Man and Artist Chapter 7

The first time you met Flaherty, and indeed on all other occasions, you noticed, before anything else, his eyes. They were a limpid, brilliant blue, lying like takes in the broad and rugged landscape of his face, the smooth, rosy cheeks making a strong contrast of color. In later years his broad and barely wrinkled forehead was crowned, like Fujiyama, with silky, frosted silver hair that had once been blonde. He had a broad and expressive mouth, a solid chin and jaw, and a bull neck. In his fine head you saw and felt a sense of permanence; the bone structure was magnificent.

Hayter Preston has said that Flaherty strongly resembled the bust of Goethe at Weimar and added: "He could very well have sat for Rembrandt as a model for a Saint." And Grierson, in addition to his famous phrase, "the finest eyes in the cinema," has remarked on "his great square head and kind of face you see carved on the side of a mountain." He had a smile of singular sweetness.

Flaherty stood five feet nine inches tall. He was bulky and sensitive about it. He was immensely strong, especially in his youth. But for all his bulk and strength his walk was sure and soft-footed, his movements slow and gentle.

When he sat down, he squared himself into an area sufficient for two lesser men and put his broad hands on his knees. His voice was musical and could therefore achieve strident discord as well; it captured your entire attention. We remember him as a monolithic figure.

Flaherty was not a complex character. He was in fact an extremely uncomplicated man. You knew him well very soon after you first met him, and as acquaintanceship ripened into friendship the first impression of the

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salient points of his character did not change. In many respects he was like a child-perpetually inquisitive, perpetually surprised or delighted by new and usually simple discoveries, prone to tantrums or temper which lasted only a short time. He was fundamentally a kindly man, as proved by the repeated testimonies of those who knew him. We have heard him called "an eccentric." He was far from that.

We need not dwell further on his fabulous generosity or his brilliance as a talker and as a storyteller, except to note what might be called his externalization. He hardly ever talked about himself. His stories-even of his own personal experiences-were built around the other people concerned in the incidents he described. This is not to say that he pretended to be a lay figure; it was, rather, that he had a passionate interest in everything he saw around him and a passionate desire to tell others of what he saw. He was less interested in telling of his inmost personal feelings.

John Grierson makes a shrewd point in this respect: "It is a fact that I never heard Flaherty at any time speak intimately, far less untowardly, of his personal life. Nor have I known anyone who has-outside his family circle. It was a most gentle aspect of him. His film troubles everybody might know about and everybody by God had to know about them. But there was an awful reticence in him in a1l that attached to his more private self." [1]

But in all else his passionate desire to communicate his experiences produced a constant flowering of his personality, of course without conscious intent. He might have made a fine actor, but such a thought would never have occurred to him.

It was perhaps his continual curiosity and enthusiasm, combined with the magnitude of his travels, which made it difficult to ascribe a nationality to him. You knew he was an American with an Irish name-but you thought of him simply as Bob Flaherty.

For John Goldman,

He was not even an American in the sense that he felt the American pattern and identified himself with it. . . . He was child of the Canadian mining-camp, facing North, on the edge of the unknown, to the edge of the unknown, to whom prospecting, hardship, personal achievement in the face of incredible conditions of nature was natural. He conformed to his background and to his upbringing and conditioning. To have expected him to be different would be absurd. When, after his years in the North, from the Cobalt district of Ontario to the eager lone-wolfing in Hudson Bay, Ungava and Baffin Land, he came South and met industrial twentieth century man for the first time in New York, he didn't rebel against it; he was fascinated and astonished and when he contrasted it with his own knowledge and ex-

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perience of life as he had lived it up till then, he found his own way was very good, that his world was real (to him) and our world was a sewer. It never occurred to him to rebel against our world because he never accepted its reality at all. [2]

Grierson makes the same point in a slightly different way:

This American spent a great part of his life in faraway places-and most of it, incidentally under the British flag. The social background of his memory and his predilection was, at the latest, Edwardian. He never knew the modem metropolitan world nor had the training or taste to understand it. He was a sort of belated Pre-Raphaelite, intensely hating everything industry, mass-production and regimentation had loosed on the highly personal world he most enjoyed, and the more so as they stormed in on his own chosen medium. (Grierson 1951a)

If Flaherty was a citizen of the world, he was an uneasy one. One-half of the world he understood-the world of his upbringing in the stern North where he learned "the poetry of the virgin lands. . . . [The] poetry of lone-exploration and the discovery of the heroism of utter self-reliance in the face of natural forces." [3] In the other half, the modern world, he remained a stranger until the end of his days, although in his two last films we see an attempt at reconciliation. But once away from his film locations he was a stranger in a strange land. Hence perhaps his chosen oases-the Coffee House Club in New York, the Cafe Royal in London. Here he felt protected, surrounded by friends, able to exercise his prerogative as a monologuist.

Oliver St. John Gogarty tells a story of Flaherty which well illustrates his unease in the metropolitan world. When you met him, he always hailed you with a little smile, and then if you were in his company too long, he seemed to get a kind of melancholy as if he was brooding on something. One evening he took me to an expensive restaurant in New York where the waiters were all attention to him. Suddenly he said 'Let's get out of this, I can't stand the pressure.' And so we went to a tavern instead of to the best restaurant in the City." [4]

Inside Flaherty there lived a lonely man. In addition to his desire to communicate his experiences there was an urgent and compelling need for company, for companionship. "I never saw a man so worried about being alone," writes Grierson, "that's why he poured out the best of his creative power in conversation." [5]

John Goldman remembers that at the time of the editing of Man of Aran,

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My own impression is that he had become (although he could not always have been that way) curiously unaware of people. He drank with them, gossiped with them, passed deadly time with them, time he had somehow to kill. He could not stand being by himself. He demanded diversion. And remember, he was no conversationalist. He would not listen to other people. Unless he was the centre of a group, he lost interest. The world of intellect was largely closed to him so he could not go to books or to thought for solace or for refreshment. . . . All of this, what seemed to me his aversion to people as opposed to company, and his addiction to his concepts of the box-office, have strong bearing on his films and especially on Man of Aran. [6]

Richard Griffith, on the other hand, who knew Flaherty perhaps better than any of his friends from 1939 until the time of his death, adds this comment about the belief that Flaherty needed an audience round him: "I have sat with him in long companionable silences lasting whole days, I have seen him often and often happily participate in the long give-and-take of conversations with groups of people far too individualistic themselves to be flattened by the Flaherty steam-roller. There were times when he encouraged others to monopolize the talk. " [7]

Of all his hundreds of stories and anecdotes not one was about sex. (The story of the grizzly bear on the railway train is perhaps an exception, but as far as we can establish, it was not his own.) [8] He was profoundly, perhaps excessively, shocked and horrified by the sexual license of Berlin in the early 1930s. His films ignore sex. The famous publicity blurb about Moana must be the most inaccurate ever coined-for in this film, apart from the ceremonial dance whose sexual symbolism is so heavily disguised as to be almost unnoticeable, we are presented with a Garden of Eden before the Fall. The studies of the modern anthropologists might never have existed. It was not that he deliberately avoided sex in his films. It simply never occurred to him to include it.

But it is to be noted that after Nanook all his films, all his unrealized ideas for films, save Industrial Britain and The Land, are haunted by the image of a youth or a boy, symbol perhaps not only of purity and innocence but also of the son he desired and never possessed. Indeed, his possessive jealousy toward Mikeleen, Sabu, and Joseph Boudreaux, of which there is such ample evidence, seems to strengthen this theory. A number of people, too, have been struck by the interesting and marked resemblance between Boudreaux's father and Flaherty himself.

This boy image, however, may be explained in other ways. John Goldman inclines to the idea that Flaherty, sickened by our modern civilization and comparing it to that of the simple Eskimos and Samoans, whom he loved because he regarded them as happy and childlike, turned to the boy image as an only solution. Goldman feels that increasingly as his

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life went on, Flaherty began to dislike grown-ups (other than his closest friends) and tried to lose himself in the world of childhood. He feels further that in doing so he lost the vital element of his earliest films:

In Nanook you have quite simply the feeling and grasp of the family and in Moana not only the familv but the feeling of the community. . . . But when we come to Man of Aran where are the people? They have become divorced from themselves and from each other. . . . Only the boy remains, but already a kind of idealised boy, living in Arkadia. By the time of Elephant Boy, a whole film is now built round the boy. In Louisiana Story again nothing really remains but the boy. The adults are almost banished. [9]

Although we do not agree with Goldman's general feeling that all Flaherty's work from Man of Aran on shows a deterioration of theme and reality, there is no doubt something in his thesis of an escape back to childhood. From the psychological point of view we could say, with Jung and Wilhelm, that the boy represents an archetype deeply embedded in Flaherty's subconscious and the center of the mandalas he constructed in the form of films. It would be difficult, however, to speculate on the archetypal myth-Atthis, Adonis, Ganymede, the infant Dionysus.

On the other hand there is Freud's thesis that "the goal of mankind is childhood." Newton Rowe, to whom we are deeply indebted for comments from the Freudian point of view, believes, as does John Goldman, that by the time Flaherty left Savaii his character was fixed and did not change further. He also thinks that Mrs. Flaherty's preoccupation with Zen Buddhism in relation to her husband's work may well have been an attempt to explain the transformation he underwent during the making of Moana.

Rowe develops this theory of transformation in relation to the Arioi cult of the Tahitians (which made them different from other Polynesians), by which the infant, from the moment of birth, became head of the family. He remarks further that the Tahitians attempted to get rid of war (in which they were continually engaged) by means of free love and dramatic entertainment and that the Arioi cult's substitution of the God of Love for the God of War was an anticipation of Freudian theory. [10]

According to Rowe, Flaherty was unconsciously but instinctively in search of Freud's Nirvana principle and its forerunner in Tahitian life. He believes that Flaherty was in search of perpetual happiness and that he found happiness among the Eskimos. To quote Freud again, "Happiness is the deferred fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little happiness; money is not an infantile wish." Rowe recalls that Flaherty was genuinely upset when he was told that he would not have liked living in ancient Tahiti. "Then," cried Bob, "there's no hope for the human race. "

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We must remember that before making Moana, Flaherty had spent most of his life in the far North, first as a lone prospector and explorer and second as the maker of Nanook. During this film his latent abilities as a creative artist emerged. This sort of self-discovery, coming as it did in his case quite late in life, could, we presume, be quite dangerous.

When in the first flush of this self-discovery and of nascent fame, Flaherty went from his Eskimo friends-people, Rowe points out, who have never engaged in war-to the far more complex Tahitian culture, he must have found the impact of change very violent. This impact may well have caused a considerable turmoil in his subconscious. His intimacy with two remote civilization-the simple Eskimo and the complex Polynesian, both deeply rooted in the basic essentials of man's primitive soul-may have satisfied the already existent urge in his subconscious to "return to childhood," that is, to express and explain life in terms of "except ye become as little children."

This reaction can be regarded as a form of escapism, but also can be explained on the theory that "the artist is the man who refuses initiation through education into the existing order, remains faithful to his own childhood being, and thus becomes 'a human being in the spirit of all times, an artist'" (Brown 1959:66-67).

Assuming that such ideas as these explain the boy theme, and remembering that the boy theme was good box office, we could further adduce that the absence of this theme in The Land is in part reflected in the tortured and agonized protest Flaherty made in that film. Its power may rest partly in the fact that its maker was faced with a situation in which the prerequisites of his subconscious attitude were not available. There is one shot in The Land of a small boy who, even in his sleep, makes the motion of stripping peas.

If any of these speculations are true, Flaherty was never conscious of them. Nor is it necessary to overload any analysis of his work exclusively with psychological theories. He remained, outwardly at least, an uncomplicated individual.

Of course, to be uncomplicated means some limitation in character, nor is it always wholly advantageous. To some he may have appeared sentimental, but underneath this was the hard self-reliance and singlehandedness which obviously came from his early exploring days in the North and his mining-camp boyhood. Some criticisms of him as an artist are not unjustifiably based on his tendency to oversimplify, which in turn led him sometimes to make his locations and people fit an ideal conception of his own rather than the actual facts. We must hasten to add that there could never be any imputation here of bad faith such as is revealed in certain travel films, where deliberate faking for the sake of sensationalism is the order of the day.

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As has been seen, these criticisms of Flaherty's approach to his subjects burst out over Man of Aran and still remain largely centered on the film. It is probably true that the most violent of the attacks resulted from a failure to take account of the fact that Flaherty was not a reporter with camera but a creative artist. We do not complain that Veronese and others dressed their biblical figures in contemporary clothes; we do complain if an essential artistic truth is missing from the result. In considering Flaherty's work, such a distinction is essential if we are to be fair and reasonable. And of course some of the criticism will be seen to be perfectly justifiable.

Looking back again to Moana, there were, as has been noted, a number of social, political, and economic changes going on in the South Seas which the film completely ignores. Flaherty disliked and mistrusted the spread of Western civilization to areas such as Samoa. He was bitter about the diseases and commercialities introduced by traders and missionaries-especially the latter. His expressed intention in making Moana was to preserve for all time habits and customs that were rapidly dying or deteriorating to tourist attractions. There is nothing basically wrong in such an idea, which indeed he carried out to perfection, producing a beautiful and memorable film. Later documentarians might have preferred a film that overtly drew attention to the dangers threatening the ancient Polynesian civilization and even suggested a way out; but in our opinion Moana is a true work of art. Years later, Flaherty said to Newton Rowe: "You and I were just in time to see the end."

Flaherty's approach to the Aran Islands was different and is less easy to justify. Here he deliberately recreated the past. The islanders had long since ceased to hunt basking sharks. They had to be taught (and persuaded) to do so. The economy of the islands was no longer closed. They were not only strongly linked with the mainland of Ireland but to some degree with America. Yet the film presented its recreation of the past as though it was valid in a completely contemporary sense; and this was the basic falsity of which many critics, either by instinct or by direct knowledge, complained. The enormous and abiding reputation of Man of Aran in France, Italy, and Germany may well have resulted in part from an ignorance of the true facts of life in Aran. The film has more impact if the viewer believes it entirely. [11]

In any case the conflict of opinion over Man of Aran, and the fact that here, virtually for the first time, the validity of his theories, and even his own position as a creative artist, were powerfully attacked, makes it necessary to review, in some detail his behavior and feelings when making a film, and this film in particular. Here once again the experience of John Goldman in working with him on Man of Aran is important evidence. He writes:

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It is said that Flaherty's world was romantic. There was a saying in Canada around that time: "You go North to live; you go South to be robbed." South, the parasites; North, the purity of man. That's how Bob saw it from his earliest childhood. And by and large that was the subject of his films. . . . Man is degraded and debased by society; man is purified and cleansed and achieves manhood and dignity in his struggle with nature.

And this makes me ask: was Nanook really about Eskimos, or Moana about Polynesians or Man of Aran about Aran Islanders? Or were they the affirmation of belief of the golden boy from the mining-camp looking North to the eternal challenge to man's qualities? One of Flaherty's favourite expressions when I was working with him was "It's like looking for a gold nugget"; this he would say when we were screening reel after reel over and over again of the same film. . . .

This stage in Flaherty's film-making was a long, long tedious and soul-destroying process, utterly exhausting. . . . I can see Flaherty prospecting in the vast lands, horizon beyond horizon, no man knows what lies beyond, behind or any way, distance upon distance, alert for the sign that may never come of the presence of iron-ore, that one single objective in that limitless universe of exploration. So he sat too in the projection-room, month in, month out, alert for that sign of magic. And all this time he suffered; make no mistake about that, he suffered. Then the process would begin all over again.

. . . I think it is important to add that the man on the film was utterly different from the man in the Cafe Royal. As different as the prospector blueing his cash and out in the field panning for gold. Flaherty on the job in Aran 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 was 24-hours a day, waking and sleeping. His being was, as it were, both wrapped around the subject but at the same time engulfed within the subject. Nothing else existed or had meaning for him. The result, of course, was an atmosphere difficult to describe if not experienced. It was heavy, thick and charged. There was tension everywhere, unbearable thunderous black tension, tension you could feel with your hand, smell and sweat in, stale tension, sulfurous tension, all-pervading, contagious and paralytic. And like some selfcharging gasometer, 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, explosive and dangerous. The subsequent explosion was like a volcano blowing its top. It had to be. The atmosphere lightened, work began anew and grew into a

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furious pace until the tide ebbed again and the fog gathered around and the tension grew and stretched and brooded once more. There
was no relief. [12]

This personal and firsthand portrayal of Flaherty during the making o Man of Aran needs of course to be related to other factors of the production, not least those of box office. Flaherty, there is no doubt, had the strongest reasons for wanting the film to be a commercial success, not least because he wanted to revenge himself for the treatment he had received from Hollywood. His conception of box office was not the same as that of Gaumont-British. It is possible that the latter, whether consciously or unconsciously, influenced him in shooting and editing the film, as many of his friends and admirers suggested after the premiere. Goldman now thinks that after the incidents of White Shadows, the Pueblo film, and Tabu, Flaherty became haunted by the idea of box office. Hence the sharks in Man of Aran and the stampede in Elephant Boy-the box-office gimmick exploited as a box-office gimmick. We doubt if this is wholly true, especially in view of The Land and Louisiana Story, although the alligator in the latter might meet Goldman's thesis.

But the main theme in both these films is not a gimmick but a genuine expression of something Flaherty passionately felt-the need for reconciliation between man and the machines made by man. It is no gimmick when in both films the machine first appears like a prehistoric monster moving through a primeval jungle. These scenes are a perfect example of the fundamental artist in Flaherty, for he worked less by inspiration than by revelation. Like a child, when he found something new (new to him) he wanted to tell everyone about it; and because he was a genius his communication of his discovery comes to us in aesthetic form. It is transmuted because he tells us what it meant in terms of self-revelation.

But, like a child, he could cheat himself and try to cheat us. The discovery that there were basking sharks off Aran had to be forced into his
film; the islanders had long since ceased to hunt them. And this in essence is the gravamen of the various charges against Man of Aran-that he falsified his own revelation.

Nevertheless, when all criticisms have been made, Man of Aran remains memorable for the validity of Flaherty's filming of the angry sea. No one but Flaherty could have used the lens-and especially the long-focus lens-with such mastery. The violence, the physical impact, the revelation of the smallness of man against these gigantic breakers produces a terrible beauty, which never loses its effect however often one sees the film; and, as we have seen from John Goldman's description of the editing of the film, the sea was Flaherty's main obsession-an angry sea which was perhaps prefigured in certain scenes in Nanook and certainly in Moana.

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Finally, those critics who never gave Flaherty an even break after Man of Aran are answered in the following statement by Helen van Dongen who, as we have seen, had her own troubles (not unlike Goldman's) in working with him on Louisiana Story:

His work should be studied and evaluated not as an isolated phenomenon to be copied and perpetuated by hundreds of little Flahertys,, but in relationship to the development of the film as an art and a vehicle for mass-education and against the changing tides in world history. If his films are used in the educational field to show how such and such a people live, then they are dangerous; if they are used to show what one visionary poet wanted to sing about a small incident in the lives of another people, with all the artistic license permitted, they are beautiful and enjoyable. [13]

His next film, Elephant Boy, however, does not illustrate this thesis other than, perhaps, in the sequence of the Jain statue and one or two other isolated scenes. But the answer here is, of course, that Flaherty was sidetracked. As we have seen, much of the filming was not his; and whatever he was trying to say did not come through. It seems to us that the entire making of Elephant Boy represents the very opposite of what Flaherty, as a creative filmmaker, wanted to do.

Flaherty's approach to filmmaking was essentially simple. He used the camera lens to make us see things in the image of his own unique and brilliant eyes. He was happy with a small film camera. He was uninterested in dissolves and other optical tricks. The lens was an extension of eye and arm; when he moved the camera it followed precisely his own vision-hence the miraculous anticipation of movement which we can observe over and over again, the most famous example being perhaps the featherlike delicacy of the pans and tilts on the potter in Industrial Britain.

We know that huge studio cameras and large film units were a bother to him. It was a cruel mockery of fate that his last and uncompleted assignment involved him with the most cumbersome system of all-Cinerama.

Moreover, Flaherty's method of filmmaking could not in its nature take kindly to the discipline of a script. In a sense, he created a film by instinct as the Eskimos created their carvings. Each shot was like a seed, which, if the soil was good, germinated and produced first a plant and then more seeds. He did not need a script. He needed, desperately, time and film stock.

Because of his method, the editing process was vital. But, as we have learned from those who worked with him, he could not approach editing from a pragmatic or doctrinaire point of view. For Flaherty, editing was an extension of the camera process. The projection room rather than the cutting bench was the scene of his creative work.

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For all these reasons Elephant Boy must, throughout its production have been an episode of cumulative frustration for Flaherty. In his wife's book on the subject, a feeling is apparent even if it is not expressed of despairing determination to keep to the original idea, which was, stripped to its essentials, to let Flaherty loose to shoot something roughly based o Toomai of the Elephants. In light of the final product, we can only admire the Flahertys' faithful belief that what they were trying to say would appear finally on the screen. Alas, it did not.

It is easy to blame Flaherty for this failure, as did Graham Greene. It is less easy to understand the slow and insidious process by which he seems to have allowed the executives to take over the production. He was in many ways a man with a mind as innocent as his eye. He never believed that people were betraying him-until afterward. It was always afterward when it was too late, that the truth dawned on him, and then he raged. In this case, however, he seems to have kept his reactions to himself. There is little or no record of what he really felt about the debacle of Elephant Boy. But anyone who knew him cannot but feel that-apart from certain joys of filming-it must, in the end, have been an unhappy episode in his life.

Flaherty, the innocent and uncomplicated artist, was also, inevitably, a frustrated man. He had to work in a field where interests other than his own dominated both production money and the means of distribution. With the exception of Nanook and Louisiana Story, he never really had an even break.

It is of course easy to make too much of this. Others in the cinema have suffered similarly-Griffith, Eisenstein, Dovjenko, Vigo, Orson Welles, Renoir, to name but a few. Nevertheless there is something horrifying about the long gaps between most of Flaherty's films (remembering especially that he started to make films comparatively late in life). Somewhat horrifying, too, is the evidence of all his attempts-so outside his real character-to play the catch-as-catch-can, clever-clever, rat-race game of the film trade in the hope, so often abused and disappointed, of getting the creative freedom he wanted.

Of course, the box-office complex was tied in with a certain vanity. As Grierson remarked, "He had come out of Hollywood punch-drunk with box-office. This was partly a matter of very proper vanity; it also had something to do with his increasing need for money. I don't think he ever wanted money for itself. He needed it to be a Grand Seigneur. He hated not being a Grand Seigneur. It got him into some odd company sometimes." [14]

Flaherty's attitude toward money was, to say the least, curious. Newton Rowe thinks that it could be explained by some unpleasant incident in his boyhood days in the mining camps, which may have left a deep complex. All who knew him confirm that he spent money as if it had no meaning for him. This was not just generosity or profligacy; it was almost an attitude of contempt. Cedric Belfrage makes the point that when he was in Hollywood

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in the late 1920s, although he associated with many wealthy Americans, he never met anyone like Flaherty for "reckless spending." Flaherty himself once remarked to Newton Rowe that if you threw things away in life, they always came back. "Maybe," says Rowe, "he was not so crazy and wildly extravagant as he was reputed to be." He also told Rowe that all his life he could never keep a watch; as soon as someone gave him one, he either lost it or dropped and broke it. [15]

His regard for the money provided by a sponsor for his films can hardly be called responsible, although this is not meant to imply dishonesty. The unfortunate experiences while Industrial Britain was being made have been related in detail. On another occasion Grierson remembers Flaherty saying, when he was gently warned not to overtax Standard Oil's generous sponsorship of Louisiana Story, "There's plenty more where it comes from." (In fact, the production cost was eventually considerably more than the original contract price.) It is certain that at no time did Flaherty understand, or want to understand, the theories of sponsorship, propaganda, and public service which underlay the economic basis of most British and American documentary filmmaking.

Flaherty had a flair for publicity and enjoyed it increasingly as his life went on. His writings (other than his books and his pieces in the Geographical Review) were often written as publicity and created a somewhat fictitious picture of himself. He was aware of this but did nothing to dispel it, just as he made no public comment on the inaccuracies or distortions in Taylor's New Yorker "Profile" (1949), which he is known to have disliked.

"His voice was the voice of protest against authority and commercialism," says Hayter Preston, "but not against what we today call the Establishment. He was too much a Tory at heart for that." [16] Politically, we add without need for elaboration, Flaherty was an innocent.

But this is only a small part of the picture. The basic fact is that the story of Flaherty is the tragic story of the artist in cinema-the artist sooner or later overwhelmed by the industrial demands of the medium, borne down by the weight of commercial or trade union demands. Nor is it true that Flaherty never complained about this. Publicly he may have made no comments on, say, his treatment regarding Elephant Boy, but most of his friends often heard him rage against the film tycoons, both personally and in the more general terms arising from the frustrations of trying to get films started, the frustrations over distribution, and the frustration of being swindled out of a fair share of the receipts. We sometimes wonder whether there is now any place left in the world of commercial cinema for an artist like Flaherty

Every artist must to some degree come to terms with the less attractive aspects of his medium, and here Flaherty may have been at fault. Writes Grierson,

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He remained something of a Sunday painter. He wouldn't learn, or rather he wouldn't work at learning. Sometimes I thought he was too grand to learn or too indolent to learn. But that was not really the secret. There is a clue to it in his inordinate pre-occupation with hospitality and friendliness and the good cheer of conversation. He just hated to come down to the disillusionments of the practical world and especially of the film world in which the practicalities of sponsorship could be more than ordinarily disillusioning. . . . No, he wasn't good at facing up to the realities of the film world and he felt guilty about it and it haunted him and he hated to be alone. Of course you can say, why shouldn't a man pursue hospitality and friendliness and the good cheer of conversation as an end in itself? The trouble was that Flaherty never found the right country and the right profession-conjointly and together-to allow him this luxury. It did seem to happen sometimes though not for long, and-Oh my! What a wishful thinker-he fell for the illusion every time. That is the story behind all his adventures in India, the East and elsewhere. But with all this . . . you had to like him the way he was, and all our tributes were utterly genuine. [17]

The tributes were indeed genuine. There were those who, however disappointed in the hodgepodge that was Elephant Boy, realized the predicament in which he had been landed and continued to speak up for his genuine qualities as an artist. And then from the doldrums that followed Elephant Boy came a commission to make a film which, although after its completion it caused Flaherty one of the worst frustrations of his life, stands out in nearly every respect as the most significant, though not the most perfect, of all his works.

The importance of The Land has already been fully analyzed earlier. It remains here only to emphasize its position as a watershed in his development as an artist. That it came toward the end of his life, and not in the middle, is a sad fact of fate. But its significance may be easily judged by the perfection and mastery of Louisiana Story, which followed it and which contains no elements that can be criticized as "escapism" as was his earlier work. Apart from Twenty-Four Dollar Island-itself an aesthetic and uncompleted experiment-Flaherty had never beamed his magnificent eyes onto the urgent problems of contemporary Western civilization. He had made films based on the myths and legends behind reality and in far-off places. Here he made a film on the facts and deployed the same genius of eye and lens. Someone who saw The Land soon after it was made remarked, "The old boy doesn't know what its all about, but by God he makes you feel it." This was not a harsh criticism but a genuine tribute.

Although Flaherty was uneasy with the technological complexities of high-powered studio filmmaking, he had a naive interest in and almost a

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passion for machinery. We remember the day in 1931 when, at the EMB Film Unit, he first got his hands on a Newman-Sinclair camera. It would not be true to say he was like a child with a new toy, because a child often breaks the toy. A nearer analogy would be that of a noble savage discovering a wheel that was completely instead of partially round; but this, too, would be inaccurate, for he had used good cameras before. No, it was the joy of an artist finding a tool ideally suited to him, the existence of which he had never suspected. He was as happy as a sandboy.

Orson Welles remarked, "He loved a gadget in a very American way, as a thing itself and not for what it could do." [18] This description does not, of course, apply to cameras; but he had a passion for contrivances which he picked up heaven knows where, carried around in his pockets, and displayed to all and sundry with hugh enthusiasm. "But," adds Helen van Dongen, "he very soon lost interest in them"; and she suspects he may have used them as gimmicks to get conversation started.

In The Land Flaherty made a new discovery of himself. Returning to North America-but much farther south than the location of his first film-he looked at the contemporary agricultural problems of the United States, and he was appalled. He suddenly saw a situation in which the present was more important than the past. He saw that the technological age, which could bring untold potential happiness to man and woman, was, owing to financial and political greed, bringing only misery; and in the very moment of his cry of protest, he saw Armageddon bringing a solution, and with it, the virtual banning of his film. For the first time he had magnificently tackled a contemporary theme, and, typically, had given a gigantic roar of anger and a passionate appeal to our conscience. And The Land was quietly and indecently put away in a cupboard. This, surely, was the acme of frustration.

Yet in making The Land he found a new certainty as a creative artist. Before The Land, his conception of Louisiana Story could never have existed; for here he found a balance, almost a peace of mind, as did Oedipus at Colonus. Here he mastered an equation he had unwittingly been trying to solve all his life-the balance between the pagan or primitive past and the definitive present. If The Land is impressive because of its passionate incoherence, Louisiana Story is sympathetic and compelling because of its acceptance of two ways of life.

Flaherty worked by instinct, and there is no reason to suggest that he consciously sat down and thought out this particular form of acceptance. It was, surely, much more-the logical development of his lifelong search for a perfect form of expression through the camera and the projector he loved so much. We have already elaborated our belief that he learned much from his firsthand contact with Eskimo carving and drawing, an approach that came "from within." We know well enough that the way he made his films-by unwinding them in agony from his own belly-made

Man and Artist 289

him difficult to work with; for he could seldom explain to his co-workers what he was after, what he meant. We know, too, from Helen van Dongen, that the making of Louisiana Story was no exception to his rule-very much, in fact, the reverse. Yet out of all the tantrums and sulking and misunderstandings and slamming of doors came a simple and almost perfect work-the meeting of two different worlds in a romantic landscape, the acceptance of each by the other, the parting of the two, with each having learned from the other-and then, alas, silence. It was his last film.

But not the last of Flaherty. His influence on others has been and will continue to be significant. It can be seen in the work of Sucksdorff, Haanstra, Rouquier, Satyajit Ray, and others. John Huston has gone on record as saying that directors such as John Ford, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, and certainly himself were all profoundly influenced by Flaherty. [19] And the influence is all the more profound because it is not just a question of imitation. It is an influence on an approach to life as seen through the film medium. As Jean Renoir said, "Flaherty was not the type of artist we can consider as the teacher. There will be no Flaherty School. Many people will try to imitate him, but they won't succeed because he had no system. His system was just to love the world, to love humanity, to love animals, and love is something you cannot teach." [20] And it must always be remembered that Flaherty had by no means exhausted his wonderfull talent when he died. He had plenty more films in him, as he had had all through the years, if only more sponsorship had been available.

Yet when all has been said-the films analyzed, the stories told, the character of the man described-the eternal question mark of genius still remains. The ancient craftsmen described their particular skill under the name of "mystery"; and so, too, it may be said that there is a mystery of genius which goes down into the grave with the artist, leaving us forever groping vainly for its solution. The Beethoven who wrote the last quartets, the Giorgione who painted La Tempesta, the Dostoievsky who created Alyosha-these men, whatever we have found out about them, are not fully known to us. And about Flaherty there is a similar mystery; in the end he defies critical scrutiny

This explorer, always roaming with a hungry heart, traversed the world without charts-proud perhaps to take no more than a penny atlas with him into the mysterious regions of creative expression; and this perhaps is one of the grand gestures of genius. He traveled alone, for even those who went with him could not be told whether the destination would be paradise or a barren landfall. As handsome in style as he was handsome as a man, he fought his way to a result with an immense, an almost terrifying simplicity of purpose. If the result was a failure, the rest of us can airily explain why; if a success, we can only guess at the reason for it.

Robert Flaherty's legacy to the world of film is wholly individual. His genius is not for imitation. His style cannot be reproduced, even by those

290 Robert J. Flaherty

with a wider education and a more ordered intellect than he ever possessed. But his influence remains; for he made men look at this world with new eyes.

Those who have shared in the innocence of his gaze, whether at the anger of the seas, the cold of the ice wastes, the heat of the tropics, the desolation of man-made deserts, or the darkness of the bayous, and at the people who dwell in all these places, will have gained a knowledge and an understanding that will help them to map, as did Flaherty, the journey

beyond the sunset, and the baths
of all the Western stars

until they die.

291

Afterword:

One basic fact about Flaherty's films is that, just as he was unable to write a script, so he did not understand, or even want to understand, the fundamental technique of film editing. Neither Nanook nor Moana could be thought of as edited films; they were just shots joined together in the right order to tell some kind of narrative coherently

Man of Aran had the benefit of John Monck, a professional editor. The Land and especially Louisiana Story, had the brilliant skill of Helen van Dongen, trained from 1928 by Joris Ivens. When Helen van Dongen surprised Frances Flaherty in the cutting room in Abbeville, her reaction was wholly understandable and indeed would be supported by any professional filmmaker. Her quitting to return to New York was finally overcome by her loyalty to Flaherty, to her official status as associate producer on the film, and to her deep respect for the film medium to which she devoted her life. (Her production diary from which extracts are reprinted in my text more than proves her professional integrity.) To have an amateur, which was what Frances Flaherty was, interfere, or even meddle in her work, was unthinkable.

Flaherty had the wisdom to realize this, and hence he beseeched her to return to Abbeville. Later, when he found that his ample budget was overspent, it was not to his credit that he left it to van Dongen to go to Roy Stryker at Standard Oil to ask for more money with which to finish the film. (Where were all the mostly well-heeled visitors who accepted the warm hospitality at Abbeville?) Small wonder, then, that Frances and Helen were unable to appear in public together in the future without mutual frigidity. I was therefore not surprised when I talked to Frances Flaherty at

292 Afterword

Black Mountain Farm in the Summer of 1957. she would not talk about my manuscript (which she had had some months) but only of Bob as an interpreter of Zen. I felt, poor Bob!

I admire Flaherty as a cinematographer able to capture the most magical visual images, often with a camera movement born of instinct, yet at the same time I deeply respect van Dongen's skill, both creative and technical. As e. e. cummings. wrote, "He was a God among men," and who am I to challenge that?

Paul Rotha Wallingford
Oxfordshire
England
February 1983

Link to Appendix I

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