Backstage-America's greatest film poet

SASA MAJUMA | Tuesday February 9, 2010 00:00

Robert Flaherty (1884-1951) is considered the 'father' of documentaries. He is best known for his Nanook of the North (1920/1922) on the life of an Eskimo/Inuit and his family. The barren Aran Islands are three naked wastes of rock around 50km off Galway City, to the west coast of Ireland - they are actually the westernmost point of Europe. The biggest of the three islands is Inishmore and it is only 12km long. The cliffs are up to 200m high and still waves will breach them.

The people make soil out of seaweed to support their meager seasonal crops and hunt sharks when the sea permits.

Their life is simple, harsh and full of struggle against the elements, leading Flaherty to say, 'It is a fight from which he [Aranites] will have no respite until the end of his indomitable days'.

The repetitive and never-ending struggle to eke out a living in a place that is one's own is captured by Flaherty in this extraordinary documentary. A musical score created by John Greenwood beautifully compliments it. It is as if only music could match the power of the immense waves that come crashing over the rocky cliffs of Aran. The scenes where men set out in small boats or curraghs to go to the mainland or to hunt giant creatures of the deep are miraculous - all the more so for people living in landlocked Botswana who have never experiences the powers of the great oceans.

Man of Aran centres on a created family of father, mother, son.

The father is Colman (Tiger) King, his wife Maggie Dirrane and their son Mickleen Dillane (as natives of Aran they spoke in Gaelic, but had their voices dubbed into English for the film instead of using subtitles). King had many skills including farming, fishing, boatbuilding and as a smith.

The approaches that Flaherty had pioneered in Nanook, that he eventually called 'non-preconception', were not strictly followed in the making of Man of Aran. He had a script and made his amateur actors follow it. He also had an eye for the eventual commercial success of this film, so put dramatic possibilities at a higher level than strict anthropological accuracy. He was accused of recreating and staging ancient fishing techniques that even in the 1930s had been abandoned by the Aranites.

The woman who nearly drowns was actually facing death - so what is filmed is real while at the same time being a recreation that transforms this from being a documentary into a feature film. The most dramatic sequence in the film is when the men set out in their small boats for two days in rough waters to kill a giant basking shark.

Man of Aran won many awards including the Mussolini Cup for Best Foreign Film at the Venice Film Festival. The great New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael said that is was a 'truly exalted work; undoubtedly the greatest film tribute to man's struggle against hostile nature'. It can be watched today as a movie, not a propaganda tract promoting 'socialist realism'.

Flaherty spent two and a half years making Man of Aran. It is a stunning movie about man's determination to survive in a harsh environment. Facing the turbulent terrors of the Atlantic Ocean, the Aranites still found ways to eke out an existence in a landscape void of vegetation and even soil.

After Nanook Flaherty made a number movies in the South Pacific, including Moana (1927) filmed in Samoa, and co-directed a number of movies with others. After Man of Aran he only made three films: Elephant Boy  (1937), The Land (1942) and Louisiana Story (1948) for which he received an Oscar nomination. After he died his widow, Frances Hubbard Flaherty at their home in southeastern Vermont, kept his fires burning there for many years. George C Stoney, whose family is from Aran, returned there in 1977 to make How the Myth Was Made on what Flaherty did on Aran and how he did it. He called Flaherty 'America's greatest film poet'. There is proof that Flaherty would develop his films on site and then show them to the people.

A Great Day in Harlem is based on a famous photograph of 57 of the world's jazz greats taken on a stoop in Harlem in 1958. Years later that picture became the basis of a documentary film by Jean Bach that is one of the best on jazz in Harlem.

The famous photograph was taken on an August morning at 10am outside a row of brownstones on 126th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues in Harlem. Esquire Magazine had invited the musicians there as part of planning for a special feature issue on jazz. If you love jazz you won't want to miss this film. 

Man of Aran is one hour and 14 minutes long and 'A Great Day in Harlem' is one hour long. Email:sasa_majuma@yahoo.co.uk