Robert J. Flaherty

Robert Joseph Flaherty, F.R.G.S. (February 16, 1884; Iron Mountain, Michigan – July 23, 1951; Dummerston, Vermont) was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature length documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922). The film made his reputation and nothing in his later life equaled its success, although he continued the development of this new genre of docufiction, eg. with Moana (1926), set in the South Seas.

He is a progenitor of ethnographic film. Jean Rouch and John Collier Jr. would practice and theorise the genre as visual anthropology, a subfield of anthropology, in the 1960s.^[1]

Flaherty was married to writer Frances H. Flaherty from 1914 until his death in 1951. Frances worked on several of her husband's films, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Story for Louisiana Story (1948).

R. J. Flaherty taking a movie, Port Harrison, QC, 1920-21

Early life

Flaherty was one of seven children born to prospector Robert Henry Flaherty (an Irish Protestant) and Susan Klockner (a German Roman Catholic); he was sent to Upper Canada College in Toronto for his education. Flaherty began his career as a prospector in the Hudson Bay region of Canada, working for a railroad company.

Nanook of the North

In 1913, on his expedition to prospect the Belcher Islands, his boss, Sir William Mackenzie, suggested that he take a motion picture camera along. Flaherty brought with him a Bell and Howell hand cranked motion picture camera. He was particularly intrigued by the life of the Inuit people, and spent so much time filming them that he had begun to neglect his real work. When Flaherty returned to Toronto with 70,000 feet of film, the nitrate film stock was ignited in a fire started from his cigarette, in his editing room. His film was destroyed and he received burns on his hands. Although his editing print was saved and shown several times, Flaherty wasn't satisfied with the results. "It was utterly inept, simply a scene of this or that, no relation, no thread of story or continuity whatever, and it must have bored the audience to distraction. Certainly it bored me."^[2]

Flaherty was determined to make a new film, one following a life of a typical Eskimo and his family. In 1920, Flaherty secured funds from Revillon Frères, a French fur trade company to shoot what was to become Nanook of the North^[3].On the 15th of August, 1920 Flaherty arrived in Port Harrison, Quebec to shoot his film. With him he took two Akeley motion-picture cameras which the Inuit referred to as "the aggie".^[4]Flaherty also brought full developing, printing and projection equipment to show the Inuit his film, while he was still in the process of filming. Flaherty lived in an attached cabin to the Revillon Frères trading post.

Melanie McGrath, a writer, writes that Flaherty, while living in Northern Quebec for the year of filming Nanook, had an affair with his lead actress, the young Inuit woman who played Nanook's wife. A few months after he left, she gave birth to his son, Josephie, whom he never acknowledged. Josephie was one of the Inuit who were relocated in the 1950s to very difficult living conditions in Resolute and Grise Fiord, in the extreme North (see High Arctic relocation). Flaherty knew of his son's difficulties, but took no action.^[5] Corroboration of these details of her writing is not readily available and Flaherty himself never discussed the matter.

For the new film, in an attempt to portray Inuit life in its purity, Flaherty staged some scenes, including the ending, where Allakariallak (who acts the part of Nanook) and his screen family are supposedly at risk of dying if they could not find or build shelter quickly enough. The half-igloo had been built beforehand, with a side cut away for light so that Flaherty's camera could get a good shot. Flaherty also insisted that the Inuit not use rifles to hunt, though they had become common, and pretended at one point that he could not hear the hunters' pleas for help, instead continuing filming their struggle and putting them in greater danger.^{[citation needed] [6]}

Further film career

Nanook of the North (1922) was a successful film, and Flaherty was in great demand afterwards. On a contract with Paramount to produce another film on the order of Nanook, Flaherty went to Samoa to film Moana (1926). Flaherty shot the Moana in Safune on the island of Savai'i where he lived with his wife and family for more than a year. The studio heads repeatedly asked for daily rushes but Flaherty had nothing to show because he had not filmed anything yet — his approach was to try to live with his subject, becoming familiar with their way of life before building a story around it to film. Flaherty was also concerned that there was no inherent conflict in the islanders' way of life, providing further incentive not to shoot anything. Eventually he decided to build the film around the ritual of a boy's entry to manhood. Flaherty was in Samoa from April 1923 until December 1924, with the film completed in December 1925 and released the following month. The film, on its release, was not as successful as Nanook of the North.

Louisiana Story (1948) was a Flaherty documentary shot by himself and Richard Leacock, this one about the installation of an oil rig in a Louisiana swamp. The film stresses the oil rig's peaceful and unproblematic coexistence with the surrounding environment, and was in fact funded by Standard Oil, a petroleum company. The main character of the film is a Cajun boy. The poetry of childhood and nature, some critics would argue, is used to make the exploration of oil look beautiful. Virgil Thomson did the music for the film.

Legacy

Flaherty is considered a pioneer of documentary film. He was one of the first to combine documentary subjects with a fiction-film-like narrative and poetic treatment.

Flaherty Island, one of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay, is named in his honor.

Filmography

Nyla, wife of Nanook, and her child

• Nanook of the North (1922)
• Moana (1926)
• The Twenty-four Dollar Island (1927) short documentary of New York City
• White Shadows in the South Seas (1928)
• Tabu (1931) co-directed with F. W. Murnau
• Industrial Britain (1931)
• Man of Aran (1934)
• Elephant Boy (1937)
• The Land (1942) 45-minute documentary made for the U.S. Department of Agriculture
• Louisiana Story (1948)
• The Titan: Story of Michelangelo (1950)

Awards

• BAFTA presents the Robert J. Flaherty Award for best one-off documentary.^[7]
• 1913, Fellow, Royal Geographical Society^[8]

References

Further reading

External links

• Robert J. Flaherty at the Internet Movie Database
• Robert Flaherty biography and credits at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• Robert Flaherty Film Seminar
• Revisiting Flaherty's Louisiana Story
• A selection of online articles written by and about Robert J. Flaherty