the lure of the native
by
Douglas Messerli
Robert
J. Flaherty (writer and director) Man of
Aran / 1934
Often
described as a fictional documentary film (an ethnofiction), Robert J. Flaherty’s
1934 work Man of Aran might better be
described as pure romantic hokum, a work which in its poetic intensity is
perhaps closer to someone like Jack London than the post-war neo-realists.
The major tenets of this film, that the isolated
islanders living in harsh conditions off of the western coast of Ireland are a
beautiful folk who live in a premodern world, struggling to grow potatoes on
stony cliffs by using seaweed as soil, surviving by rock fishing, and keeping
their lights on by hunting and harpooning large Basking sharks to render their
liver oil into lamplight are almost all fabrications. The seaweed, in fact, was
used mostly as a fertilizer; shark hunting had stopped nearly a half-century
before the making of this film, and the director needed to bring in Scottish
sailors to show the Aran natives how to maneuver their harpoons; and the small
crabs and fish that the family’s young son catches would hardly have supported
the hunger of a larger family.
Indeed, even the family Flaherty
portrays, the father, Man of Aran (Colman ‘Tiger’ King), the mother (Maggie
Dirrane), and son (Michael Dillane) were not related, and were chosen for their
photogenic capabilities.
Yet, that last scene is so very powerful,
looking as it does a bit like something like Albert Pinkham Ryder’s 1880s work,
The Waste of Waters Is Their Field,
that we can only wonder at the scene. Moreover, as we know from movie history,
there were plenty of filmmakers from the 1920s and 1930s who put their stars in
great danger: Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd—to
name only a few.
Today, there are a great many critics of
this work who completely dismiss it for its lack of proper focus—some arguing
that instead of man vs nature, the film might have dealt with the Irish
treatment of the island’s poverty-stricken population and the tariffs applied
to them—while others such as George Stoney, who created a documentary about the
making of the film, Robert Flaherty’s Man
of Aran, How the Myth Was Made, have
continued to attack the movie outright for its fabrications. Others have been
kinder to the film, which received great acclaim upon its premier, not only
from Irish and British viewers, but from the Nazi government, who saw in
Flaherty’s myths of the outsider, issues which resonated with their own visions
of themselves. It is apparent that Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl was
influenced by Flaherty’s film.
But it is equally clear that for Flaherty there was no political intent, but, perhaps just as dangerously, as writer Arthur Calder-Marshall notes, Man of Aran is an “’eclogue’—a pastoral and marine poem”—as I would argue, not a film you can easily make under the guise of a paean to a real place and its people. Ryder’s wild landscapes come to mind again; we know these wonderful works are from a feverous imagination, not from a stolid vision of reality.
Flaherty loved the exotic, worlds he felt
had been left behind by the modern world—and were better off for it, despite
the hardships their cultures might have had to face. If only Flaherty had never
been classified as a documentarian his films might proffer a different kind of
perspective of a man who, in the depths of the Great Depression, who offered
lullabies for a people whose land, agriculturally and economically, had
betrayed them. Flaherty’s mock-nativists survived because they’d never even entered
the 20th century. And the lure of that world still exists. Is it any
wonder that Riefenstahl, in her later years, photographed African tribal natives?
Los Angeles,
November 21, 2018
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (November
2018).
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