it, and he puts the tiny
creature back into his shirt. He starts to go away when another thought
strikes him. He takes a furtive glance round and then, for good
spits down
measure, the hole.
The boy now goes down to the deck where the idle crew are
hanging around. The boiler-man sees him. 'Well, look who's here!
What have you been up to? Lost your salt? Have those things been
after you again?' The boy is hurt by the way they laugh at him, par
ticularly his friend Tom. In all his life he had never felt so hurt. The
men joke, saying that they could use some of that magic salt of his
for the well. Tom
snaps his fingers. Tve got it! don't we get
Why
him to do what he did to his bait?' The boy shyly says, *I did.' They
laugh raucously and the boy, deeply hurt, goes away.
The next day, the boy is at home in the cabin, peeling potatoes for
traps. The boy is sad. The
his mother. His father is making ready some
derrick will be going away any time now. Suddenly, they all hear the
sound. It's the derrick pump working again. The boy is overjoyed. He
knew all along that his magic would work. Now
at last the derrick-
crew will strike oil. It will come gushing up. And it does.
This means, of course, that the Latour family can now afford some
more much-needed things for their home. Jean Latour returns from
town to the cabin with stocks of food and some presents. A shining
[284]
APPENDIX 5
goes outside on the porch and sits down to examine it. While he is
sitting there, he hears a familiar sound. the cry of Jo-Jo, the coon.
It's
He was not killed by the alligator after all. He has been wandering
about in the forest and the swamp but has now found his way home.
The oil-derrick, this fabulous structure which once amazed the boy
so much, has now done its work. The tugs are towing it
away down
the lagoon. It moves slowly, imperiously, out of sight. Taking his coon
with him, the boy goes to wave good-bye to his friends. The
bore has been capped with a 'Christmas tree'. The boy clambers up
on to it, with his coon in his arms. He calls out and waves to Tom
Smith for the kst time. He spits into the water to remind the oil-men
that it was his magic, not theirs which brought the oil.
[285]
Appendix 6
THE FILMS OF ROBERT J. FLAHERTY
[286]
APPENDIX 6
Music by : Rudolph Schramm.
Produced from the original by : Herbert Edwards.
Distribution : United Artists.
non-paying audiences.
The National Film Archive, London, holds 135 mm. print for pre
servation and i 3 5-mm. print for circulation.
1 The Robert
J. Flaherty Foundation has now been superseded by International Film
Seminars Inc.
[287]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Note: Copyright is held
by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Museum of Modern Art Film Library, New York, holds 2
nega
tives (i of cuts) and 6 35-mm.
prints (3 of cuts).
)ctober, 1934.
Tie Museum of Modern Art Film Library, New York, holds 2 3 5-mm.
rints for circulation.
The Museum of Modern Art Film Library, New York, holds I 35-nnn.
>rint for circulation.
[289]
THE INNOCENT EYE
THE LAND (1939-42)
Produced for: Tlte Agricultural Adjustment Administration of the
United States Department of Agriculture.
Script, Direction
and Photography : Robert J. Flaherty.
Additional Photography : Irving Lerner, Floyd Crosby.
Production Manager: Douglas Baker.
Editor: Helen van Dongen.
Music: Richard Arnell.
Played by : The National Youth Administration Symphony under
the direction of Fritz Mahler.
Narration written by: Russell Lord and Robert J. Flaherty.
spoken by: Robert J. Flaherty.
Distribution: Non-theatrical only (see below).
feet.
Length: 4 reels (approx. 43 mins.). 3,90
First shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to a private
Robert Flaherty Foundation for limited circulation. The film was with
drawn from all other circulation in 1944.
[290]
APPENDIX 6
1
Length: 7 reels (approx. 77 mins.), 7,000 feet.
with : Joseph Boudreaux, Lionel LeBlanc, Frank Hardy.
Flaherty is trustee. Mrs. Flaherty and David Flaherty hold the con
trolling interest.
The World of Robert Flaherty, Richard Griffith (Duell, Sloan & Pearce,
I953)-
My Eskimo Friends , Robert}. Flaherty (Doubleday, 1924).
1956).
White Shadows in the South Seas, Frederick O'Brien (Grosset & Dunlap,
1928).
The Vagrant Viking, Peter Freuchen (Julian Messner, 1953)*
The Aran Islands,]. M. Synge (Luce, 1911).
Man of Aran, Pat Mullen (E. P. Dutton, 1935)-
Elephant Dance, Frances H. Flaherty (Scribner, 1937)-
Forever the Land, Russell Lord (Harper, 1950).
History of the British Film, Vol. II, Rachel Low (Allen & Unwin, 1949).
1 For note on the divergent lengths of the British and American versions, see p. 224.
[291]
THE INNOCENT EYE
Life against Death, Norman O. Brown (Wesleyan University Press,
1959).
and:
The Film Till Now, PaulRotha (Funk & Wagnalls, 1950; Vision,
1960).
Documentary Film, Paid Rotha, Richard Griffith and Sinclair Road
(Faber& Faber, London, 1952 edition),
also:
ACKNO WLEDGEMENTS
Note: The following list was drawn up in January, 1960, when the
first MS was completed. Some of the persons and sources named may
not, however, have found appropriate inclusion in Arthur Calder-
MarshalTs preceding text. We
have retained them nevertheless because
of the help so
kindly given at the time.
P.R. B.W.
help all through the preparation of our book, both in long first-hand
talks and in correspondence, has been Richard Griffith, Curator of the
Museum of Modern Art Film Library, whose own book The World
of Robert Flaherty we have plundered so deeply. We thank
him for
his permission for so doing.
Both Griffith and Grierson knew Flaherty intimately and we are
indebted to the fact that they have read our original MS
and set their
seal of approval on it. Without it, we should have been unhappy.
purpose and most of those listed now have read our original MS either
in part or in whole :
Miss Eileen Molony and Mr. Michael Bell for the loan of B.B.C.
scripts and telediphone recordings of talks made by Mr. and Mrs.
Flaherty in London.
Mr. Oliver Lawson Dick for scripts and tape-recordings of the B.B.C.
programme Portrait of Robert Flaherty, produced by W. R. Rodgers
on 2nd September, 1952.
Sir Arthur Elton for access to an
unpublished MS left to Kim by the
kte Sir Stephen Tallents relating to the history of the
Empire Marketing
Board Film Unit.
Mr. W. E. Greening for permitting us to read parts ofhis
unpublished
MS of the life of Sir William McKenzie.
Among various organizations and the like to which we are indebted
for their co-operation are :
The Museum of Modern Art Film Library, New York, and the
National Film Archive, London, for their
screenings of the Flaherty
films ; the British Film Institute for the
help of its Information Depart
ment; and the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, New
York, the Royal Geographic Society, London; and the Central Office
of Information, London.
My Eskimo Friends
(Heinemann), Samoa Under the Sailing Gods
(Putnam), White Shadows in the South Seas (T. Werner Laurie),
Mourning Became Mrs. Spendlove (Creative Age Press), Footnotes
to the Film
(Lovat Dickson), Grierson on Documentary (Collins),
Elephant Boy and Man ofAran (Faber & Faber), Eskimo (Toronto
[294]
APPENDIX 6
University Press), Best Moving Pictures of i22-23 (Small, May-
nard), Forever the Land (Harper & Brothers), Cinema (Pelican).
The Guardian, The Observer, The Spectator, The New Yorker, Sight
and Sound, National Board of Review Journal, World Film News,
Close Up, Sequence and Cinema Quarterly.
Acoma Indians film, 123, 127, 176, 177 Belcher Islands, Hudson Bay, 35-39, 49,
Active, The, 59 53-61, 63, 64, 72-74, 77, 83, 87, 109 n.,
Adams, Maude, 121 209, 212
Admiralty charts, 60, 63, 65 Belfrage, Cedric, 142
Agate, James, 175 Bell & Ho well film-camera, 55
Agricultural Adjustment Administration Bell, Clive, 133
(Triple-A), 190, 193, 197-9, 223 Bell, Michael, 18 n,, 19 n., 174 n., 233
Akeley film-camera, 79, 108, 109, 127 Bell, Monta, 180, 181
American Geographical Society, 76 BeU, Dr. Robert, 37
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 238 Belsen concentration camp, 197
Anstey, Edgar, 139, 175 Ben-Hur, 94 n.
Arabian Nights, The, 17 Ben-Hur (silent version), 122 n.
Aran Islands, 141, 142, 143-5, 147 n., 148, Bennett, Arnold, 83
149, 151, 159, 162, 163, 165, 166, 168, Benson, John Howard, 210
178, 180, 186, 249 Bicycle Thieves, 247
Arctic Circle, 150 Biddle, George, 99
Army-Navy Magazine, 204 n. Big Parade, The, 122 n.
Arnell, Richard, 198 Biro, Lajos, 177, 179
Amflex film-camera, 220 Birth of a Nation, 93, 94
Asquith, Anthony, 134 Blackheath Studio (GPO), 171
Auden, W. H., 171 Black Mountain, Bratdeboro, 202, 243
Blue Bird, The, 166
Balcon, Sir Michael, 19 n., 143, 151, 155, Blue, Monte, 123
177 Bodnariuk, Stefan, 23 1
Bali, The, 124, 125 Bond, Ralph, 166
Ballantyne, R. M., 19, 39 Bontto the Bull, 176, 208
Bambridge, Bill, 126 Bonnage, 194 n.
Barrett, Wilton, 117 Borradaile, Osmond H., 177, I7&n., 180,
Barry, 198
Iris, 96", 183, 188
BBC, London, 18 n., 19 n., 55 n., 67 n., Botticelli, 250
69 n., 101 n., 134 n., 142, 145 n., 171, Boudreaux, Joseph, 214, 226
174 n., 178 n., i87n., 233, 247, 248, 249 n. *Bozo, the Bear', 233-7
[297]
INDEX
*
Bratdeboro, Vermont, 9, 10, 186, 187, 202, Coronet, The*, London, 132, 135 ru
205, 230, 242 Costello's Bar, N.Y., 208
Brave Bulls, The, 127 n. Country Comes to Toum, The, 135
Bridge, The, 194 n, Crighton, Charles, 182
Brighton Aquarium, 164 n. Crosby, Hoyd, 127, 129
British. Board of Kim Censors, 163 Cunningham, Jack, 123
British. Commercial Gas Association, 187 Cunynghame, Sir David, 180
British documentary -film movement, n, Curtis, T. H., 24, 25, 27
132-40, 166, 167, 175, 1 86, 231, 232, 240 Cyrus Eaton, Co., 54 n., 72 n.
British Him Institute, 122 n.
British Information Services, 140 Daily Express, 188
British-Lion Films Ltd., 224 Daily Mail, 96
Britten, Benjamin, 171 Daily Telegraph, 96 n.
Brunet, Madame, 92 Dartington Hall School, England, 175, 178
Brussels Film Festival (1949), 231 David, Felix, 100, 101-4, *o<5, 107, no,
Bryher, 119 115, 123
Buffalo Bill Cody, 85 Davidson, Jimmy, 132
Davidson, J. N. G., 143, 144, 151
Caf6 Royal, London, 151, 175, 1 86, 196, 231 Davy, Charles, 165, 166 n.
Canada, 15, 17, 20, 22, 26, 53, 62, 73, 78, Day Lewis, Cecil, 187
224 Debrie film-camera, 127
Canadian Government, 26, 72, 74 Denham Studios, England, 176, 179, 181,
Canadian Northern Railway, 26 184
Canadian Pacific Railway, 23, 24 Denis, Armand, 224
Cannes Film Festival (1949), 23 1 Dick, Clare Lawson, 233, 234, 247, 248
Capra, Frank, 184, 203, 204 Dick, Oliver Lawson, 19 n.
Captain's Chair, The (book), 30, 185, 186, Dickens, Charles, 246 n.
187 Dietz, Howard, 122
Carpenter, Prof. Edmund, 54 n., 69, 72 n., Dillane, Mikeleen, 144, 145, 154, 161, 163,
85 n. 214, 228
Carroll, Lewis, 171 Dillane, Mrs., 145
Carter, Huntley, 165 Dirrane, Maggie, 147, 154, 163
Castano, Mr., 186 Dixon, Campbell, 96 n.
Cavalcanti, 171 Documentary Film (book), 133, 203 n., 225n
Caven, Olive, 62, 63 Documentary Film News (journal), 225 n.
Cezanne, Paul, 250 Documentary News Letter (journal), 200 ru
Challenger, H.M.S., I39n. Dongen, Helen van, 10, 69, 194-8, 200,
Chaplin, Charles, 184, 229 201, 204, 213-23, 230
Chelsea Hotel, N.Y., 241, 242, 243 Doniger, Benjamin, 222
Children's Film Foundation, 224 n. Dostoevsky, 249
Chopin, 22 Dovjenko, Alexander, 130
Cinema The (Pelican), 77 n., 83 n., 84 n., Doyle, Ray, 123
92 n., 93 n., n<5 n., 120 n. Drawings ofEnooesweetok (book), 69 n.
Cinema Quarterly (journal), 168, 169 Drum, The, i82n.
Cinematheque
*
Franchise, 187 Dubhn, 143, 147 n., 149
Cinerama*, 241, ^^ Dun-Aengus, The, 144
City Girl, 124 Dyke,W. S. van, 122, 123
Clair, Rene*, 131 Dziga-Vertov, 184
Clark, Lancelot, no, in
Close-Up (journal), 119 Earth, 130
Clancy, Carl Stearns, 91 East is West, 239
Coffee House Club, The, N.Y., 92, 99, 196, Eastman Kodak Co., 109, no
207, 208, 242, 246 Edinburgh Film Festival (1948), 224
Coleridge, 171 n. Egan, Father, 145
Collier, John, 182 Eisenstein, S. M., 130, 131, 174, 184, 246
Colorart Productions Inc., 125, 126, 127,
Elephant Boy, 176-85, 214, 230, 240
13 in. Elephant Dance (book), 10, 178 n,,
Columbus, Christopher, 156 185
Cooke, AKstair, 171 Eliot,T. S., 133
Cooper, Fenimore, 19 Elton, Sir Arthur, 139, 175
[398]
INDEX
Empire Marketing Board Him Unit, values of panchromatic stock, 108-9.
London, 132, 134, 136, 137, 143, 151, 186 Taken ill at Safiine, no. Editing
Epstein, Jacob, 175, 18711.
Moana in Hollywood, 115-16. Distribu
Eskimo (book), 69, 85 n. tion and critical reception of Moana,
Eskimo Art Film, 72 n. 11620. First meeting with John Grier-
Eskimo carvings, drawings, 69-72, 190 son, 118. Begins and ends White Shadows
Eskimo Village, 139 n. of the South Seas, 122. Begins and ends
Evans, Ernestine, 19 n., 63 n., 131 Acoma Indians film, 123-5. Forms part
Explorers* Club, New York, 76 nership with F. W. Murnau to make
Tabu, 125-9. Arrives Berlin (1930),
Famous-Players-Lasky, 98, 99, 116 130-2. Arrives England and renews
Farrar, Geraldine, 83 Grierson friendship, 132. Films Industrial
Fascism, 167, 199 Britain for E.M.B. Film Unit, 133-40.
132-4, 143-5, 147, 152, 155, 162, 171, Abortive work for War services, 203-4.
175, 176-8, 181, 182, 186, 187, 189, 191, Relations with Frank Capra, 203-4.
196, 201, 202, 207, 213, 214, 217, 219, Anecdote by John Huston, 205-7.
231, 232, 237, 238 n., 241-3, 246, 248 Anecdote by Grierson, 207-8. Period
Flaherty, Frances, 78, 99, 178
of idleness, 208-10. Prepares to film
Louisiana Story, 211-14. Filming and
Flaherty, Monica, 78, 99, 178
Flaherty, Robert Henry, 15-17, *9, 20, 25, editing Louisiana Story, 214-23 Distribu
.
[299]
INDEX
Gaumont-British Distributors, Ltd., 140 124-6, 129, 130, 131, 142, 156, 164 n.,
Gaumont-British. Picture Corp., 142, 151, 176, 180, 182 n., 183, 204, 216, 229
155, i<53, 172, i?3 197 Holmes, Jack, 186
Gelb, Charlie, 91 Holmes, Winifred, 237
Geographical Review, New York, 78 Housing Problems, 170
Gillette, Col. W. B., 203 Hubbard, Frances J. (See Frances Flaherty)
Giotto, 250 Hubbard, Dr. Lucius L., 20, 78
Gish, Lillian, 19 n. Hudd, Walter, 182
Gogarty, OHver St. John, 19 n., 230, 232, Hudson Bay, 22, 23, 26, 27, 30, 35, 37, 40,
233,246,247 49, 52, 55, 58, 62, 69 n., 72, 74, 76, 78,
Goldman, John, 10, 69, 151, 152, 154-64, 79,87,173, 186,245,249
176 n., 194, 201, 204, 224 n. Hudson's Bay Company, 18, 32, 33, 39,
Golem, The, 102, 115 64,78
GolightlyJ. P. R., 10, 137, 138, 1 88 Hudson Straight, 26, 55, 56, 57, 58, 63
Gone With the Wind, 94 n, Humble Oil & Refining Co., 213
Goonatilleke, Sir Oliver, 237 Humble Rig Petite Anse No. i., 213
Good Earth, The, 122 ru Hunter, T. Hayes, 176
Gorki, Maxim, 131 Huntley, John, 223 n.
Gotterdammerung, 102 Huston, John, 19 n., 196, 205, 231, 248,
G.P.O. Film Unit, 171, 186 249 n.
Graflex still-camera, 84
Grand Hotel, 122 n. Ibsen, 165 n.
Grandma's Boy, 93 Imperial Relations Trust, 189
Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, 23, 24, 27 'Imperial Six', The, series, 140
Grapes of Wrath, The, 196 Independent Labour Party, 133, 154
Grapes of Wrath, The (book), 189 India, 178-82, 245, 249
Green Border, The,^ Industrial Britain, 121, 134-42, 155, 196,
Greene, Graham, 165, 166, 183, 184, 230, 240
249 Innuksuk River, Hudson Bay, So
Green Mountain Land, 231 Intolerance, 94
Grey, Zane, 98 Ireland, 15, 141, 143, 147, 165, 168
Grierson, John, 10, 19 n., 74, 118, 119, Irish Guards, band of the, 164
!3in-33, 135, 137-43, 151, 154, i<55~7, Iron Curtain, The, 199, 238
169-71, 174, 175, 184, 189, 193, 197, 199, Iron Mountain, Michigan, 15, 19, 61
204, 207, 208, 212, 224, 225, 230-2, 241, Ismail, Sir Mirza, 181
247 It Happened One Night, 203
Richard, 9, 17 n., 42, 55, 168, 172,
Griffith, It Pays to Advertise, 102
200, 202-5, 208, 209, 215, 225, 241-3 It's All True, 208
Griffith, D.W., 79, 93, 184 Ivens,Joris, 131, 194 n., 195
[300]
INDEX
Kipling, Rudyard, 121, 177, 181 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 166
Klockner, Susan (See also Susan Flaherty), Mallett, Capt. Thierry, 78
15 Manchester Guardian, 226 n.
Klondyke Gold Rush, 77 Man ofAran, 69, 72 n., 141-73, 177, 181,
Knight, Eric, 203 183, 184, 192, 197, 208, 238, 240
Knobel, H. E., 22, 23 Man ofAran (book), 145 n.
Korda, Sir Alexander, 19 n., 176-84, 224 Manvell, Roger, 77 n., 223 n.
Korda, Zoltan, 177 n., 180, 182 Matisse, Henri, 19 n., 187 n.
Mavor (trader), 38, 73
Leacock, Richard, 213, 214, 217, 226 Mayer, Carl, 124
'Latour, Jean', 227, 228 McCormack, John, 83
Laddie, The, 55, 56, 58-60, 62-64, 66, 68, Mcllhenny, CoL, 213, 215, 216
72, 73, ?6 McPhail, Ajigus, 142
Land, The, 69, 127 n., 146, 189-201, 209, Melville, Herman, 123, 133, 249
212, 223, 229, 230 Men, The, 131 n.
Land, The (journal), 190 n. Men of the Earth(book), 190
Lasky, Jesse M., 98, 100, 101, 103, 109, 114, Menschen Am Sonntag, 131 n.
176, 177 n. Merrick Square, London, 139
Last Laugh, The, 124 Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y., 121
Last Tycoon, The (book), 122 n. Metropolitan Opera House, New York,
*Latour, Alexander Napoleon Ulysses', 99
214, 215, 216, 218, 225, 226, 227, 228, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 122, 123, 126
238 Mexico, 176
Lauder, Sir Harry, 66, 83 Michelangelo, 230
Laurie, John, 186 Michigan College of Mines, 20, 21, 25, 54
Lawrence, D. H., 250 Michigan, University of, 238
League of Nations, loon. Million, Le, 311
LeBlanc, Lionel, 215 Ministry of Information, Films Division,
Lee, Anna, 164 n. 232
Leica still-camera, 143 Miracle Man, The, 102
Leith,Dr.C.K.,33, 36 Mitchell film-camera, 220, 221
Lejeune, C. A., 142, 164, 165 Moana, 18 n., 98-120, 121, 123, 127, 129,
Lend-Lease, 198, 199 130,139, 140, 143, 146, 153, 156 n.,
Lennox Robinson, 143 161 n., 164, 177, 181, 240
Lerner, Irving, 10, 193 Molony, Eileen, 18 n., 233
Leslie, S. C., 187 Moore, Grace, 99
Let's Co to the Pictures (book), 96 Moore, Dr., 72
Living Corpse, The, 131 Morning Post, 142
'Living Newspaper, The', 200 Mother, 131
Motion Picture Herald (trade-journal),
Lloyd, Harold, 93
London, Jack, 16, 51, 77, 108 n., 133, 119 n.
187 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 203
London School of Economics, 133, 154 Mullen, Pat, 19 n., 144, 145, *47, 149, 15,
Lopert Films Inc., 224 153, 154, 163
Lord, Russell, 190, 191, 196, 198, 212 Munn, Capt., 149
Lorentz, Pare, 188, 189, 190, 193, 197, 198, Murnau, F. W., 124-31, 135
212, 223 Mumau-Flaherty Productions Inc., 125,
Louisiana Story, 69, 94 n., 120, 161 n., 201, 128, 131
208, 211-32, 237, 238, 240, 247 Murray, Capt. 150
Low, A. P., 37, 39, 40, 48, 50, 54 Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., 230, 240,
Lye, Len, 171 249 ru
Lyman, Abe, 123 Museum of Modem Art Film Library,
202 n.
Lyon-Fellowes, EvelynJMrs., 62 N.Y., 10, 198,
Mussolini, 167, 172
MacArthur, General, 242 My Eskimo Friends, 26, 29 n., 32 n., 38 n.,
01]
INDEX
Nanook of the North, 12, 69 n., 76-98, 100, Peck, Rev. E.J., 39
103, 104, 116-19, 129, 130,
108, 139, Pentagon, The, 204
140, 142, 143, 146, 153, 156 n., 160, 161, P.E.P., 133, 154
164, 167, 173, 177, 181, 187, 208, 209, Peter Pan, 166
231,238,240,247 Petit Club Frangais, Le, London, 231, 233,
[302]
INDEX
Rousseau, 108 Stromberg, Hunt, 123
Rowe, Newton, A., 10, 100, no, 113, Strong, Austin, 119
125 n., 133, 134, 147 n. Stryker, Roy, 211
*Roxy*. 93 Siicksdorf) Arne, 250
Royal Ontario Museum, 69 n. Sugar Research Foundation, The, 209
Ruadh, Patch, 146 Sunday Express, 142
Sunday Referee, 134
Sabu, 19 n., 179, 180, 214, 228 n., 240 ru Sunrise, 124
Safiine, village of; Savaii, 99-106, 110-14, Suschitzky, Wolfgang, 231 n.
H9 Swanson, Gloria, 119
St. Francis of Assisi, 250 SyngeJ.M., 142
Sanoma, S.S., 100
Saintsbury, Prof., 169 Tabu, 125-30, 164, 165 n., 177, 181
Salisbury Cathedral, 135, 136 Tahiti, 99, 122-5, 127, 128
Saltash, Bridge at, Devon, 137 Tallents, Sir Stephen, 19 n., 132, 134, I37
'Salty Bill*, 66 138
Sammis, Edward, 222 Tartuffe, 124
Samoa, 99, 102, 103, 106, 108, 114, 115, Taylor, John, 72 n., 145, 146, i47- 15*.
124, 125, 128, 141, 145, 149. 249 152, 175
Samoa Under the Sailing Gods (book), 100, Taylor, Robert Lewis, 83 n., 115
H3 Technique of Film-Editing, The (book),
Sanders of the River, 177 n. 223 n.
no, Technique ofFilm-Music, The (book), 223
n
Savaii, island, of, 99-103, 105, 108, 118,
133 Television, 186
Savoy Hotel, London, 142 Thalberg, Irving, 122, 123, 176
Schrire, David, 168, 169 Thomas, Dylan, 250
Scott of the Antarctic, 177 n. Thomas, Lowell, 241
Screen Directors Guild, The, 240 Thomson, Virgil, 19 n., 223, 224, 226
Sentimental Tommy, 102 Thoreau, 249
Sequence (journal), 207 n. Thurston, Margaret, 64
Sharman, Mrs., 145 Titan, The, 230
Sherwood, Robert E., 93, 94 1*9 Todd, Mike, 241
Siamese White (book), 180 Toomai of the Elephants (book), 177, 178,
Sidewalks of New York (revue), 122 182
Sight and Sound (journal), 167
n. Torres, Raquel, 123
Skinner, Otis, 116 Trotskyism, 166 n.
Smith, Sidney, 215 Turbulent Timber, 131
[303]
INDEX
Vaughan, Olwen, 187, 200, 231 Wilkinson, Brooke, 163
Venice film Festival (1934), 167 Williamson, , printer, 82