Europe, England, and the Atlantic: Chapter 3

I : In the New Year of 1931 Flaherty went to Berlin, where he was to find a warm welcome. Nanook and Moana had been much liked by both the German public and intellectuals, and his reputation has always stood high in that country. Nanook in particular was often revived. He was deeply shocked, however, by the social life of Berlin. Some months later when he came to London, he would tell and retell of the licentiousness he saw paraded on the Berlin streets. The serried ranks of prostitutes who lined the Friedrichstrasse (also the street where the film producers were located), the shop-window displays of sexual and particularly of sadistic literature and photographs, the lesbian and homosexual bars and night spots horrified the man who had only recently come from the innocence of Tahiti. The main reason for Flaherty's visit to Germany was his anxiety to get into the Soviet Union. It is not clear whether he had received an offer from the Soviet film industry, or whether he made the first overtures himself through the Soviet film-trade house in Berlin, which had been distributing films with great success in Germany ever since the impact made by Potemkin in 1926. Fred Zinnemann, then a young man associated with the making of Menschen am Sonntag ("People on Sunday") met Flaherty early in the year. [1] He writes:

The curious thing is that during our association, which lasted for seven months in Berlin, not one foot of film was shot. But I used to sit talking with him and listen to him, drinking a lot of beer, and I found

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out a lot about motion pictures ... the thing that was tremendously important for me was the fact that Bob was preoccupied in showing the spirit of man.... What I learned from him was that if you want to make a picture, you should try to tell the truth as you see it, and try not to compromise nor deviate from what you are trying to say. (Zinnemann n.d.)

He remembers that Flaherty talked of wanting to make a film about the decaying civilizations in Central Asia but that the Soviet officials with whom he was in touch preferred instead a film about the modernization of the primitive life. John Grierson, on the other hand, says that Flaherty was waiting for an invitation to go to Russia to make a film about the Russian women. [2] The Ufa Company was to supply the film stock for Flaherty's film, the Russians were to have the internal rights with the proviso that they could take out scenes from the film but not put anything in, and Flaherty would have the rights for the rest of the world with a similar proviso. [3] But the deal was never consummated.

After this setback, a group called the Porza, headed by Dr. Dimitri Marianoff, a son-in-law of Einstein, employed by the Handelsvertretung, USSR, tried to raise funds for Flaherty to make a film in Germany, but this, too, came to nothing.

After Murnau's tragic death in March of that year, Flaherty received no more payments from the sale of his shares in Murnau-Flaherty Productions, Inc., until legal matters had been settled by the executors. David Flaherty had remained in Hollywood to represent his brother's interests. The legal representatives of Murnau's estate even fought over the yacht Bali. It was not until 1932 that a hearing took place on the suit brought by Colorart against Murnau's estate and against Flaherty. Colorart lost, and Flaherty's money was released to him. The Flahertys in Berlin were rapidly exhausting their meager funds. Suddenly they remembered John Grierson in nearby England.

One summer evening, the few of us who were then working at the little Empire Marketing Board (EMB) Film Unit were gossiping about the days work in the pub The Coronet, just off Soho Square. Jimmy Davidson, the staff cameraman, came into the bar and said to Grierson, "There s a Mrs. Flaherty calling you from Berlin up in the joint."

At this point it is necessary that we leave the Flahertys suspended in a telephone call upon which much depended in order to describe briefly the state of development reached by the British documentary movement at that time. It is important to understand in perspective the deep impression Flaherty would make on his British co-workers as well as the motivation behind the British documentary movement, which was in many ways very different from Flaherty's approach since Nanook. The divergence between

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the Flaherty and the British documentary points of view later grew into open disagreements that continued until his death.

The Empire Marketing Board Film Unit was nearly two-years old. Nurtured by Sir Stephen Tallents, its head, and byJohn Grierson, who after the success of I)dfters decided to form a group of filmmakers rather than continue personally to direct films, the unit was the only experimental film workshop in the world outside the USSR. It also represented the beginnings of a realization by government and by Whitehall that film could be used in the public service.

Starved for finance, staffed with a handful of young film aspirants who made up by enthusiasm what they lacked in technical knowledge, the unit was probably the laughingstock of the commercial studios of the period. It had cutting rooms, a small projection theater, and a couple of offices in Oxford Street opposite the now defunct Frascati's Restaurant. Its members Included Basil Wright, John Taylor, Paul Rotha, Arthur Elton, Stuart Legg, and several others.

But In 1931 the unit had little to show for itself apart from D?iften. (now eighteen months old) and a couple of compilation films that had received favorable press notices, particularly from Cedric Belfrage, Caroline A. Lejeune, and the Times. Most of the members of the unit spent their spare time writing and lecturing with remorseless persistence about the aims of documentary.

Now, with an increased grant, the EMB unit was on the verge of going into full production. Its tyro directors and cameramen must face the challenge and see if they could in fact practice what they preached.

Grierson at once realized that to have Robert Flaherty working with his EMB unit would not only add to its luster but would also give a unique chance for the young tyros to learn at firsthand about his instinctive handling of a movie camera and his wonderful sense of observation. Tallents accepted the idea with some reserve, though his decision was eased by the recent agreement at the imperial conference to widen the EMB's terms of reference to include Empire markets overseas as well as inside Britain.

A few days after the telephone call from Berlin, the Flahertys had checked in at the York Hotel, Berners Street, which was a bare couple of stone-throws away from where the unit was housed in London's most vulgar shopping thoroughfare. We well remember Flaherty and his wife being conducted by Grierson round all the two floors of the unit's premises and going to their hotel to look at the superb photographs of Savaii that Frances Flaherty brought with her. We remember especially Flaherty's delight at discovering the English-made, spring-driven, Newman-Sinclair camera, with its easy portability, its rapidly interchangeable film magazines, its excellent range of lenses, and, in particular, its extensions, which could make ultra close-up work possible. Flaherty positively gloated over this fine example of English precision engineering. [4]

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Newton Rowe, who had resigned in disgust from the New Zealand government service in Samoa and had just published Samoa Under the Sailing Gods, went to see Flaherty at the York Hotel. He took with him Hayter Preston, the widely traveled and knowledgeable writer, who at the time was working for the Sunday Reference. A memorable session took place, which ended outside the hotel at dawn with Flaherty making friends with the roadmen hosing down the street. "A magnum of champagne stood unopened all night on the dressing-table," says Rowe, "and it took all Bob's charm to get the incredulous night porter to keep finding more bottles of whiskey." [5]

The EMB unit, of course, was still operating on a shoestring, but Tallents had contrived to get some money-2,500 pounds, which was a vast sum to us-to make a film about craftsmanship in British industry. The subject had been offered by Grierson to Anthony Asquith, who had graciously refused it. It was therefore agreed that Flaherty should go off and produce a film that would reveal the craftsmanship that persisted in even the most modern of British industries, even behind the smoke and steam and grime of the industrial Midlands.

An early achievement of the unit had been to destroy the fallacy that existed in the British film industry that the British weather was a hindrance to exterior filmmaking. For economic reasons alone, many of the EMB films had to be shot in any weather, and some remarkably good cinematography resulted. "There remained to be destroyed," writes Tallents, "the belief that the industrial life of Britain and her grey city atmosphere could never be portrayed on the screen. The real point of bringing in Flaherty at this moment was to destroy that fallacy." [6]

In the unit's humble circumstances, it was impossible for Flaherty to be allowed to pursue his established method of digging himself in for months before starting to shoot his film. But Grierson realized the importance of letting him become acclimatized, even if briefly, to the English scene. Basil Wright was about to begin shooting his first film, 7he Country Comes to Town, about milk production (other elements were added later), with some of its locations in Devonshire. Grierson suddenly decided that it would be fine experience for Flaherty to accompany Wright to see something of the Devon countryside, while Wright would have the benefit of Flaherty's wisdom and advice in the initial stages of shooting. Says Wright,

So it came about that I found myself driving Flaherty-whom I regarded with immense awe-in a very dilapidated Buick two-seater roadster from London to Exeter and points west.... It soon became clear that he was extremely nervous and he indulged in a good deal of "backseat" driving. Round about Runnymede he confessed the reason for this. He had been deeply affected by his friend Murnau's recent tragic death in an automobile accident in California....

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However, by the time we reached Camberley, he felt in need of refreshment, so I was instructed to pull into a pub. Here the fascinating unpredicability of the great man hit me for the first time. I was terribly anxious to push on and get established on the Devon location as early as possible; but over pints of bitter (which I don't think he liked but was drinking as an experiment), he suddenly caught sight of a shova-ha'penny board. . . . He wanted to know everything about the game. What's more interesting, perhaps, is that before he even learnt the rules, he had in a purely tactile series of gestures appreciated the physical qualities of the board-the silky smoothness of the woods surface, the need for accurate craftsmanship in the brass-strips which, carefully hinged, separate one "bed" from another up on the board. Inevitably, some locals appeared and we became involved in a series of games....

With a lot of very nervous tact I eventually got him back into the car. After a bit he mercifully fell into a doze, and we took the Bastingstoke-Stockbridge run at full-speed....

At Salisbury we lunched. I remember nothing of the meal except that he cannot have enjoyed it. I do remember, however, that he demanded to see the Cathedral. We drove to the Close. He was rapt in admiration, viewed the Cathedral from several angles, and then went inside. Like everyone else, he was disappointed. "It's an exterior job," he said....

On the outskirts of Salisbury, just where the road crosses the railway and aims at the open country, there were a lot of chaps looking over a wall. "Stop!" cries Flaherty, "lets see what's going on." It was a cricket match.

Flaherty was fascinated. He stood up on the floor of the car. He balanced himself on the seat-cushions. He asked a Niagara of questions. But here he had, in a minor sense, met his match. Young then, I disliked cricket and all it implies more even then than I do now. I began to talk about schedules and Grierson and the problems of the EMB unit expenditures, and, after about twenty minutes, got him to relax in his seat and off again we went.

The next thing I recollect is that we were established in a tiny pub called 7he Lamb, between Exeter and Cotley, which was where the farm was located that we were to use in the film. We were all rather crushed together in the pub but I contrived that Flaherty had a room to himself. He expressed the warmest gratitude for this, and gave me the impression that he did really like the opportunity for solitude.

The other thing I remember about The Lamb was Flaherty's interest in the girl who looked after the bar and the bedrooms. This interest I must add had no sex implications at all. She was one of those

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strapping Devon wenches who are tall, with a fine figure and splendid vital statistics, dark flashing eyes, black hair, and a heightened colour. Flahertv was fascinated by her, because of what you might call her "foreign" (non-Saxon) appearance; and when I, or someone else in the unit, brought up the old legend of shipwrecked mariners from the Spanish Armada mingling with the local population, Flaherty'.s excitement knew no bounds. I would give a lot of money to be able to remember the ideas which flooded out of him on that occasion. But, alas, I can only remember being very excited and, at the same time, trying to put some curb on his ideas, which (solemn young documentarist as I was) seemed to be going, as it were, over the edge of probability.

What, however, I can remember is the soft, careful and tactful manner in which, over a number of days' shooting, he (as it were) lent us his wonderfull eyes. He never said, "Look, how wonderful, you must shoot that!" What he did was, almost as if it were in passing, to comment on the play of light on fields and woods and distant landscape, or on certain movements of horses or cattle, or even on the way a lane twisted between hedges to reveal the half-seen gable of a house. It's almost impossible to explain his way of seeing things in this manner, and how he, often in an undertone, conveyed it to you. I certainly would say that in those few days he enriched my understanding of looking at a thing and people in terms of movie in a way which ten million dollars couldn't buy. Incidentally, when I was actually shooting, he went as far away as possible and sat down (if he could find somewhere to sit). He never advised or interfered. But he opened up for me a new field of revelation every day, whether we were driving to our location, or walking about looking for camera set-ups. I have never known a man with such an eye. (Basil Wright, personal communication, n.d.)

When Flaherty returned to London, he found that Grierson had engaged a production manager for him. J. P R. Golightly had been an estates manager in the west of England and in that summer was between jobs when he met Dr. Anthony Grierson, who suggested to Golightly that his brother John, might he able to make use of him at his film unit in London. An interview was arranged, and, before he knew what had happened, Golightly found himself signed on to be what he describes as a "man-of-all-work" on Flaherty's new film. He had had no previous experience in filmmaking. [7]

The two of them set out in a very old Austin car, Golightly at the wheel, together with a Newman-Sinclair camera and what, for an EMB film, was a generous amount of film stock. Mrs. Flaherty stayed in London. Their destination was Saltash in Devon near Plymouth, where Flaherty was to

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film the steel bridge. For a few days nothing was heard of them. Then one morning, when some of the unit's rushes were being viewed, there came on the screen several reels of shipping scenes and shots of cranes at some unidentifiable docks. There were also some curious shots taken from what appeared to be a railway coach window, which were unusable because of the vibration of the train. There were, in addition, some very fine shot's of Saltash Bridge.

After some discussion, it was agreed by the process of elimination these rushes must be from Flaherty. They were. But Grierson and others were shocked by the amount of footage shot on things that could not be remotely related to the subject of the film. Matters were not made easier when, cautioned by Grierson over the telephone about the amount of film stock he was blazing away, Flaherty explained that the rushes were only "tests" he had made to get "the feel of things."

Before the production had started, Grierson had explained to Flaherty that "someone" in Whitehall-meaning the top people at the EMB would want to see a script of the film he was going to make. At first Flaherty point-blank refused. He had never written a script before, and he was not going to start now for any civil servant. Grierson was polite but firm. Flaherty retired sulkily to the York Hotel and remained there hermitlike for several days. Then he appeared at the unit and gave Grierson a thick wad of paper. On the top sheet were the words in Flaherty's heavy hand, "INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN: A Film About Craftsmen: by Robert J. Flaherty." On page 2 were the words: "A SCENARIO" and underneath, "Scenes of Industrial Britain." [8] Nothing more. if anyone in Whitehall ever read a script for the units new production, that script was certainly not written by the maker of Nanook and Moana.

Meanwhile, the two-man unit proceeded on its way. Golightly recalls that Flaherty wanted to film everything he saw. "We would be going along in the old Austin and suddenly Bob would see a string of electric pylons striding across the landscape. Immediately he would instruct me to make a detour so that we could film the pylons." The windmill shots at the opening of the finished film were taken this way, wholly by chance.

Golightly was not a little worried. Knowing nothing about the film world, he could not have been expected to have held Flaherty in awe, but he was, of course, aware of the tremendous respect with which the whole unit regarded him. But his new employer had urged on him the need for strict economy and thrifty expenditure, especially for film stock. So, as a high proportion of the total amount of stock allocated to the film seemed to be being used up on what Flaherty called his "tests," Golightly's anxiety increased. The unit shortly returned to base, and a serious and probably stormy meeting took place between Flaherty and Grierson.

Loaded with two small lamps and appropriate lengths of cable for lighting interiors, the Austin and its crew now set out for the industrial

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Midlands. Golightly was to make the contacts at the places where Flaherty wanted to film and get the necessary permission, arrange for the hotel rooms, find the electricity supply when they wanted to use the lamps, shift the lamps about at Flaherty's orders, look after the money, keep the accounts, and drive the car. Eventually, Flaherty observed that even a man of Golightly's resources could not cope with this multitude of tasks. After a word to London, a young man named John Taylor (Grierson's brother-in-law), aged seventeen, was sent to join the unit.

Golightly relates that Flaherty would watch a process, such as glassblowing or pottery-making, for a long time and with great concentration. He would note every movement of the men on the job so that when he came to use his camera, he could anticipate their actions in advance. The rushes of both the glass-blowing and pottery-making sequences were sent to Flaherty, and he ran them at a local cinema so that the men who appeared in them could see how they looked. They were proud of what they saw and full of respect for Flaherty as a craftsman in his own medium.

Among the industrial processes to be shot was steelmaking. Golightly had great difficulty in obtaining permission for Flaherty to film at a particular works near Birmingham. "He could be very irritable and impatient," says Golightly, "if permits to shoot could not be got quickly; he was surprised that factory owners had not heard of him." Finally, permission was granted, but certain parts of the steel plant, unfortunately some of the best from a photogenic aspect, were banned to them. Flaherty accepted this ruling with bad grace, but they shot all morning.

The same evening, Grierson and Jimmy Davidson showed up unexpectedly at the hotel where they were staying in Birmingham. Grierson was in high spirits because that afternoon, on their way up from London, he and Davidson had shot some spectacular steel material which they had chanced to run across. The more lyrical Grierson's description waxed, the more apprehensive became Golightly and the more furious became Flaherty because it soon became obvious that Grierson had been at the same steelworks as had Flaherty and had shot the very things that had been forbidden, apparently without seeking permission.

But Grierson's visit had a more serious purpose. By now, Flaherty had used up all but £300 of the £2,500 allocated for his film. Grierson realized that he had no other choice than to stop the production, however painful that might be. After he, Flaherty, and Golightly had eaten a very good dinner-the bill for which, Grierson noted, went down to expenses on the film-he said: "Bob, your money is running out."

"But,John," protested Flaherty, "this is only the beginning. I'm still just making tests. Look, unless there's £7,500 for the picture, I quit."

"Bob," said Grierson warily, "you don't know the British Treasury."

"You go down and see them in Whitehall," said Flaherty, "and get some more money out of them. Don't they know who I am?"

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"D'you really want to know what they think you are in Whitehall?" asked Grierson innocently, and paused. Flaherty waited.

"They think you're just a bloody beach photographer," said Grierson.

Flaherty drew himself up to his full height and size, raised his clenched fists to the ceiling of the crowded hotel restaurant, and bawled his best four-letter Anglo-Saxon swear word.

They were all requested to leave the hotel. [9]

Despite this incident, Flaherty did not immediately stop work. He insisted that he still had £300 to spend. They moved over to Northern Ireland, where they were to film in the shipyard of Harland and Wolff at Belfast. It was there that Flaherty managed to get his bulky form wedged in a gantry high up over the yard. "It took fully half a dozen men to free him," says Golightly. "He was a very scared man and had to stay in his hotel several days to get over the shock although he wasn't actually hurt in any way."

There they finally ran out of money. Golightly sent telegram after telegram to the unit in London but received no reply. Finally, Flaherty became very angry and telegraphed Grierson that unless some money came by return, he would sell the Newman-Sinclair. Some money then arrived. They paid the bill and left for London.

When Flaherty returned to London, it became perfectly clear that although some superb footage had been shot, there was no picture. It was tactfully agreed that Flaherty would not edit the film. Grierson pledged that he would do it himself.

A screening of the rushes at once suggested that further filming must be done and that the stock library must be raided. Basil Wright was sent to shoot some waterways and flying boats; Arthur Elton went down a coal mine. Grierson appointed Edgar Anstey his assistant, and the footage was removed to a room in Grierson's house in Merrick Square, on the south bank of the Thames, which had been fitted up with primitive editing equipment and a hand-turned projector. In his very few months at the unit, Anstey had done some general editing-trainees always began on that job-of Canadian footage acquired by Grierson earlier that year and had proudly cut his first film called Burma Cheroots out of material obtained from heaven knows where.

Anstey remembers that about twelve thousand feet of Flaherty's material were turned over to him, which was hardly excessive and does much credit to Golightly's stewardship of Flaherty on location." [10] There was, of course, no script from which to edit. Anstey states that he never had anything on paper from which to work. During part of the time, Grierson was ill and confined to bed, where he would edit the film by eve. It was completed as a silent film, and when Anstey left it (to go off on H.M.S. Challenger to film a surveying expedition in Labrador), it was two reels long and very similar to the way we later knew it as Industrial Britain. At no

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time during the editing, says Anstey, did he see anything of Flaherty, nor to his knowledge did Flaherty see the film.

All the next year, 1932, the film lay fallow; but then the EMB concluded a distribution deal with Gaumont-British Distributors for six two-reel pictures to be known as the "Imperial Six" for general cinema release. They were Industrial Britain, 7he Country Comes to Town, Upstream, O'er Hill and Dale, Shadow on the Mountain, and Big Timber. Part of the deal was that Gaumont-British would provide sound-recording facilities so that music and commentaries could be added to the films, under EMB supervision. The release of the "Imperial Six" was necessarily held up until all of them had been synchronized; as a result, Industrial Britain did not have its first showing until the fall of 1933. It carried a joint credit to Grierson and Flaherty. The series played with popular success at London's main West-End cinemas and later throughout the United Kingdom and overseas.

Industrial Britain opens with a reminder sequence of British traditional skills in rural industries-basketmaking and weaving, with power from windmills and transport by barge-making the concluding point that even in the machine age, "the human factor remains the final factor," thus setting the key to the film. The sequence ends with some sweaty shots of miners hewing coal the hard way much as it was done a hundred years earlier.

A Midlands exterior of smoke and steam (black, white, and gray) leads into the famous pottery-making sequence, which is followed by the equally famous glass-blowing sequence, where in the "Glory Hole" at Smethwick we meet Sam Hasselby, the king of the goblet makers. Then the film shows the making of giant lenses for lighthouses and airport beacons, with the refrain "behind the smoke beautiful things are being made." Steel is introduced by a subtitle with mood music, followed by a fast-moving, impressionistic sequence of furnace-tapping, pouring, ingot-forging, and so on. Then we are back with the "keen eyes of the individual," the testing of steel for aero engines, and the fine skill of precision engineering for supercharged rotors: "The process may change but the man doesn't."

A final roundup sequence shows the products of all these skills going out to the world-British ships and planes taking the craftsmanship of British workers to markets overseas-intercut with the fine faces of the men who made the product.

Thus a great deal of the footage shot by Flahertv remains, which, with the Grierson-shot steel sequence, forms the backbone of the film. The narration, written by Grierson, was spoken by the actor Donald Calthrop in an emotional, sentimental style; the music, from stock records because of economy, was romantic and tuneful, except for some heavy "machine" music for the steel scenes. Extensive use was made of Beethovens Coriolan overture.

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As an example of Flaherty's work, the film is notable for his continued use of big close-ups, already explored in Moana, with very simple lighting; for its sensitive camera movements following and often anticipating the actions of the potters and glass-blowers; and for its photography, catching and contrasting the blacks, whites, and multitude of halftones of the industrial landscapes of the murky Midlands. The wonderful faces of these craftsmen-mostly men of middle age or over-caught in deep concentration on the job in hand, linger in one's memory. If Industrial Britain was significant for no other reason, it put the true faces of British workmen on the public screens in a way not seen before. The British worker-for so long portrayed in films as a comic stock figure-was at last given his rightful dignity. It was also significant of the EMB outlook that one of its most displayed posters was a steelworker, not a fancy-dress John Bull.

In addition to Industrial Britain, a silent one-reel film was edited by Marion Grierson from the Flaherty pottery footage. It was called 7he English Potter and was destined for school distribution. "It is," wrote Grierson, "thank God, still silent and, except for a synthetic ending, a lovely thing to see." [11] Of the parent film, Tallents wrote, I always thought the magnificently photographed IndustrialBritain, with its vivid shots of steelworkers and potters and glass-blowers, and its closing portrayal of a ship outward bound with the exports of Britain, as moving as any that the unit in those days yielded." [12]

In hindsight, Grierson wrote of the film:

Before Flaherty went off to the Aran Islands to make his Man of Aran, I had him up in the Black Country doing work for the EMB. He passed from pottery to glass and from glass to steel, making short studies of English workmen. I saw the material a hundred times, and by all the laws of repetition should have been bored by it. But there is this same quality of great craftsmanship in it which makes one see it always with a certain new surprise. A man is making a pot, say. Your ordinary director will describe it; your good director will describe it well. He may even, if good enough, pick out those details of expression and of hands which bring character to the man and beauty to the work. But what will you say if the director beats the potter to his own movements, anticipating each puckering of the brows, each extended gesture of the hands in contemplation, and moves his camera about as though it were the mind and spirit of the man himself? I cannot tell you how it is done, nor could Flaherty. As always in art, to feeling which is fine enough and craft which is practised enough, these strange other-world abilities are added. (Grierson 1932:147)

There is no question but that Industrial Britain, with Drifters, was the most successful and generally liked film to come out of the EMB Film Unit.

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It was still in circulation by British Information Services in countries outside Britain years after World War II. A proof of its longevity is found in the following piece by the dramatic critic, Alan Dent (1951):

Being about five minutes late at one of the Edinburgh Festival's documentary film sessions, I found myself instantaneously enthralled in watching a number of skilled craftsmen in close-up. A young potter fashioned a vase with expert hands and earnest gaze-an elderly glass-blower made goblets with cheeks fantastically distended as he blew. The commentary was pithy without being facetious, and it was plentifully interspaced with music that drew attention to the peculiar dignity of especially skilled labour-Beethoven's Coriolan overture. Nothing was overemphasised, no sequence was unduly protracted, and the artist-craftsman had that absolutely complete lack of any kind of camera-awareness which is to be seen in only the supremely well-directed order of documentary.

In my ignorance, I assumed for a minute or two that a striking new master of the medium had arisen. But as soon as the little masterpiece was over, three authorities stood in the flesh before us and one of them said, "You have just seen an early documentary made by the greatest master of documentary, Robert Flaherty."

.... But I found, coming away, that the Flaherty-Beethoven had a lingering effect even over and above these supremely good things. I was haunted by the noble music, as one often is after any performance of it, but this time the music in my inward ear was accompanied on the inward eye by the recollection of Flaherty's beautifully composed visual images.

II : Flaherty's withdrawal after he had done his shooting for the EMB caused Grierson considerable concern. But it was no secret that Flaherty had set his heart on making a film about the people of the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland. To help that hope to fruition, Grierson got in touch with Angus McPhail, who was in charge of the story department of Gaumont-British (GB). At the same time, Cedric Belfrage, outspoken film critic of the Sundav Express, challenged the perennial bleat of British film executives that there was no creative talent around by reminding them in his column that a movie genius of some note was in London needing work. Belfrage had met Flaherty in Hollywood when he was preparing to go to Tahiti to work on White Shadows in the South Seas.

A lunch was arranged at the Savoy for Flaherty to meet Michael Balcon, who was in charge of production for the Gaumont-British Motion

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Picture Corporation, then controlled by the Ostrer brothers. Angus McPhail and Hugh Findlay, GB's publicity man, also attended. Flaherty unfurled his project for making a feature-length picture about the Aran Islands.

He had been keen to make such a film since meeting a young man from Cork on the boat from the United States to Germany late the previous year. Some of the passengers had been sitting around a table in the smoking lounge discussing the major topic of the time, the Great Depression. The company was gloomy about the future. All at once the young man from Cork spoke out:

You chaps make me tired with all your lamentations about misfortunes, poverty and all that. You don't know what poverty is. Why, there are three barren islands off the west coast of Ireland which are just rocks without trees. The people there have to make soil out of seaweed and sand. First they have to scrape the rocks to make them smooth and then spread the seaweed and sand on them. It isn't much thicker than a rug and out of it they grow potatoes. They are almost the only food they can get from the land. For the rest, they go to sea in primitive little boats. And it is one of the worst seas in the world. The islanders have been doing this for a thousand years or more. If any of them have to leave the islands and migrate to America, they only do so because they're forced to it. When they leave, all their relatives foregather on the wharf and keen them away, just like exiles going to Siberia. [13] (Griffith 1953)

Flaherty was deeply moved and was astonished when he was told that these Aran islands were only some fifteen hours from London. He read the works of John Millington Synge and was particularly impressed by Riders to the Sea and Synge's travel book, 7he Aran Islanders.

All this he poured out to Michael Balcon. When Flaherty waxed enthusiastic about an idea, he could be wonderfully persuasive. Balcon reacted favorably. The Aran project might be just what he was searching for at that moment in British film production.

In 1932, Gaumont-British, with C. M. Woolf in charge of distribution, was the biggest organization in the British film industry, consisting of two studios, a distribution company, and several hundred important cinema theaters. The Gaumont-British Company announced that year that out of its program of nineteen pictures scheduled for production by itself and by its associate company, Gainsborough Pictures, ten were to be musical comedies, five comedies, two melodramas, one unknown, and one real-life drama. The last was Flaherty's film. For this program of nineteen films, Ostrer and Woolf "tossed a million pounds at producer Balcon with instructions to spend it as he thought best" (Belfrage 1932). Balcon decided to risk exactly one-hundredth of his total production budget on Flaherty!

108 Robert J. Flaherty

Tile scheduled cost of 11an of Aran was £10,000. This was less than Nanook, a silent film, had cost, and this one was to be with sound.

It was rumored that GB backed Flaherty with the deliberate aim of proving that the kind of film he made-and for which many people were clamoring-was neither economically nor artistically wise for the British film industry to undertake. In other words, the Ostrers and Woolf (we do not associate Balcon with this conspiracy), were prepared to lose 110,000 in the hope that they would rid themselves of the irritating carping of the film community.

To his credit, Balcon was prepared to allow Flaherty to proceed with his project without a script. "Flaherty merely told me," he writes, "that he wanted to deal with a community who kept alive on minimum standards, even to the point of reclaiming tile soil for their barren rocky island. The fishing and hence the shark sequences ... were never mentioned in our original discussions ... Flaherty undertook that the film would not cost more than 10,000 pounds." [14]

In the autumn of 1931, Balcon arranged for Flaherty and Mrs. Flaherty to go across to Ireland for a preliminary visit. Their guide was J. Norris Davidson [15], who had worked at the EMB Film Unit during that summer. Writes Davidson:

One day late in August, Grierson telephoned us from London. Elton took the call. He then gravely told us that Jack Miller and I were both fired and that he, Elton, was to go on half-salary "The EMB," Grierson had said, "was under the economy axe."

When we got back to London, I started looking around for some other form of film-employment. I chanced one day to meet Grierson. He was at once very angry with me for not being at work with his unit in Oxford Street. I explained to him that he had sacked me, but he seemed to have forgotten all about it. He said, "You are going to go to Ireland with Flaherty."

Now I had never met Flaherty, only heard about him, and being very ignorant could not imagine an American film director being anything other than the "typical" Hollywood director of the movies. The first time I met Flaherty he bought me apple-pie á la mode and coffee at the snack-bar almost next door to the EMB unit. The next time was in a genteel hotel in Berners Street. I could not make the snack-bar and the hotel and Tabu (which was then running in London) add up to this amiable, grey-flanneled character-or that's what I thought he was.

Grierson had told me some story about Flaherty having met a ship's engineer on the liner that had brought him from New York to Europe and that this engineer had told him about the Aran Islands. I could never get from Flaherty, however, anything more than the

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vaguest answers about the man; in fact, I began to wonder if he ever existed. Flaherty himself seemed most anxious to see Ireland but not any particular part of it. It was Grierson who kept talking to me about the Aran Islands; he knew that I had stayed there not long before in a tent. Grierson, I should add, had restored me to the EMB staff (at half-salary) but when Tod Rich put me on the Gaumont-British payroll, Grierson withdrew all financial support and yet-I never knew why-in some way I continued to be the property of the EMB.

Anyway, I drove off to Liverpool and brought the car to Dublin, meeting the Flahertys a few days later and bringing them to a well-known hotel. "Young man, never again bring me to an American-style hotel," he said, and promptly moved to another one. It took a long time to get him out of Dublin. I introduced him to a lot of local notables (including Lennox Robinson) and he settled down to absorbing Irish life, while I fumed with impatience....

It was then late October. We finally took the road and went to Achill Island off the Mayo Coast. We settled into one of those old-fashioned and comfortable fishing hotels that don't exist any more. I then began to find out how difficult Flaherty could be. When anyone annoyed him or differed from his views, Flaherty would sadly comment that "he was suffering from a mental hook-worm." But he seemed content to peek and pry and take photographs and talk and talk and talk. In my ignorance, I did not understand that he was simply trying to settle himself into a new country. I stupidly thought that we could get into action any day, that cameramen, generators, lights, etc., would arrive-but nothing happened. Looking back on it, I realise how discerning the Gaumont-British people were. In my odd contacts with them by telephone, they seemed quite undismayed by any delays or vagueness. God knows, the EMB unit in Scotland with Elton, Jack Miller and myself, had seemed a bit small and mean, but when Flaherty said, "Cameramen? I don't like them!" I felt he had said something not quite nice.

Mrs. Flaherty was taking a lot of stills with her Leica all this time. She also had a portable developing-outfit of some kind that gave endless trouble. One afternoon she spoiled a whole roll of film. She and Flaherty had a furious row. She locked herself in their bedroom where she had been doing the developing. He sat on the stairs outside and pleaded with her. She refused to come down to tea. He said he would have no tea if she wouldn't come down. She still refused. So I had three teas-jam, cake and buttered potato-bread.

Time passed and still Flaherty showed no interest in going to the Aran Islands in spite of all I told him. Indeed, it looked as though he might make the film in Achill Island. He spoke of sending to Kodaks in Dublin for a 16-mm camera we had seen there. He would shoot on

110 Robert J. Flaherty

16 mm and get the film "blown up" to 35 mm, he said. No plot, no script and not a whisper about any sound. . . .

At last one day Flaherty decided to look at the Aran Islands. By now it was sharp cold autumn weather and my car was an open one. Flaherty sat in what used to be called the "dickey" seat (they don't make them any more) and he used to fortify himself with whiskey. But the weather was so cold that we used to stop for more whiskey (Mrs. Flaherty disapproving) and then he used to have to get out to relieve himself and the cold would strike him and that meant more whiskey in the next town and then more stopping for his comfort....

Finally we got to Galway. We spent some days there sight-seeing while we waited for the sailing-day of the Dun Aengus, the island steamer of those days. We went to the cinema every night no matter what was showing.. . . Galway had put Achill right out of his head and he began to question me about Aran. He told me to buy a bottle of whiskey to give to the parish priest there. This would have been a very bad move but I did buy the whiskey (on G-B) and it was later put to other uses. I also got Flaherty to admit shyly that he played the violin. It's not hard to break the Ice in Aran-there's no ice to break-but a violin player would have given much pleasure since they have only melodians there....

When we got to Kilronan harbour, the first man Flaherty noticed on the quay was Pat Mullen's father. . . . The Leica soon went to work. Pat himself was then about seven or eight years back from America and was known locally as The Socialist. People said it was bad of me to get The Socialist to drive the Flahertys around on his side-car. [16] But we drove about the island of Inishmore with Pat Mullen and I tried without success to interest Flaherty in the village where I used to stay. I did, however, show him two small boys who used to bring water, fish and letters-or nothing at all-to my tent the year before. They were Josie and Mikeleen Dillane. Flaherty took to the younger one at once and he later took part in the film. [17]

In January of 1932, Flaherty arrived back on Inishmore, the largest of the three Aran Islands, which he had chosen for his base because of the plentiful supply of fresh water, which would be needed for processing the film. He writes:

The first thing to do, and a most important one, was to choose from among the islanders someone to be the perfect diplomatist in our dealings with them. For when one came into a strange community to make a film of that community, negotiations to begin with were delicate indeed. This man we found in the person of Pat Mullen, who,

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though an Aran Islander by birth and preference, had travelled far in his earlier days and had spent seventeen years in America. [18]

There are no motor-cars on Aran, no movie theatres, no luxuries of any kind. The young man from Cork had not exaggerated the barrenness of the island. To the islanders their hard-won soil is more precious than gold. They would not part with a foot of their land, barren as it is, for any consideration. [When Flaherty told about this, he would cup his two hands together as if they were filled with grains of soil.]

Nor had my friend of the boat exaggerated the sea. All the way from America the North Atlantic sweeps in and hurls itself against the high rugged coast, sometimes climbing three hundred feet to the clifftops and then sweeping in over the land. (Griffith 1953:84-85)

With Flaherty were his wife, their three daughters, and John Taylor, who had worked on Industrial Britain. John was to look after the film processing and also to do some extra camerawork. Later he found he was expected to be the accountant as well. The unit established itself at Kilmurvy on the leeward side of the island. To the north, the great pillars of Conn~_ mara loomed across Galway Sound; to the west, the wide Atlantic surged. They settled in the best house on the island, rented from a Mrs. Sharman who owned it but lived in London. Two freshwater springs were at hand, near an old stone wharfhouse that was to be used as the laboratory. The main house was large enough only to provide living quarters for the unit. Another was needed in which to film any interiors that Flaherty might decide to shoot. So with the aid of local labor, they set about building one for this purpose out of the hard, gray limestone of the island. It was to be as thick-walled as a fortress, with a turf-covered roof thatched with straw.

Man of Aran is the first Flaherty film for which firsthand reports from many people who worked on it are available. The story is best told in their reminiscences.

The building of the "film" house is described by Pat Mullen who provided the Flahertys' local transport in the form of his own jaunting cart.

An Irish cottage had to be built for the inside scenes, and Mr. Flaherty left this job to me. . . . I searched the three most westerly villages of the island for a gang of picked men, men whom I knew were good at handling stone; then I searched through the different villages for a tumbled-down old house that had in it an arch over the fireplace suitable for our cottage. A friend of mine in Gortnagapple village owned one and, like the fine man he is, he tore down the walls of the old house, took out all the stones that formed the arch, put them on his own cart, brought them to where we were building the cottage, and made us a present of them. While this work was bustling along, I

112 Robert J. Flaherty

spent some days driving Mr. and Mrs. Flaherty around. We met and spoke to many people here and there along the road. Mr. Flaherty looked these people over very carefully with an eye to finding suitable people for his cast. We also visited people in their houses and chatted with them partly to become on sociable terms with them and partly with the idea to find out if they would be suitable for the film.

This is a method which Flaherty followed in all his films. He selected a group of the most attractive and appealing characters he could find to represent a family and through them he aimed to tell a story. It was always a long and difficult process, this type finding, for, as Flaherty said himself, "it is surprising how few faces stand the test of the camera."

For a long time the people didn't quite know what to make of us. To begin with, the name Flaherty itself-every other person in the Aran Islands has the name of Flaherty or O'Flaherty, Including Liam O'Flaherty, the famous writer, who was born there, and there were some who were quite sure he had assumed the name in order to gain their confidence. We had already had a brush with the name in Galway. There was still an inscription over the old Spanish Gate which had been built when Galway was a walled city. It read as follows: "From the furious O'Flahertys, may the good Lord deliver us!" (Mullen 1935:65)

John Taylor, on the other hand, did not spend his first week on the island quite so industriously as did the Flahertys. He was instructed to pick out on a typewriter the wording of a long title Flaherty composed, which was to unfold upwards on the screen at the opening of the completed film. Flaherty constantly changed his mind about the wording, and John became bored with the assignment.

One day Flaherty spotted a small boy called Mikeleen Dillane. A few days later, Flaherty took test shots and, when he saw them, he knew that Mikeleen was the boy for the film. Pat Mullen was sent to Killeany to talk to the boy's parents, who were very poor. The mother refused to let the boy go to Kilmurvy to work for Flaherty. [19] The Flahertys were surprised because they were offering far more money than Mikeleens mother had seen in her life. Her husband was a fisherman and earned very little money. Mrs. Flaherty went frequently to the family home and sat patiently by the fireside, sharing tea with her. But still she shook her head. Weeks went by and the boy's mother still refused. At last they hit upon an idea. Flaherty went to Father Egan, the priest of the island. He gave him a donation and pleaded with him to entreat with the boy's mother. He did. They got the boy. [20]

It was not until they were well along on the picture that Pat Mullen told them why the mother had been reluctant. At the time of the potato

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famine some hundred years previously, Protestants came over from England and offered Irish peasants soup if they would become Protestants. The boy's mother had thought they were trying to make him a "souper," as the converts, were called.

Meanwhile, the exhaustive search for the cast went on. Flaherty had to see almost every man, woman, and child on the island before he made his final choice. It was not easy going, but Flaherty was the most persistent man that Pat Mullen had ever met. Says Pat:

Rumours were rife that Mr. Flaherty was a Socialist. Not many on Aran know what Socialism means. To the great majority it means an organisation backed by the devil. Other rumours said that the cottage we had now nearly built was to be used as a "Birds Nest." "Birds Nests" were buildings or homes that were put up in Ireland during the famine years, and there destitute Catholic children were clothed and fed and brought up in the Protestant religion. . . .

Mikeleen came to Kilmurvy, but for many weeks he did nothing but fool around the place, doing whatever he liked. . . . The rest of the cast had to be found before Mikeleen could be used. (Mullen 1935)

Actually Flaherty was letting the boy get to know him well and acquire confidence in him so that he would not be self-conscious during the filming.

One of the men who helped to build the cottage was Patch Ruadh, a fine old man with a red beard. Flaherty fancied the look of him and told Pat Mullen that Patch looked "very dramatic." Some tests of him were very successful. The old man was delighted to have been chosen but asked Pat why. Pat told him he was "very dramatic" and surmised that the drama must lie in his handsome red beard. Patch was engaged for the rest of the film but frequently could not be found when he was needed. Pat Mullen finally discovered that every morning he disappeared behind a big boulder near the shore, where he spent half an hour or so combing his beard before a cracked piece of mirror to keep, as he said, "the drama in it."

Maggie Dirrane, who eventually took the part of the mother of the family, was discovered by the Flahertys as she stood with her baby on her arm in the doorway of her cottage. The first tests of her were not good, but a second lot convinced Flaherty that she was right for the part:

Maggie was a wonderful character. She was the poorest of the poor, and a great believer in the fairies. Her husband crippled himself carrying seaweed up from the sea. Maggie was so poor that she had no milk for her children, so we gave her a cow. She came over to see my wife with tears in her eyes. My wife asked her why she was crying didn't she like the cow? "Oh," said Maggie, "its wonderful, but what I am thinking of is if the children should get used to the milk and then

114 Robert J. Flaherty

they couldn't have it because the cow died." She had three children and they were all dressed as girls. One day I pointed to one of them and called it a little girl. "Oh, no," said Maggie, "no sir, he's not a girl, he's a boy." "Well, Maggie," I said, "if he's a boy why do you dress him like a girl?" "Sure, sir," she said, "the fairies don't steal girls." [21]

John Taylor claims that Maggie was not so provincial as Flaherty suggests. She had worked in Dublin for ten years and was one of the few people on the islands who could swim. [22] She did all the housekeeping for the Flahertys as well as playing a leading part in the film.

Incidentally, it is a melancholy (or inspiring) thing to note that three months after the unit had left the island, Maggie gave all the money that had been paid to her for her work on the film to a missionary priest who came from the mainland.

Flaherty had already shot some footage of both sea and land material before he eventually found the man he wanted for the hero of the film. Several types were tested, but either they were not suitable or they refused to cooperate. One day one of Flaherty's daughters was on Kilmurvy Pier and caught sight of a man who seemed exactly what her father wanted. Pat Mullen identified him as Colman King, brother of a young man who had already been approached to make a test but had not turned up for it. Tiger King, as he was known, was by trade a blacksmith, but like most of the islanders he was also a boatbuilder, a fisherman, and a bit of a farmer. Flaherty says,

The hardest one of all to make friends with was Tiger King. I wanted him very much because there was no one so picturesque or so well suited to play the part. But there was a terrible lot of gossip still going on among the people about us. One of the stories about me, so I was told by the priest, was that I used to carry a bottle of water with me and if I happened to meet a child walking home by itself from school, and I could get near enough, I would spill the water ... over the child and change it into a Protestant. The priest also told me that there was a flower which had only begun to grow on the island since we had come and which, if it took root, would lead the whole population to damnation....

Tiger King was one of those who believed all these tales.... He was finally subdued and captured one night at a wedding. . . . Pit Mullen was there too, for one purpose-in the forlorn hope of winning over Tiger King. He noted that Tiger was drinking well. And naturally the drink that makes weddings so successful in the west of Ireland is potheen. One gulp of it is very strong, enough to knock the tail off a mule. And this was a highly successful wedding! That's how Pat Mullen captured Tiger King-with potheen. When we got him

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across to our cottage, we set up our lamps and camera and made a test of him. With great difficulty we sat him on a stool. But soon we all became friends.

Flaherty tells about the seas round the islands:

The Aran Islander in order to survive has to fight the sea. 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 today are covered with tarred canvas. It is wonderful the way they can manoeuvre them in the big seas. If they are heading into a very large sea which is too big to take head-on, they will sidle over it in much the same way as a gull rides the water.

There was one instance of a crew in a curragh trying to get into land. The following waves were so overwhelming that when a wave larger than the rest towered behind them, they had to swing round and face it, sidle over it, and then turn and run until the next wave came on and then the performance had to be gone through all over again. That day the seas were so high that 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 under take 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...

In one of our scenes for the film, we had Maggie coming up from the sea with a heavy load of seaweed dripping on her back. She had reached a point well above where we thought any sea could ever break. Suddenly as we were filming, the sea reached up without warning and caught her. I thought the heavy burden might have broken her back and we rushed to help her. Maggie was still lying in a smother of sea when Tiger King got to her. He grabbed her by the hair as another wave came pounding in and submerged them both.

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When Maggie rose, bleeding and cut from the rocks, her face was deathly white. She muttered something to us, and in her eves was wild look of fear. She mumbled to us something about the sea which trailed off into an unintelligible Gaelic-something more like a wail a primitive animal sound, than a human voice. Never in my life have ever seen anyone so frightened. She was weak with fear, but unhurt. But there was a look in her eyes which went far back into primeval time. ... [23] 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 five pounds apiece. But they were so intensely proud of the fact that they had been chosen to act in a film which might be shown all over the world that there was nothing they wouldn't do to make it a success.

We had picked three skilled men to be the crew of the curragh in the film. There was one scene I remember which took place so quickly in the finished film that most possibly it wasn't noticed-when the curragh is racing and trying to get to land. Suddenly a jagged tooth of rock is revealed by the momentarily sagging waters and the curragh comes to within a foot of it. If it had struck that tooth of rock, the curragh would have been ripped from bow to stern and the three men would have been drowned before our eyes.

As has been said, the men are very superstitious. Everything had to be propitious for the crew or they wouldn't go to sea. One day I had all our cameras set. The men were about to launch the curragh to do a scene in a raging sea, when one of them saw a dead fish rolling in the surf. That was enough. That day we did no filming.

One day in April of our first year on Aran, we caught sight of a strange creature swimming in the cove just below our house. It was enormous in size and had a black fin sticking up about a foot, maybe two feet, above the water. It was slowly swimming around in the clear green water. We got into the curragh and rowed out to it. It didn't seem to want to be bothered by us. It came slowly alongside and passed 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 kind of creature. This monster, judging by the length of the curragh which was eighteen feet long, must have been at least twenty-six or twenty-seven feet in length. Pat went on to tell me that soon there would be a lot of them there. They were to be seen every Spring, hundreds and hundreds of them, so that the sea "would be filled with them."

Staying with us at that time was my friend Captain Munn, an explorer and hunter, who had been pretty well round the world. When

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he left to go back to London, I asked him to call at the National Library in Dublin and find out more about what Pat Mullen called a sunfish. He did finally dig 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 basking-shark could be rendered as much as one hundred gallons of oil. This oil was used for illumination. It was poured into a small shell with a rush for a wick. The shark was hunted with harpoons and lines, in the old way of hunting whales.

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 twenty-seven feet, the tail being six feet across. This school was four miles long. Looking down into the water, we could see that they were in layers-in tiers, tier after tier of them until 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 further up the coast to the Hebrides and the Faroes, up the coast of Norway and out beyond the Arctic Circle.

Dr. Maher, the Curator of the Museum of Antiquities in Dublin, became very interested in these creatures. He entered into much correspondence for me with various museums, particularly one in Bergen, in Norway, and we found out that even today these creatures are hunted off the coast of Labrador and that a hundred years ago they were hunted off the coast of Maine.

I had this shark-oil analysed, hoping that it might contain some valuable vitamins which are found in the livers of cod and halibut, but we got negative results. Later I understood that they are being used for some medicinal purposes. They are also using the meat and a fishery has been started on the West Coast of Ireland. [24] This basking-shark is not a scavenger and there is no reason why the meat shouldn't be quite palatable. It is a curious compromise between the whale and the shark. Its mouth is formed of whalebone and the food it eats is the minute sea-life, such as plankton, which it sifts through the whalebone, straining the water, as it were, of the contents just as does the whale. Its throat is very narrow, far too narrow to swallow any fish. I have always felt that the story of Jonah and the Whale must be a bit cockeyed somewhere.

Flaherty's lengthy description of basking sharks and whales demonstrates his great interest in all his surroundings, especially if he could discover some little-known or forgotten object or idea. The arrival of the basking sharks off Aran had more than curiosity value. It caused Flaherty to

118 Robert J. Flaherty

change the shape of his picture. "Originally," John Taylor tells us, "Flaherty was going to shape the film round Liam O'Flaherty's story Spring Sowing, but once the sharks appeared he started to waver." [25]

He was determined to include a spectacular sequence showing the islanders hunting these creatures with harpoons, even though no living Aran man had ever handled a harpoon, let alone pursued a basking shark with it. They would have to be taught. Undaunted, Flaherty estimated that by sheer good fortune he had stumbled on a spectacular high spot for his film, which would also be good box office in the Hollywood idiom. [26]

It fell, of course, to the indefatigable Pat Mullen to find out what he could from the old men of the islands as to how the hunting of the Levawn Mor, which is how the giant basking shark is called in Irish, was carried on sixty years ago. He unearthed two or three rusty old harpoons, which were given to a blacksmith in Galway so that he could make replicas:

Next day we sighted two of the monsters close in shore. They swam around in wide circles, for this is the way they feed: they surround whatever it is they live on and with their great mouths wide open swim around in ever'narrowing circles until, I suppose, they swallow the feed all up.... We laid planks across two curraghs; and with ropes that went from these planks around the bottom of the canoes we bound them firmly, keeping the canoes about four feet apart to give the whole thing steadiness. A platform was erected on the planks between the two curraghs and on this Mr. Flaherty stood workIng his camera. Two oars, on the outside of each curragh were used for driving them ahead and on fine days they were pretty steady. (Mullen 1935)

That summer Flaherty also hired a Brixham trawler, the Successful, and many trips were made far and wide pursuing the sharks and letting the crew get experience in harpooning. As had been done in the old days, sentinels were stationed on high points at strategic places on the coast. As soon as a sentinel spotted a shark, he would come racing down to where the boat was waiting, and out it would go. But the season for the sharks was ending and little usable film had been taken of the hunting. Tiger King and his boyos (sic) had still to master the technique of harpooning, which had been the pride of their grandfathers.

Flaherty had intended to finish his shooting by the end of November 1932, but it was clear that to get his spectacular shark sequence he would have to extend his schedule by twelve months. Gaumont-British agreed to the extension, and the unit remained on the islands until the end of the summer of the next year.

Various land sequences remained to be shot and, of course, more

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strengthened by the arrival late in October of David Flaherty from America, with an Akeley camera, to help with additional shooting and take over the accounts from John Taylor. Gaumont-British sent £500 a month in £5 notes. "These," John says laconically, "I kept in my back-pocket and doled out cash to Flaherty as and when he asked for it."

In November, John Goldman arrived from the Gaumont-British studios. He was one of a small group of young university men whom Balcon had recruited with the estimable aim of raising the quality of British production personnel, which was hardly rich in intellectual, let alone educated, talent at that period. [27] When Flaherty had made arrangements for his production with Balcon, Goldman had been on vacation in the USSR. He had acquired editing experience working on such studio pictures as Sunshine Susie. When he got back to England and heard about the Flaherty film, Goldman determined to join the unit in Aran. He tried to persuade Balcon to send him over to learn camerawork from a maestro. Balcon, however, demurred, and it was not until Flahertv himself paid a brief visit to England (which he did periodically all through the production) that Goldman induced him to let him work on the film.

No actual processing of the film was done on the island until October, when an expert from Kodak arrived, reorganized the field laboratory, and put it into working order. All the rushes until then had been sent to London for processing, and Goldman brought out with him a selection of the print. He was not able to bring all that had been shot because an argument between the Eire and United Kingdom governments, which had begun halfway through the film, had resulted in a high import duty being levied on the film. By the time Goldman arrived, however, the laboratory was in operation. Film was beginning to accumulate. "It was natural, I suppose," says Goldman, "that I should get my itchy fingers on it. Everyone was doing a bit of everything. We all had to, so the film material naturally fell to me. . . . Someone had to break down and classify this increasing mountain of film, and maybe put it into some kind of order. No one else there had any kind of professional editing knowledge so somehow I got around to the job. Flaherty seemed to accept the fact." [28]

The famous storm sequence with which the film was to end was, in fact, the first sequence to be edited. A lot of film still had to be taken for it during the approaching winter, but Goldman had enough material to start in on a rough assembly. That sequence was cut and recut innumerable times over a nine-month period before they were satisfied with it. Even when they returned to London the next year, some further work was done on it. But the film worked backward, so to speak, from that final big sequence.

Denis Johnston, the distinguished Irish playwright,says, "Flaherty himself, after the day's filming, would be in and out from the sitting room to the laboratory, from the lab to the cutting-room, and every time the filmprojector would be switched-on inside in order to run through another

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section of his film, all the other lights would dim with the extra load on the current. And you could hear Flaherty and his editor roaring at each other above the hum of the machine." [29]

Flaherty was known for his seeming profligacy in the use of film stock. For Man of Aran he shot a total of some two-hundred thousand feet of film. John Taylor, who had been schooled in the austerity of the EMB Film Unit, might have been shocked to see such apparent flagrant disregard of film. "But," he says, "I was full of admiration at seeing someone to whom it was a great pleasure and excitement just to use a camera. I can remember him once, when we were short of film and I was told by Flaherty to ration him, shooting for hours with an empty camera purely for the pleasure of doing it." [30]

The supply of stock sent out by Gaumont-British was made up of what are called short ends, that is, leftover negative from other productions, and thus it had already been paid for and did not add to the film's cost. Its processing on the island cost a fraction of what it would have if done at a London laboratory On one peak day's work Flaherty himself with two cameras (John Taylor loading for him) shot 5,600 feet of stock between 10:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. on sea scenes.

Goldman recalls:

Much the worst example of his profligacy, was his addiction to panning his camera. Perhaps the smoothness of the gyro-head tripod had something to do with this, and touched a tactile nerve in him. One shot-quite pointless in itself-consisted of a complete magazine (200 feet) of an unbroken pan shot ranging over the perpendicular walls of a cliff from the top-though never showing the skyline-down to the sea and back again until it finally lost its way. I think he was trying to establish by feeling it the height of the cliff. It was typical of him to try and do this by the 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 he was trying to do what could not in fact be done. [31]

In connection with this seemingly reckless use of film, Mrs. Flaherty has written:

It may be that I am oversimplifying Bob's approach to filmmaking when I point out that he simply went out with his camera and shot and shot and shot, exploring every angle, every vantage, every location, every light, delving as far as imagination could take him into his subject, photographing exhaustively everything about it that the camera's, eye could possibly see. The complaints against him always were: "He

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takes too long, he uses too much film." Indeed he did spare neither time nor film nor himself nor anybody else. He made his films alone; they were one-man films from their first conception to the final cut, not excepting the processing of the film which he always did himself in a laboratory which he took along with him. [32] But he also [33] used everyone around him. They were not professionals, for professionals had their way of doing things and could not adapt to his way, nor he to theirs. He had to have helpers he could break into his ways, young people, and particularly native people, the cast with whom he was making his film. Our cast on Aran became partners in our work. "God bless the work," they would say. [34] They lived with us as one family; they served us and the film hand and foot; they lived and died with us with the ups and downs of the film. It was a way Bob had.. . .

Bob's procedure in his work was by trial and error, and trial and more trial.... Our cameras with their long lenses were taken from one location to another; perhaps some of them would be better than the one before. "He'd see some spot in the distance," says Pat Mullen, "where he would figure he should put up his camera. Well, nothing could stop him getting there. He made a direct line, and he'd bolt through a field of briars, you know, that would hold a bull-that sort of way. He had that fire in him; you see-say nothing, but do it if it costs you your life." (F. Flaherty 1953)

John Taylor recalls that Flaherty was becoming shortsighted and that John often had to focus for him. The lenses he used were the 6, 9, 12, and 17 inches, obviously necessary for the shots of the curraghs at sea and the storm scenes. He rarely used any filter but a K2, but he always did his own operating, that is, he himself handled the camera for the panning shots. "He was," says Taylor, "very strong physically. Even a Newman camera on a heavy-duty gyro-tripod was no light weight but Flaherty would shift it from place to place with effortless ease. He told us that once in Canada he had won a five dollar bet by carrying four sacks of flour-one under each arm and two in a line from his forehead-a total of 480 pounds-for a quarter of a mile. We believed him!"

Goldman stresses the difference in Flaherty when on Aran making his film and when acting as host in the Cafe Royal, London:

Bob on the job was not only bereft of all humour and wit but was utterly concentrated on the film to the complete exclusion of all else, and this twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, waking and sleeping. His being was, as it were, both wrapped around the subject and at the same time engulfed within the subject. Nothing else existed or had meaning for him. The result was an atmosphere difficult to describe if not experienced. It was heavy, thick and charged. There was tension

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everywhere, an unbearable tension, thunderous black tension, a tension you could feel with your hand, smell and sweat in, stale tension, sulfurous tension, all-pervading, contagious and paralytic. It would swell and inflate and grow thicker and darker; emptiness and frustration and failure; pressing at the sides, bursting at the seams; your very blood thickened into a sludge and life slowed down into profound depression, compressed, explosive, dangerous. The subsequent explosion was like a volcano blowing its top. It had to be. The atmosphere then lightened, work started anew and grew into a furious pace until the tide ebbed again and the fog gathered round and the tension again grew and stretched and brooded. And there was no relief.

It would be wrong to talk of Flaherty's temper. It was not temper. It was not anger. It was much more than that. It was temperament, real temperament, the tremendous power of a force of nature. Those of us who could get away across the fields and rocks up to the old fort at Dun Aengus, we were lucky. We would sit on the cliffs on a peaceful sunny day, and rest our eyes on the ocean away to the west, or lose ourselves across the Sound to the east, in the blue still mountains of Connemara. But Flaherty could never escape from himself, from his brooding and passion. God! How that man suffered.

.... Did Flaherty love his film? I can only say that there was a strange light in his eyes. He was as a man possessed. And the smell of this possessedness pervaded and spread through the unit. We all felt it. We were all touched by it. There was nothing rational about it. There was nothing rational about making a film with Flaherty, from the beginning to the end. And when I heard him talking of the making of his earlier films, I could recognise 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. Murder could have happened on Aran, too, might have done, perhaps nearly did. Any one of us was capable of it in the miasma of madness in which we lived. But it just did not happen. It was an atmosphere far, far removed from the Cafe Royal or the Coffee House Club. [35]

John Taylor says the Flahertys lived in "a house of slamming doors. The carpenter was forever fixing them again. During the twenty months we worked on Aran, I was fired twice and quit once but I was still there when the picture closed down."

By about the autumn of 1932, Harry Watt was sent out from the EMB Film Unit to join them. There was, it seems, the prospect of a film project being set up in Ceylon, which would call for a field laboratory, and Grierson thought that Watt, a newcomer but under consideration for the Cey-

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lon venture, might pick up some useful knowledge from the Aran unit. Watt says:

I was sent out to Aran as a sort of "willing lad." I had thought and it had been indicated to me that I was going to rough it. In point of fact, I had never lived in such luxury ... I went out there loaded with sea-boots, oil-skins, etc. . . .

When I arrived, there was a kind of notice-board in the large house which Flaherty had taken, and on it there was a little note marked "Shots Wanted" and below it was written "Maggie on the cliffs" and "Seagulls." As far as I know, that was the only script that ever existed and when I left the notice was still on the board.... We juniors lived in some converted cottages and we had a pretty easy time because shooting was always desultory, just when it came up Flaherty's back, and it generally didn't start too early in the morning. John Taylor made an enormous contribution. He developed and printed every foot of film; one of my jobs was just sitting in the darkroom doing labourer's work. We used to take a bucket over to the big house every night and have it filled up with Guinness and then sit round enormous peat fires ... and drink stout and we all got very fat....

I was never quite certain how the Aran Islanders thought of Flaherty. They are an intricate and tricky people. . . . I think they admired him as a man, but felt in their hearts that he was exploiting them. . . . In point of fact, he was one of the greatest exploitationists that I have ever known. I remember that when anybody from Gaumont-British came to visit us, Bob had sold them on the rushes and the excerpts before they ever saw them. He was quite unabashed at sitting there while rushes were being run and veiling, "Isn't that great! Isn't that the greatest stuff you've ever seen!" and so on. [36]

In addition to Denis Johnston (who based his play Storm Song on this experience), many people visited Flaherty on Inishmore during the twenty months that he was there. John Grierson came and, according to some reports, which he denies, was nearly harpooned by Tiger King during a lengthy potheen session. Cedric Belirage went across in an airplane and wrote it up for the Sundav Express. Hugh Findlay, the Gaumont-British publicity man, is convinced that it was the only time in his life that the leading lady of a film brought him an early morning cup of tea. Others who spent time there were Jack Yeats, the painter; Professor Robin Flower, deputy keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum; Newton Rowe, the old friend from Savaii; Tod Rich, the studio manager from Gaumont-British; Tom Casement (Sir Roger Casement's brother), Geraldine Fitzgerald, Charlie Lamb, Arthur Elton, Ria Moony, and a strange character named De

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Silber, who was, it appears, both head of censorship in London during World War I and chief receiver of espionage for the Germans at the same time! Said Grierson of Flaherty, after one of his visits, "He is like a feudal baron among his retainers."

It was on the Aran islands, too, that Orson Welles first met Flaherty. "He was on Inishmore and I was on Inishmaan, and for a long time I took a very dim view of what I imagined was a Hollywood film-maker ruining this strange and delightful out-of-the-way part of the Irish world. And then by accident on a trip by curragh, I found myself on Inishmore and in the midst of a long and very rich conversation with Flaherty this was the great director whom I'd been loathing from my little island a few miles away." [37]

Flaherty had been a poor sleeper ever since the fire in Toronto in 1916. He had had sent to Aran a complete set of the Everyman's Encyclopaedia, which he read at night in bed. At breakfast, he often questioned the company on recondite subjects about which they displayed ignorance. He would then discourse knowledgeably on the Matter, which he had, of course, read about during the night. He had also imported a miniature billiard table upon which he delighted to play; to refuse to join him was an act of unpardonable rudeness. A piano, too, had been shipped across from the mainland, which Frances Flaherty would play while Bob displayed his skill on the violin. When they were there, the Flaherty daughters would entertain the company with songs and dances learned in Samoa.

"At three o'clock in the morning," recalls Goldman, "we would stagger exhausted, blind and stupefied with cigarette-smoke from the projection room, which was also the film store, cutting room and my bedroom and had an open peat fire at either end, into the next room to play billiards until four A.M. or later. Bob hated going to bed." [38]John Thylor adds, "One of Flaherty's standard pastimes was printing stills. Most of the film that was used on tests was actually used trying to get the laboratory working properly. All the tests for the cast were made by Mrs. Flaherty on a Leica. During the first ten months when the laboratory wasn't functioning adequately, Mrs. Flaherty also took three or four rolls a day of stills which matched the shots which Flaherty was making and she continued at this rate throughout the whole production. The rolls were developed before supper and Flaherty usually spent the evening enlarging them. . . . Before breakfast, he used to sit in his dressing-gown with a large pot of coffee trimming the prints. One hundred prints a night was normal, but sometimes it was two or even three hundred." [39]

One evening, Flaherty suddenly had an inspiration that by using the projector he could turn the film into a three-dimensional stereoscopic production. He insisted on collecting every looking glass in the house and with Goldman spent hours arranging them in relation to their hand-turned Ross projector. The experiment ended in failure. Although fascinated by

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mechanical tricks or invention, Flaherty was opposed to theory or study. One day he found Goldman deep in a book on optics and photography He at once objected. He believed profoundly that experience was the only teacher. "To him," says Goldman, "the camera was the magic box. All you needed to know was how to make it go-how to keep it clean-how to care for it. To learn the theory of its magic properties was to place a barrier between yourself and the box. What you really needed to know was the scene that you were shooting-not the magic box itself" [40]

As winter came near, Flaherty filled in time until the big storms should break by filming scenes of people on the shore and cliffs to cut in with the storm in the final sequence and took many shots of the curragh and its crew. During that winter they got all the fabulous material out of which the famous storm climax of the film was assembled.

In February, the weather became warmer and they began to talk again about the return of the basking sharks. Flaherty had been in touch with an old friend from his Arctic days, Captain Murray, who had been captain of the whaler Active of Dundee. He had sailed the last whaler out of that port and had brought back the biggest pair of whale jaws ever seen. The captain was now retired and living in Scotland. Flaherty decided that it would be a grand idea to get him to come over to Aran because he would know the technique of harpooning and could instruct the cast how to go about it more successfully that! They had the previous year.

Captain Murray, variously described as "powerfully built, with a barrel chest" and "small, wiry, and precise" was lame in one leg and very popular except with Flaherty, whose tales of his Arctic days he constantly interrupted by remarking that Flaherty's version was not accurate and that he, the captain, was the only one who could tell it.

The captain brought with him a harpoon gun, which was at once adopted by Tiger King, who was a great man with guns of all kinds, having spent some time in the Irish Free State Army. Tiger cleaned and polished the harpoon gun, which had been made in 1840, as if he had owned it all his life.

This year Flaherty decided to hire a steam drifter, the Jobn Summers, from Galway, to use as his camera boat; he called her the dirtiest drifter on the west coast of Ireland. On the day she arrived, Flaherty anxiously questioned her master and crew if they had sighted any sharks on their way there. "Why, yes, sir," said the master, "several of them." "How big were they?" asked Flaherty. "Oh, maybe some were thirty feet-some perhaps forty feet long." Flaherty was jubilant. The master and his crew exchanged glances. "Of course, sir," said the master, "there were one or two real big ones." "How big?" demanded Flaherty. "Well, there was one for sure I'd swear was sixty feet long, maybe even more," replied the master. Flaherty almost embraced him and shouted for all to hear, "We'll have the biggest fish in the world! Nothing that size has ever been known!"

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It was only later that John Goldman found out that the master and his crew had, in fact, seen no sharks on their way. "Then why did you tell him the story?" asked Goldman. "Why, sure, we hated to disappoint him," said the master. "Mr. Flaherty wanted us to have seen sharks so we said we had to make him happy."

The summer went by with Flaherty shooting each day with infinite patience and returning again and again to shoot more footage. The sharkhunting took place as successfully as it ever could. By August 1933, the unit had been on Innishmore for twenty months. Gaumont-British probably wanted the production to be wound up. The only film that had been sent back to the studio was the roughly edited storm scenes. By this time, recalls Michael Balcon, the film was widely regarded as "Balcon's folly." He screened the seemingly endless storm scenes on Saturday afternoons when the rest of the studio was empty to avoid the caustic remarks of some of his colleagues. One Saturday afternoon, when Balcon believed himself to be alone at the studio, Isidore Ostrer (the head of Gaumont-British Corporation) and his wife unexpectedly came into the projection room. They sat down without saying a word. They were enthralled by what they saw and, says Balcon, "After that, life became a little more tolerable." [41]

Nevertheless, the hard facts were that Flaherty had shot some two hundred thousand feet of film and thirty-five thousand feet of tests, had extended his stay in Aran by nearly a year, and had inevitably exceeded the budget of £10,000.

Goldman recalls working with Ted Black, the London-based production manager, to end the shooting.

By now, Flaherty was ultra-sensitive about the length of time the film was taking. If he thought anyone was questioning it, he would blow up. I myself was surprised by the lack of complaint from London. On my few visits there, I would naturally be asked why it was taking so long, how far we had progressed, how much longer would Flaherty take-but there was never any complaint from Balcon or Black. In fact, it was I who finally told them that unless the studio closed the unit down, Flaherty might go on for months. He had reached the stage where he could no longer bring himself to finish. Thus when I asked Ted Black to close it down, he did so at once. From Bob I expected a storm but he accepted the recall with such good grace that I have always suspected that he was relieved to have had the decision made for him." [42]

The editing of the film in England at the Gainsborough Studios in Islington during the winter of 1933-34 established an important precedent in Flaherty's work. Up till then he had edited his own films with con-

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siderable help from his wife and an assistant. Now, however, he had to form a relationship with a professional film editor, John Goldman.

Their points of view in regard to the editing process in filmmaking were opposite. It was perhaps largely because of Goldman's, tact, as well as his respect for Flaherty, that the film was finished without a shattering battle. Balcon, as producer, had the wisdom not to interfere. No one else at GB, says Goldman, seemed to care about the film's existence, except Ted Black and Hugh Findlay, the publicity man. Despite many arguments between Flaherty and his editor, the film that finally emerged as Man of Aran was the film as the Flahertys wanted it to be. Balcon had his doubts at various stages of production but was wholly behind Flaherty in everything that was done.

To understand the conflict of views between Goldman and Flaherty we should explain that the former was a constructivist editor, albeit a young and not greatly experienced one. He believed that a film did not have breath and life, shape and form, until the raw footage reached the cutting-room floor. He was greatly under the influence of the editing principles and methods of the great Soviet filmmakers Pudovkin and Eisenstein, whom he met in the USSR in 1931. Thus his approach to the Flaherty film was based on his idea that only in the editing could the creation of effect and meaning by juxtaposition of shots and their related lengths and rhythmic content be achieved. He was not alone; any other documentary filmmaker in England at the time would have handled the Flaherty film the same way.

Flaherty, on the other hand, had no knowledge or understanding of such "scientific" editing techniques, but he did have an intuitive feeling for putting one shot after another so that they followed the obvious logic of storytelling. As he frequently told Goldman, he "photographed what the camera wanted to photograph," not what an editor wanted. It is possible that he did not possess any feeling for the principles of continuity that are a basic necessity to film techinique. If Goldman explained to him while they were still shooting on Aran that he wanted a link shot between, say, a man coming out of a cottage and the same man arriving at the seashore, Flaherty would say, "No, the camera doesn't want to shoot it-the camera doesn't see a shot like that." "You can always cut away to some other shot," he would say, and Goldman most often did just that. If Goldman became insistent that the sequence would not make sense without this missing shot, the shot was sometimes taken with reluctance, but Flahertv had no interest in it. Flaherty often made an analogy between his use of film and the Eskimos'carving of ivory. When he would say, "I photograph what the camera wants me to photograph" or "The camera doesn't see it like that," he was expressing his belief that the material dictated its own shape and meaning. He thought that no shape or form should be imposed on the subject and that if you waited long enough, with infinite patience and con-

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templation, the film would, in a sense, make itself it is also why he endlesslv screened his material in the belief that finally the material itself would suggest its own shape.

Flaherty was very anxious not to impose his own personality on a shot. If a particular shot was singled out for praise by someone in the projection room for its lovely composition or photographic quality, he would at once ask Goldman to discard it as being "self-conscious." He had a dislike of general long shots unless they revealed some specific action or object. "Long shots don't reveal anything," he would say.

In retrospect, Goldman thinks Flaherty had no sense whatsoever for what is known as the "rhythm of film." He had, as so much of his work shows, a wonderfully sensitive feeling for rhythm as it arose in the people or things he photographed. No one had a more observant eye for the movement of a gesture-as the dancing in Moana or the pottery-making in
Industrial Britain testify-and no cinematographer has ever moved his camera better than Flaherty, but this understanding of movement and rhythm stopped short when he came to the editing of his films. Flaherty's delight was in a shot per se, and not in the cumulative effect of a number of shots arranged in a particular way.

John Goldman's notes indicate how this film was a turning point in Flaherty's career, as will become clear when we study the conflicting criticisms of it. [43]

To make such a film as Man of Aran requires an extreme awareness, an openness to reception which in my experience is rare among people. The difficulty for Flaherty, and for any film-maker for that matter, is that at outset he has to give some reason to potential backers for making the film at all. There has to be a subject; the backer wants to know what the film will be about. But from the moment when Flaherty peered through his camera, he as it were disrobed, he undressed, he
shed the logic and convention of himself as a human being and became only aware of what the camera revealed. When he set up his camera on the rocks of Aran, he was no longer seeing the Aran Islands, he was seeing what the camera told him.

This is a very subtle thing, very difficult and profound. It requires a degree of openness, a degree of freedom to receive, and a degree of liberation from the convention and thought of modern life, a dropping of the whole edifice of knowledge and expectation that we acquire as we go through life, that only the most direct and simple person can ever achieve. This freedom to be aware was, I believe, Flaherty's great gift. The more intensely aware you are, the freer and more fluent is the act of creation. In Flaherty's case, this act was infinitely difficult and prolonged. . . . All the time I was on Aran saw Flaherty deliberately pose his camera. The camera was set up and

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he peered through it. Either what he saw through it was right, or absolutely wrong. And by right I mean not conscious, deliberate composition, but life. Either what he saw had its own life and existence, or it was dead and lifeless, meaningless in its own terms. All sensitive film-makers have experienced this. The act of such photography is the first act.

The second is seeing the rushes of what you have shot. This was a vital and profound study for Flaherty. It was often hard for those who worked with him to know why he rejected some shots and retained others. And often infuriating. But I found his decision always most definite and I can think of no occasion when, after many months, if I had retained some rejected shot in the film for some reason or other of my own, he did not spot it and again reject it with the same decisiveness.

When seeing rushes, it is easy to see and reject the shots which are failures, which are lifeless. And Flaherty had a very high proportion of such failures. These having been rejected, the second stage of selection came, and here the difficulties really began. During these viewings nothing existed for Flaherty except what was on the screen. Gone was the moment when he took the shot. Gone any preconceived idea of what he wanted for the film. Gone were any notions of good photography or of focus or exposure. In the theatre, he would sit for hour after hour, smoking cigarette after cigarette, heaving with his peculiarly laboured breathing, concentrating wholly on the screen. He was free and open to receive what the screen had to say to him. Now anything was rejected which to his awareness had the slightest blush of self-consciousness, the faintest scar of imposed will whether from the camera or from himself. He often and repeatedly referred to the elimination of nonessentials. Each shot had to contain nothing that was nonessential to its own life. These were not so much judgements as perceptions.

Thus Flaherty's actual film-making took place not in the camera, not on the cutting-bench, but in the projection-room. Here he would sit, running through reel after reel over and over again, cutting, sorting, eliminating the dross and joining up what remained, always sifting, panning for the gold nugget, and the only criterion for the recognition of this nugget was his own bare awareness, this freedom from other sophistications, this freedom to receive what the shot on the screen had to say. During all this long, tedious process there was no shape to the film, no beginning, no end; only cans and cans of rushes with two thirds of the material eliminated. Imperceptibly during this sorting process, the shots would start to sort themselves, migrating from film can to film can and gathering like molecules round a nucleus. But

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there was no conscious thought directing it. Certain shots would seemingly remain outside the main swarm during the shifting about, and then they would get put into another can and tagged on to the end of another reel where the process of swarming would start all over again. And then one day, months after the start, Flaherty would suddenly realise that he was looking at a sequence. It was a peculiar sensation. One day a mere collection of shots joined up together; the next, a perceptible semblance of a sequence, seemingly self-generated, organic, belonging. And that, so far as that sequence was concerned, was the end of the second stage in making the film.

The third stage now began, similar in process to the second but longer, more difficult, more demanding in patience and perception. Each sequence was built up in this way. Some simultaneous with one another; some immediately after another; some months afterwards when the third and fourth stages had been completed on other sequences. Again the projectionists would work day and night. They would have endless strips of paper which they would insert in the reel of film on the projector when Flaherty pressed the buzzer in the theatre. "Cut that shot in half-Take out that long shot, it's dead." And from the first germ of life, the sequence would start to grow up, the hard way like any human child. First the internal life in the individual shot, then the internal life in the sequence. I recall one sequence growing this way into life and then it seemed to wilt and die, stillborn. "We've been preconceiving," Flaherty said. And so every shot had to be broken down and shuffled up and the reel put back again into rushes. And for long weeks no progress seemed to me to be made. From time to time there would be pressure from the studio. When would the film be finished? And this made Flaherty inarticulate and helpless in despair. Would the film never grow? Had he lost the touch of helping it? And tempestuous storms of utter helplessness would boil within him, caged, boxed-in, and no way out. These were difficult times. Endless games of billiards, sleeplessness. Upheavals. You cannot sympathise with a volcanic eruption; you can only stand back in awe while the lava flows down and quiescence returns from utter exhaustion. "You'll have to finish the film, John. I'm done." Peace.

Then the process would begin again. Just as patient, just as long, just as alert, watching for that tell-tale gleam in the quartz. No shortcuts here. So he must have been during his wanderings in the Arctic. Weeks and months of sledging, stores used up, exhaustion and nothing to show for it. But always tomorrow. . . .

And so the individual sequences came to life and grew, some lusty and some poor, twisted and misshapen, ruthlessly to be destroyed and refertilised. "I'm missing that shot, John, where is it? You've taken it out." Which shot? No clue. No shot had been taken out.

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But some memory of a shot in his mind from some forgotten film can. So the spare reels would be run again and a lost shot rediscovered and put back into place.

Then the next stage would begin. Individual sequences would be linked up together. Disaster. Whole sequences built up and grown after long months of loving care and fatigue would have to go, or once again must be taken apart and allowed rebirth. But never for one instant did Flaherty himself intrude on the film. Always he allowed it to grow from within, the chromosomes dividing and doubling, growing, according to its inheritance, beautiful or ugly, strong or weak, but it came from within not from without.

Here I come to a strange fact. Just as I said that Flaherty was never concerned with the conscious composition of a shot, for to him either the shot lived or was dead, so you found him in the same attitude towards rhythm. The complex of shots, the sequence of shots grew from within and conformed to no preconceptions about rhythm and flow. The rhythm in the film flowed from life, not life from rhythm. If it was disjointed and jerky, maybe that's the way it was; you can't change it because it is not pretty and smooth. If the thing lives and breathes, then it must have rhythm, the rhythm of life. . . .

To me there are two kinds of creative people. Those who create by inspiration and those who create by revelation. Flaherty in my mind was not an inspired artist: he did not work by inspiration but by revelation. And for such people the way is long, laborious and frustrating. It requires fantastic patience and a degree of sustained awareness and perception that is exceeding rare. I have always thought that Flaherty possessed these qualities in excelsis.

Having written of Flaherty's method, if it can be called such, that is of allowing a film to grow organically out of its material and the material out of what he called his "tests," there remains the other side-the stylistic and grammatical idiosyncrasies particular and individual to him. However much he may not have wished it, these were in fact imposed upon his work. What had begun as an almost imperceptible style in Nanook had become an exploited habit by the time of Man of Aran.

He had very definite ideas of what he meant by drama and the dramatic. All his later work was based on these conceptions. As a dramatic film director, I found his grammar and vocabulary using those terms in a film sense, curiously limited. His drama was based solely on suspense and since this was the one weapon in his armoury, so to speak, he used it increasingly hard and extended it to a degree that could be said to be monotonous. On the other hand, this suspense drama was ideally suited to his needs. I have said that he was a creator who worked by revelation and this ran through every facet of his

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work. Suspense was always based on revelation, and the revelation delayed until the last possible mornent. [44] He was very careful about the exact moment of the resolution of the suspense, the moment of revelation. This had to be of the briefest, cut as short as possible on the screen. 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. Similarly he disliked the medium and mid-long shots because they revealed without hiding. They contained no drama, no suspense, no resolving by revelation. In all his films after Nanook, he proceeds from close-ups eventually to a long-shot as a pay-off. Keep the audience guessing was his belief. Never reveal anything. Keep people asking questions even after the film is over. "If they want to know more," he would say, "you know you have got them."

He also believed profoundly that it is not the task of a film to do all the work. The audience must meet the film, at least halfway. To get them to do this is the craft of film-making by drama and suspense and revelations never fully revealed. This relationship between the film and audience was never absent from his mind. It was upon it that he relied and worked in constructing his whole film.

Flaherty insisted that 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 launching of the boats, to the first sight of something indefinable in the sea, to the harpooning, the fish being twice lost, until finally the revelation of the basking shark in all its length and turbulence. The technique has not varied from the earlier films but become more complex with suspenses within suspenses. The weakness of this method in Flaherty's case is, in my opinion, the monotonous regularity with which he uses it. . . .

Now I come to the last sequence of the film, the great storm sequence. This appears to me to be quite different from anything else in all Flaherty's work. In this sequence Flaherty hinted at and started to develop an entirely new breadth and splendour of expression. Here was something 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 snow, but

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in Man of Aran the storm is utterly transformed. It rears up as a gigantic piece of nature, majestic and profound where human beings are as fragile and pathetic as mosquitoes in a summer storm. Here is the force of eternity bursting upon us; and all that frail human beings have to pit against it is their human spirit, their courage which proves eternal and enduring as the prodigious cataclysm of the Universe. This is a spectacle beyond spectacle. This is a grandeur of conception that I have not seen equalled on the screen, Lear-like in its force and expression and, I have always felt, fully realised.

How can this extraordinary sequence be explained? Granted that the storms we saw that winter on Aran were stupendous and breathtaking. Granted the superlative use Flaherty made of every change in light to photograph them, yet there is something beyond all this in the dark poetry of the scenes as they flow before us and produce on us a new and unique experience. I believe that in this sequence the whole pent-up fury of Flaherty's genius flared up and expended itself, like some giant volcano bursting in its great moment of glory

Perhaps it is worth recording something about the making of this sequence. To start with, it took us two-thirds of the whole time we took to make Man of Aran to make this one sequence. Day in, day out; night in, night out. This was the first sequence to be finished, and until nearly the end, the only one. We had a rough-cut of the shark sequence and only vague attempts, all to be discarded, of the others. The Land sequence was finally put together in one night and, apart from some trimming, never altered. The opening sequence was finished previous to the Land sequence and fairly easily achieved. Mikeleen on the cliff-top put itself together and remained hanging about in a rough-cut version for a long time, waiting for a place to he found for it in the film. From rough-cut to final version required only a day or two of delicate trimming. I wonder if a single reel of film-some ten minutes-has ever before or since had the better part of two years' devotion lavished upon it? I was on Aran the most part of a year and I began work on putting the sequence together as soon as I arrived. The main shots were made during the second winter. We had a definitive fine-cut of it when we returned to London in the autumn of 1933, but despite this we worked on it the whole of that winter and spring and even when we fitted the sound-effects, we still made small changes. But I must stress that this storm sequence was profoundly Flaherty's work. Yet there are aspects of it which I believe came about through a unique collaboration between us and through a deep sympathy and understanding which merged us.

Perhaps what I did con