Robert J. Flaherty

American Robert J. Flaherty (1884-1951) is the father of documentary cinema in the full sense of the word, when it is discussed as a personal art form and conscious self expression. Thousands of non-fiction films had been made since the 1890s, and feature-length non-fiction films, chiefly exploration films, were already popular. Flaherty’s films were also part of this established genre, bringing it to a new level.

From his first film, Flaherty was considered one of the giants of cinema. He inspired and was admired by Jean Renoir, John Ford and Sergei Eisenstein. He has been compared to such great American poets and writers as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville. His films are essential, when thinking about the role of cinema as the preserver of lost experiences and they offer in-depth material for discussing what Claude Lévi -Strauss called “the savage mind,” despite and perhaps because they almost never were recordings of the already modernized ways of their time, but reconstructions of already disappearing ways of life. Criticism of Flaherty’s ethnological stagings was common already in the time of the films’ release, but Flaherty saw his documentary calling in the scope of millennia, not years.

Originally, Flaherty was an ore prospector continuing in his father’s profession at the employ of a railway company at Hudson Bay. When he decided to take a camera with him, Nanook of the North (1922) was made with financing from a fur company. The striking masterpiece about the struggle for life was a reconstruction stripped of all signs of modernity where old customs were recreated.

Financed by Paramount, Flaherty and his family spent three years on Samoa, where he filmed Moana (1926). The visually enchanting film was an account of the boy Moana’s growth to adulthood. In his review of the film, John Grierson established the word ‘documentary’ in film criticism. When Grierson established himself as the father o thef British school of documentary cinema, he invited Flaherty to England where he made Industrial Britain (1933). Man of Aran (1934) produced by Michael Balcon, brought Flaherty to his roots in Ireland. In the film fishermen show how basking sharks are caught using traditional methods amid waves as tall as buildings. Again, Flaherty looked to major investors when he traveled to India on the expense of Alexander Korda. In the Kipling-based Elephant Boy (1937) the narrative scenes were directed by Zoltan Korda, and the stunning nature imagery by Flaherty.

On the eve of the Second World War Flaherty returned to his native United States. The Land (1942) was an epic look at the state of farming in the country, and the footage of erosion in the Mississippi region was ecologically alarming. Financed by Standard Oil, Flaherty directed Louisiana Story (1948), his last masterpiece, which shows the bayou country through the eyes of a Cajun boy.

In thirty years, Flaherty directed only six films that were fully his own. “But what films!” said G.W. Pabst. Later documentary cinema, including the work of Finnish Markku Lehtikallio, has been influenced by Flaherty’s poetic views of a lost paradise and of love uniting men and women from the North and the South.

Antti Alanen
Researcher at the National Audiovisual Archive

Translation by Maria Koistinen