Robert J. Flaherty
I. Early years
A. Born in Michigan
B. Sent to school in Canada
C. Studies at Mich. School of Mines
D. Hired by Wm. Mackenzie (famous builder of Canadian Railroads) to map far north.
E. 1910-1912, two expeditions to Hudson’s bay by foot, sled, canoe, to map area.
F. 1913 Mackenzie suggests he bring camera on third expedition
1. Flaherty shoots, 70k feet of film
2. However, footage is lost (he drops a cigarette into it back in Toronto and it burns up).
3. Might have been accidentally on purpose.
II. Nanook
A. Flaherty decides he wants to make a new Eskimo film, but has trouble finding a financial backer.
B. In 1920, he gets backing from Revillion Freres, a French fur company, and leaves to shoot Nanook.
C. It takes him about 13 months to do the shooting.
1. While he is not trained as an anthropologist, he does get close to participant observation, and he does know Eskimo culture extremely well.
2. Powerful dramatic technique of following a single individual.
3. He is quoted as saying “Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit”
a. He clearly does this in parts of Nanook. For example, he has the Eskimo build an Igloo set so he can film inside it.
D. Nanook is wildly successful.
1. It has cost about one tenth of a Hollywood feature of similar length.
2. It establishes that nonfiction films could be wildly successful.
III. Later projects.
A. Seeing the success of Nanook, Lasky (Paramount) offers him a sizable budget to make a film anywhere he wants to (as long as it is as successful as Nanook).
B. Result is Moana, A Romance of the Golden Age.
1. Shot on the Samoan Island of Savi’i.
2. Considered to be very beautiful film
3. Culminates in famous sequence of a youth being tattooed.
a. Again Flahrety set it up. Tattooing had been abandoned but he paid the kid to have it done and the experts to do it.
4. Moana is successful, but not nearly so as Nanook. It lacks drama, struggle, and conflict.
C. He makes two short films in NYC: The Pottery Maker (1925) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Twenty Four Dollar Island (1927) .
D. 1927, Thalberg hires him to collaborate on a fiction film set in the South Seas, but he fights with the other director (W.S. Van Dyke II) and leaves project...he is to do this again in the future.
E. His troubles working within Hollywood studios and his failures to get along with other directors leave him broke, out of work, and unable to get work in the US.
F. He goes to England, where he is able to find backing for Man of Aran, a documentary film about the islands of the north coast of Ireland.
1. Man of Aran is the first film he has really had control of in a long time.
2. The critics consider it to be a masterpiece and it was reasonably successful with audiences.
G. Result was an offer to film another fiction piece in collaboration. Rudyard Kipling’s Elephant Boy.
1. Again result was disaster.
H. Two years later, and again bankrupt, Flarety is again back in the US to make The Land, commissioned by the government
1. He’s supposed to make a farming technique film (about the problems of soil erosion) but he makes a film about America’s depression dispossessed.
2. The film is released, then pulled rapidly from theaters.
I. His last film is Louisiana Story about the interactions between a local boy and drillers working on oil derricks.
J. Dies 1951