Robert J. Flaherty

Robert Joseph Flaherty (16 February 1884, Iron Mountain, Michigan - 23 July 1951, Dummerston, Vermont) was a filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature length documentary film (Nanook of the North) in 1922. He was married to writer Frances H. Flaherty from 1914 until his death in 1951. Frances worked on several of Flaherty's films, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Story for Louisiana Story (1948).

Side by side with Dziga Vertov, Flaherty is considered as one of the pioneers of documentary film. He is the father of docufiction (Moana - 1926).

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 for his education. Flaherty began his career as a prospector in the Hudson Bay region of Canada, working for a railroad company.

Film career

In 1913, on his third expedition to the area, his boss, Sir William Mackenzie, suggested that he take a motion picture camera along so that he could record the unfamilar wildlife and people he encountered. He was particularly intrigued by the life of the local Inuit people, and spent so much time filming them that he had begun to neglect his real work. On the other hand, he received an avid response from anyone who saw the footage he shot.

To make the film, Flaherty lived with an Inuit man, Allakariallak, and his family for some time before beginning filming. The silver nitrate film was destroyed in a fire started from his cigarette and so Flaherty returned and reshot the film. He later claimed that this was to his advantage, since he was unhappy with the original footage. According to him, it was too much like a travelogue and lacked a cohesive plot.

For the new film, Flaherty staged almost everything, including the ending, where Allakariallak and his family are supposedly at risk of dying if they could not find or build shelter quickly enough. The 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 Eskimos 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]}

Nanook of the North

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). The studio heads repeatedly asked for daily rushes but Flaherty had nothing to show because he had not filmed anything yet — his method was to live with his subjects as a participant-observer, 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 peoples' 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 in January 1926. The film, on its release, was not as successful as Nanook of the North.

Louisiana Story (1948) was another heavily fictionalized "documentary," 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 exploitation of men and nature look beautiful. Virgil Thomson did the music for the film.

Filmography

Nanook of the North (1922)
Moana (1926)
The Twenty-four Dollar Island (1927) short documentary of New York City
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)