Today is the birthday of the so-called “father of documentary film” Robert Flaherty, a man whose accomplishments cannot be ignored, and yet these same accomplishments are still, rightfully, debated to this day. Known mostly for his two films about “primitive” man un-touched by progress – 1922’s Nanook of the North, detailing the life of an Inuit fisherman, and 1934’s Man of Aran, showing the wild life of a small family on the wild Aran Islands, located off the West coast of Ireland. Nanook was a hit – surprisingly practically everyone – and it launched an interest in using this new medium of cinema for something other than melodramas and knockabout comedies. Flaherty embedded himself with these communities, and some of his footage is truly extraordinary. But you should probably put documentary in quotation marks. This wasn’t just caught footage. He engineered scenes, sometimes putting the very real people at risk (see the quote in the title). Still: incredible photography, incredible glimpses of a time long gone by. Although not so long as that. I’ve been to the Aran Islands. They really are that wild.
I wrote about Man of Aran for Film Comment, and get into all of this in an in-depth way.
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