Film 305 - Midterm Study Guide Part 1: A New History of Documentary Film

The Work of Robert and Frances Flaherty

It was figuring out how to make a new kind of motion picture film. With this discovery, he brought the life of the far North Country and its inhabitants, the Eskimos, to the attention of the world, and through this revelation, Flaherty forever put his personal stamp on documentary.

While editing hours of material in Toronto of Eskimos engaging in their activities and surroundings, Flaherty dropped a cigarette onto a pile of film. It went up in a great flash of flame, but fortunately, an edited and positive print survived.

Robert and Frances spent several years fundraising, and after many setbacks, obtained backing from French fur company Revillion Freres for a return to the North to make another film. The result, Nanook of the North (as we currently know it), was a sponsored film, shot between 1920 and 1922.

Ordinary people carried out and sometimes re-enacted things they did in everyday life - working, eating, sleeping, travelling, playing with their children - doing for the camera what they seemingly woud have done if the camera hadn't been there. There are many scenes of the Eskimo working to survive, with a walrus hunt providing the most dramatic challenge.

One by one, distributors turned it down. "Who would want to see a movie about Eskimos, a movie without story, without stars?", they asked. Eventually, it was Pathe Exchange, a firm with French origins, which eventrually undertook worldwide distribution, and the film became a substantial box office hit.

Titled 'Moana', Flaherty went to Samoa, and learned of a ritual involving young Samoan men who were initiated into manhood by undergoing elaborate and intricate tattooing over their bodies.

Preceding and paralleling the scenes of tattooing are scenes of them gathering of food - in the jungle, from the sea, and along the shore - the making of clothing and ornaments, and the preparing and cooking of a feast, etc.

In all of Flaherty's films, the dramatic conflict is achieved with man against - or at least in relation to - nature.

In Nanook, it is family against the arctic cold and desolation.

In Moana, it is man against invented, or at least man made pain.

In Man of Aran, it is man and woman against the infertile rock of a barren island off the west coase of Ireland and the towering waves of the North Atlantic.

In Louisiana Story, it is a boy and his raccoon moving amidst the secrets and dangers of a primordial swamp, and an oil drilling crew wresting commercial treasure from deep beneath its surface.

A Flaherty film family usually has a strong, mature father; gentle but heroic mother devoted to him, the children, and the concerns of the family; and a son who is learning his way into his cultural and natural surroundings.

The film families were artificially created for the films with considerable care given to the casting. Those selected to become father, mother, son, sister, and the rest are physically representative of the culture and also attractive - not necessarily handsome or beautiful, but 'best of type'.

Rather than approaching a society with an idea of the film he wanted to make, Flaherty chose to live with and observe the people, to discover their essential story. Another characteristic was Flaherty's practice of shooting tremendous amounts of footage on the aspects of the people and their environment that struck him as significant, beautiful, or interesting.

For his first filming in the North in 1913, Flaherty used a 1912 Bell and Howell studio camera, adapting it to his needs.

Later he would use the Akeley, a sophisticated gyroscopic camera employed by newsreel cameramen, and then the Newman Sinclair, which became a standard camera for documentarians.

It should be noted that Flaherty was among the first to use Eastman Kodak's new panchromatic film on Moana. It was also on Moana that Flaherty first began to make extensive use of long (telephoto) lenses. He found that his subjects were less self-conscious and therefore behaved more naturally if the camera was some distance away from them.

No, Flaherty never condescended to or marginalized his subjects. In some respects, his films are as much about him - his pleasures, his prejudices, his convictions - as about the people he was filming. He always presented people at their finest, simplest and noblest, gaining their cooperation to acheive this presentation.

His films were not created from make-believe or fakery; all that he shows did happen or had happened in the lives of the people and/or their fathers.

Filmmaker's Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoesdack show in Grass the migration of 50,000 Bakhitiari tribesmen in central Persia (today Iran) who cross a wide flooding river and climb a 12,000 foot mountain to reach pasture for their herds.

Unlike Nanook, the film does not focus on specific individuals, but rather captures the beauty and the dangers of a tribal culture from an almost objective point of view.

The Soviets and Political Indoctrination, 1922-1929

After the revolution in 1917, one of the first acts of the new Communist government was to set up a film subsection within the new Department of Education.

Soviets working in the arts and media understood that ideoligical bias operated in the selection and presentation of content in all information and entertainment, and that it was naive or hypocritical to pretend otherwise. Hence, propoganda. Key to Lenin's edict was the urgent need to communicate the experience and spirit of the Revolution to the still largely uninformed, often illiterate, poor and apathetic public.