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Appendix III

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On the Record

Of the many appreciations and tributes paid to Robert Flaherty in the days and months following his death and printed in newspapers and magazines the world over, we feel that a few should be placed in the permanent record.

By John Grierson

"He was at times as difficult with his admirers as he was with his commercial collaborators. Yet I will say in the end that, not in spite of but because of all difficulty he was a great man to know. His troubles came out of the very special sense he had of a mans relationship with his art: out of his deep inner revolt against all the conditions which modern life was imposing on the artist-not least so in the complicated and expensive world of film-making. He, so to speak, carried with him always the burden of the individual and personal artist in a world-and a medium growing ever more impersonal. He hankered after, and often bulldozed his way to getting, a species of freedom-with art, with money-that only the anarchists any more allowed for in their theories. In all, and never frivolously, he was born to be troubled.

"Yet the crazy thing about Flaherty was that he could never see the logic of his role or why it should always be painful. He was a conservative who deplored the implication of being actually a revolutionary it was a pity that inevitably, on this paradox, he could never meet his brethren; for he was an enormous friendly man and you might almost say built in physique and heart for friendship. He was big, wide-shouldered, and handsome, with the sort of face and forehead you carve a hundred feet high on rocks. He had the clear blue eyes of the sailor and explorer. With it all went a sort of boyish innocence of expression, and enjoyment that invested his hospitality with a spontaneity and his conversation with an enquiring eagerness which made him one of the richest men to knock around with in a veneration.

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"The fact was that Flaherty had not been brought up in the metropolitan world in which he was finally compelled to operate. He was born in Michigan of an Irish father and a German mother, but went to school and grew up in Canada. By and large, the best part of his life was spent close to the far frontiers of Britain's Empire that he absorbed unconsciously, not the technological traditions of the United States, but the Victorian, or at the late Edwardian, traditions of a nation and a period in which the highly personal command over far places and the paternal privilege over distant peoples went with a precise sense of the graces that wealth could bring to the personal life.

"It was a world in which, at the least, no one ever grew sick for the lack of leisure or of understanding how to use it. Indeed, Flaherty was a lost soul in the United States, save perhaps in the near-English atmosphere of the Coffee House Club; and he was never more comfortable in London than in the red-plush marbletopped Cafe Royal, which the exquisites of the mauve decade had left behind.

"How deeply and how often I had to come up against the problem he created in our very different midst; for one came to adopt an almost passionate care in preserving this lost child of the arts in his once fashionable illusions. This exponent of real life had, it seemed, to be preserved from even the proximity of reality; and no one could be more damnably hurt by the differing viewpoint which brought in for him a world he could not accept and could not live in. . . .

"I think the issue over Man of Aran best describes all that was best, as well as all that was, to other minds, limited in Flaherty's art. I personally regard him as one of the five great innovators in the history of film. I think that with him go Melies, the first of the movie magicians; D. W, Griffith for developing the strictly movie terms in which a drama could be unfolded; Sennett for transferring comedy from the limited space and conventional props of circus and vaudeville to the infinite variety of the world about; and Eisenstein for his study of organised mass and movement and his great sense of the films' potential in both physical and mental impact. Flaherty, great personal story-teller he was, did not especially think of films as a way of telling a story, developing a drama, or creating an impact, either physical or mental. For him, the camera was veritably a under eye, to see with more remarkably than one ordinarily saw.

"It never really occurred to him that a shot should be foreseen, and when we came later, because of the expense of the thing, to work out everything beforehand as best we could, there was something in Flaherty that instinctively revolted. Some have said it was indolence, or disorder, or even a will to waste in him, but I will say it was nothing of the kind. For Flaherty, it wasn't what he saw or thought he saw which was important, but what the camera revealed to him.

"Whence the infinite and infinitely patient experiments with movement; when, incidentally, his pioneering work-not hearly sufficiently recognized-with panchromatic film, with filters, with telescopic' lenses, with keys in black and white to make a graciousness of grays, with shooting at hours of the day, and under conditions of light that the orthodox discarded. No one ever, or so significantly, studied his rushes so closely Rushes were not the result for Flaherty, but the beginning: the moment of revelation. Expensive? Yes, it was. But the reason for it was as I have said, not otherwise. If paper had been as expensive as film, they would have said the same of Flaubert.

"On one level the camera was for Flaherty an extraordinarily convenient way

On the Record 317

of recording one's reminiscences; and reminiscences meant for him what they once meant for Boswell: the test of a man's penetration and of his capacity for life. It meant, moreover, an extension of horizons for everyone, the backwall of the proscenium out and a window on the world. He loved to emphasise the mobility of the camera, and he was, to the end, a man impatient and even angry with the great heavy contractions which not only needed a team of men to handle them but put half-a-dozen other pairs of eves between Flaherty and the object.

"It was with a hand-camera, the Newman-Sinclair, that most of his work was associated with this lightweight affair, one had the notion of a camera as a highly personal instrument, like a pen or a brush; and in nothing did Flaherty depart so considerably and perhaps importantly from the studio conception. Take this personal contact
away, for whatever purpose and by whatever means, and Flaherty was lost, as he was on Elephant Boy, Tabu and White Shadows. . . .

"It may not seem so on what I have said, but, behind the explorative and modest and near-mystical belief in the camera's power of sight, there was, of course, a basic pattern in his observation. His long early years in the Far North had given him a special affection for primitive peoples and an intimacy with nature and man in his relationship with nature which showed always in his clear blue eyes, and, in the pinches of more complex argument, never left him.

"His first instinctive revolt against movies-and I think nearly all movies-was that the story was imposed on the background and did not come from within. He was shocked when Hollywood, following up Nanook, made a film on the Arctic with a phoney Eskimo girl and a love-story that had nothing to do with the Eskimo's normal and very proper appreciation of polygamy. [MGMs Eskimo, directed by W. S. Van Dyke.] Flaherty was no theorist and tended, like so many, to fit the theories afterwards to the facts. He faked a bit like all of us, and a little more so after they whipped him in Hollywood with the charge that he had no sense of box-office, but he had a genuine passion for the genuine.

"When he talked of the difference between a hunter throwing a spear and John Barrymore impaling a rubber-shark with his profile, he had something which the camera, if no one else, understood with him. When he discoursed, after reading my piece on the subject, on the 'movement of craftsmen and priests that time had worn smooth,' be sure it was not I that had done the shooting to deserve the theory but Bob himself who was the only begetter. He was too dramatically precise for his day when Nanook didn't make any fuss at all as he came out of the blizzard and found the shelter of his igloo, or when everyone, more or less, had a pleasant Polynesian Sunday afternoon flaying poor Moana in the big tattoo. He stayed where people were, and if he did not greatly impose upon them, except to gentle everything he saw of them, it was again, as with the camera, in the modesty that forever the Almighty was a considerable artist and that you had only to look on his works under and under, and you couldn't miss.

"It Is a point of view shared by Wordsworth in some of the best, as well as in some of the most naive, of his works. It is a point of view shared at the present time by many of the younger colonial peoples, and you could pick it up easily in Canada, for example. It is not exactly fashionable these days among European artists and metropolitans generally, but this is to be said for it. Flaherty returned us to the origins of all observation: where the seasons are, where flowers not only grow but are worn in the hair; where people take, or fight for, the fruits of the earth, and dine

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well and pour a ceremonial libation on the ground to the gods and dance in thanksgiving; where the difference between a man and an animal of the wild is only one of degree; where storms come and go and are merely a great spectacle in their passing, and children are forever the assurance that time is timeless, and the horizon, finally, without too much pain.

"Perhaps he was over in love with the merely decorative, and nothing on earth, for example, would keep him from putting his most staggering shots at the opening of his films. He made it possible for the less sympathetic to say of him that it was all packed away at the beginning, with nothing thereafter deeply to emerge. But something there always was, even if it did not come in the classical cathartic terms. He thought, for instance, that the opening of a flower was a sufficiently dramatic sequence in itself, but he was in fact better than that. The day fulfilled itself to the last shadow; people rested after the burden of the day; there was always a nice sense of the world tucking its head under its wing for an inevitable sunrise.

"The child motif was constant. The boys in Moana, Aran, Elephant Boy, and Louisiana Story, the bullfighting boy, whom Orson Welles took over, and the Hudson Bay and coal-mining boys he never made represented an essential to him. Some chose to say it was the boy Flaherty that never grew up, the admiring son of a remarkable father, or again that it was the son Flaherty never had. I choose to think that this child forever growing up, affectionate but always a little detached from his elders, finding his own solitary contact with birds, beasts, and trees, fishing from cliffs, capturing alligators, taming raccoons, riding elephants, and paddling canoes, gave Flaherty a path to expressing a detachment from the world and a sense of innocence among the tumbling facts of life which he personally craved.

"On one occasion, he talked of 'the poignancy of the horizon,' and perhaps it was the same thought in him. It was after Aran. He had felt bitterly the implied criticisms of his friends that he had idealized this tough world of tough men and lost the reality of a landlord-ridden poverty to decorative horizons and artificial issues with basking-and very harmless-sharks. 'Isn't the horizon a larger reality?' he protested. And, 'Why do they always want me to make things shabby with their poverty, poverty, poverty?' Like Wilde, he hated the grotesque and deformed, objected to the thundering noise of March of Time, and I suspect that the Russian films-Dovjenko's Earth always excepted-troubled him more than he confessed. But this only means that he was a faithful disciple of Rousseau or, better still, that he was a pre-Raphaelite beyond his time. He sought beauty as passionately as any, but it was not of his origin, his nature, or his habit, to find it in the gutter. There the critical world split with Flaherty and not without a certain sadness; for it was those who denied him most who had learned most from him and were the first to acknowledge it.

"Picture, however, the forces that were impinging on film-making in the 1920s. It was by and large a liberal world, with democracy everywhere on the move. Here was Flaherty pointing a way to the extended observation of mankind: proposing, in effect, an art which could match in its sweep not only the speeding interrelations of peoples but men's conscience in regard to them. Here too were other voices-from Russia, Germany and England especially-saying with equal validity: 'Ware the ends of the earth and the exotic: the drama is on your doorstep wherever the slums; are, wherever there is malnutrition, wherever there is exploita-

On the Record 319

tion and cruelty. ' 'You keep your savages in the far place Bob; we are going after the savages of Birmingham,' I think I said to him pretty early on. And we did.

"In doing so, we aligned ourselves in many ways more closely with the Russian method than to Flaherty's. We borrowed from him his emphasis on the spontaneous; and something of his affection for seeing for seeing's sake crept into much of our work. But the Trotsky theory that art is 'not a mirror held up to nature, but a hammer shaping it' and John Stuart Mill's injunction that it is 'in the hand of the artist that the truth becomes a living principle of action,'drove us to a certain deliberation of effort which Flaherty natively deplored. We were propagandists, not just discovering the dramatic patterns of 'actuality' in a vacuum, but of deliberation, bringing the working-man to the screen, revealing the social relationships inevitable in a technological society, demonstrating the follies of poverty in a world of plenty, and so on and so on.

"Inevitably we were taken up by governments and powers and became one of the instruments of public education, public management, and-in the days of greater crisis-of public persuasion, exhortation, and command. Flaherty watched it all with a sense of bewilderment and no wonder; for, in fact, this other documentary school had correctly estimated its relationship with up-and-coming social democracy and was riding in on the tide. Sir Stafford Cripps put it generously-but it may be with a modicum of justice-when he said later that nothing made the new social-reform Government so certain in Britain as the work of the documentary film people in making the patterns of social justice patent to everyone.

"For myself, I think the bombings helped not a little; but the point to make is that we had taken Flaherty's documentary film away from its more contemplative origins. 'I don't like this business of looking at people as though they were in a goldfish bowl,' said one early exponent of the different view. So he went down to the East End slums of London, got to know the people pretty intimately, set up his camera and microphone, and invited the people to take over the screen, its yours.'

"The result was the remarkable Housing Problems, which revolutionized film approaches. Its maker, incidentally, was Flaherty's own pet pupil, John Taylor.

"Flaherty made a handful of lovely films, all with enormous difficulty both in finance and collaboration. The documentary people who went the other way got financed by the million, established educational and propaganda services for governments all over the world, and made themselves film by the thousand. And yet and yet . . . I look at it all today and think with the gentler half of my head that Flaherty's path was right and the other wrong.

"The new way became as easy and complacent as Flaherty's grew more difficult and finally distressing. In the ardent pursuit of good works there has been overmuch accommodation to expediency. The film people have learned to be diplomats, politicians, administrators, fixers. They have got so involved with technique and technicians that you would hardly know the glossy; chromium-plated, overweighted contraptions of a documentary unit today from the Hollywood set-up from which Flaherty revolted. Till recently, a great number have been all too comfortable in the secure jobs and the inevitably repetitious formulas which safety breeds. One might almost say that the heads got fat.

"Be sure something has been lost in the process. I miss the poetry, as I miss the personal fervor of the original inspiration. I shall say it in short by saying that I

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miss Flaherty. I figured it more practically than he did, but have little comfort in the world I figured with so much, as they barrenly put it, 'political correctness.'

"I would not today take issue with Flaherty so hopefully and confidently as once I did. The old boy was like a lighthouse; not much to do with the comings and goings of the people on land, but much to do with more abstruse journeys of sailors. There is a fundamental in art which is greatly concerned with such. Perhaps Flaherty's 'poignancy of the horizon,' like Leopardi's Ode to the Moon, comes as close as anything to expressing what most we are missing in the sick and close-eye which now attend us." (Grierson 1951d)

By Jobn Huston

"Everything Flaherty was and did hung together. He was all of one piece; the way he looked, the way he spoke, the way he did. As he went on the outside-gay, noble, compassionate, simple, brave, patient and profound-he was within. Look for a little while at a photograph of him and you will recognise all those qualities.

"He was a hard man to fault. As a rule, there is something inhuman about people you can't find anything wrong with, but this doesn't go for Bob; he was human above everything else. I think he was just a little more human than almost anybody else I ever knew." (Huston 1952)

"Pioneers in the arts usually explore their new world to its furthest limits. Those who come after only exploit what already been discovered; sometimes they even corrupt. Robert Flaherty was a pioneer. He went all the way and saw everything. Let other picturemakers draw inspirations and power from his great works, to strengthen them in their own adventures. But sweet Christ, don't let them try to imitate or advance what he did, for nobody else will ever do it half so well." (Huston 1951)

By Charles Siepmann

"First and foremost (well, perhaps not first, the order is immaterial), Bob had a rare eye for beauty. . . . Beauty was there, indeed, in the things he shot, but Bob made it over into something that was never there before. This is what all poets do. They lend us their eyes, and we see life afresh. Bob did this again and again, throughout his life in every film he made. He lent us his vision, and he had a rare eye for beauty.

"And Bob had zest. He drank life to the lees. He had Olympian laughter. When Bob laughed, he shook; and it seemed as if the whole world shook with the glee and the delight he found in it. He laughed as did no man I ever met-except one, and a very different man he was, but he had something of Bob's build (only more so) and the same outgoing, generous zest for life and people. That was G. K. Chesterton. Both laughed the same way and for the same reason. It came from deep inside, from love and compassion for the wayward follies of mankind, laughter that at times was near to tears.

"But for all his companionable zest, Bob was a lonely man, lonely in the sense that he had deep, inarticulate reserves. He spoke much, and he was a wonderful speaker, and even more wonderful at telling stories. But, first and last, he

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walked alone, for he lived essentially in his imagination. And, when it comes to imagination, 'the mind,' as Milton said, 'is its own place.'

"Bob was very much in this world, but on one side he was not of it. Most of us take life as it comes, and take our color from it. And as a consequence we are not greatly distinguishable, one from another. We are part of the motley. Bob drew on life as food for his own thoughts. Some of those he gave back to us-in the language of the film, at whose tyrannical limitations he railed and fretted as often as he mastered them. But there were more that he withheld, aware that, of our deepest insights, some are incommunicable and others not to be communicated. Bob knew the true meaning of privacy. He never overstepped its bounds. His loneliness and his reserve, on this side, is something I cherish and honor as I remember him. . . .

"Bob saw the grandeur, winced at all (in and out of film) that is so scarred with trade. But above all he knew that there lives, indeed, the dearest freshness deep down things-in you and me and people rich and poor, educated or not. He sought to feed that freshness, using the common language of the eye. The one universal language of our time: film. Bob made it great by bespeaking in it, through it, a philosophy of life-communicated in the language that even children understand: the language of poetry and imagination. Bob knew that the key to a good picture is the integrity of the man who makes it. Every film he made, despite many a fault and flaw, speaks, shouts, that one word: integrity. Not how he made them, but what he brought to them, and what he made them for, is, I suggest, what's worth your study. Bob, in a broader context than that of film alone, recalled what many in our time have forgotten, or are scared to face: the fact that in life, as in art, there is but one key to truth, to self-respect and mutual relation, the key that Shakespeare offered when he wrote: 'To thine own self he true and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.' it was thus Bob approached and used the film." (Siepmann 1959:57-58,74-75)

By Orson Welles

"I think that if you tried to relate Flaherty to anybody else in films, it would be difficult to do it decisively. But it's very easy to identify him with certain great streams of American cultural life-with Thoreau, for example, and Whitman. I don't see where he fits into films at all, except as being one of the two or three greatest people who ever worked in the medium." ("Portrait of Robert Flaherty," BBC Broadcast, September 2, 1952)

By Sir Alexander Korda

"I am quite certain that Flaherty occupies one of the most important places the cinema has for any of the creative artists. Flaherty was one of the best-one of the very few persons who with his contribution helped to shape the cinema. His influence was very large-far beyond the number of pictures he made-not only on the public but chiefly on the younger directors; they learned an immense amount from him." ("Portrait of Robert Flaherty," BBC Broadcast, September 2, 1952)

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By Oliver St. John Gogarty

"It's an easy thing to judge men by the way you feel when you leave them. When you left Flaherty you felt like a stag of ten, or somebody for whom the police had held back the traffic. Other people, when you leave them, you'd think you'd given them a pint of blood. . . .

"But it was different with Flaherty. When you went into a room, you knew he was there because there was some sort of magnetic feeling as if you went into a room where there was a dynamo in action. And then he hailed you with his nimbus of white hair and his smiling pink and white face. He was unique in New York, where 'brunettisation' was going on apace. In fact, in a couple of decades, everybody will be red again. But Flaherty was pink and white. You'd think he was born on the other side of the world in Europe." ("Portrait of Robert Flaherty," BBC Broadcast, September 2, 1952)

By John Houseman

"In an industry where the very best have shown themselves-with the years and pressures-insecure and corruptible, Flaherty has persevered . . . alone, unhurried, uncovetous and unafraid. With him life and art are indivisible. His energy, his obstinacy, his fine visual sense and natural gift for words, his cunning and his massive personal charm-all these have been marshalled and exploited without stint for the artistic realisation of his own personal myth.

"All his pictures are variations on this one theme-man's response to the challenge of nature. It is the measure of his greatness that after a quarter of a century, Flaherty's myth is today more valid, more universal and more significant than ever before. And it is no wonder. For it is rooted in love. And what it tells is a story of the innate decency and fortitude and invincibility of the human spirit." (Houseman 1951)

New York Times editorial

"Through the years Mr. Flaherty's work became increasingly important in its influence both here and in Europe. While this man himself brought great beauty and honesty to the screen with his own documentary masterpieces, his death serves to remind us that his greatest contribution was that he planted seeds the full richness of whose grain has yet to be harvested." (1951)

By Terry Ramsaye

"Robert J. Flaherty's passing the other day, ending an adventurous career as prospector and cinematographer, brings long thought from an old friend. He goes into history as a great and pioneer film documentarian, and with a deal of technical folderol from the esoteric criticism about remote considerations of his art. They discovered mysterioso elements in his pictures that he was delighted to learn about. . . .

Mr. Flaherty stayed decidedly arty, often displaying a gift and feeling, rarely penetration. Documentary production took little from his approach and has fol-

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lowed a more incisive order of concept and technique, largely derivative from newsreels. But Bob dreamed magnificent dreams and enjoyed their pursuit. In that he had success. Tradition will make it greater." (Ramsaye 1951)

By Gilbert Seldes

"NO FLOWERS"
"A three-line notice on the fifth page of the Hollywood Reporter announced the death of Robert Flaherty-the only recognition by the movie-industry of the passing of one of its great men. Flaherty disliked much that Hollywood would have asked him to do, but the movie-makers in Hollywood had no cause to dislike what he did. He made Nanook and Moana, and Louisiana Story and Man of Aran, transmuting fact not into fiction, but into poetry, creating the documentary as an interpretation of life. Hollywood gave him no Oscars when he lived and sent no wreaths to his funeral when he died." (Seldes 1956)

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Link to Appendix IV

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