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Flaherty reveals a joy, an unholy pleasure in his subject matter; he revels in it. And its distinguishing quality is a deliberate turn to the fringes of civilization or to an anthropological present, a present for which the Industrial Revolution need never have taken place; and romanticism and "lo, the noble savage" pervades the whole, wraps it in the old miasmal mist of irrelevancy and distraction. In Flaherty's world of cinema there are no such things as machinery and smoke-grimed factories, hotels and labour camps, unemployment and hunger, tenement houses and mansions. But the primitive Esquimeaux, bronzed Polynesians, virgin snows and coconut trees, surf and elemental storms are the normal material for his celluloid. And it is not as if he is a sensitive soul who cannot bear to contemplate the misery and pain of our modern economic life; Flaherty is no emotional vegetarian. For he can face and shoot individual pain with an all too facile relish (vide the tattooing scenes in Moana). It is just that he is a throwback, an artistic atavism to whose apologia "I like this idyllism. It satisfies my artistic conscience," there is no reply. For "aesthetic" individualism cannot be overcome by rational argument. The only course to follow is to give the " artistic" product of such people the tribute of our condemnation.
Flaherty is an institution. He rushes to the bucolic present for material to fashion into his exquisitely finished product. Our economic system breeds such types as this by the score and their film prototypes are merely logical reflections of their role in every aspect of modern culture.
Their threat is twofold; in the first place, they are conditioning the mind of the public to this evasive idea of documentary. They are no longer isolated. Numbers of imitators have already sprung up and "mocumentary" is beginning to dig itself in as a normal, item in supporting programmes. Secondly, they have led cine magnates to imagine that documentary deals either with the noble savage in his native environment, or is a spineless, elegant reflection of the pleasant trivialities of modern life. And may the Lord preserve documentary from the support of the commercial producing companies !
Documentary will have a hard fight to establish itself. It is already probably too late to break the title that Flaherty pictures have to the word. Another one may have to be coined. That we have assisted " mocumentary" in establishing itself is unfortunate. But let us now realize, clearly and finally, that the pictures of Flaherty etc., are hindrances to the growth of documentary; that not only must we withdraw all support, not only cease damning with faint praise, but that the time is over-ripe to attack evasive documentary for the menace that it really is.