We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
JOHN GRIERSON REPLIES
Flaherty with his Man of Aran has caused almost as much division of critical opinion as Thunder Over Mexico. David Schrire's article puts the principal objections: that Flaherty is a romantic escapist and that the film is only so much idyllic fudge. As I originally, I think, invented the word "escapism," and used it on Flaherty in the very early days of Cinema Quarterly, it may seem scurvy in me to double-cross a supporter. But I do not agree with this estimate either of Flaherty or Man of Aran.
In the first place one may not — whatever one's difference in theory — be disrespectful of a great artist and a great teacher. Flaherty taught documentary to create a theme out of natural observation. He brought to it for the first time a colossal patience in the assembly of effects. And this was necessary before the discursive travelogue could become a dramatic — or dialectical — analysis of event.
It is of course reasonable for a later generation of film-makers to want a documentary tougher, more complex, colder and more classical, than the romantic documentary of Flaherty. It is fitting that it should want a documentary in which both material and theme are found in our own social organization and not in literary idyll. But there are considerations one must watch carefully. The first one is that Flaherty was born an explorer, and that is where his talent is: to be accepted on its own ground. It would be foolish, as Professor Saintsbury once remarked, to complain of a pear that it lacks the virtue of the pomegranate.
I call it futile, too, to ask of Flaherty an article which cannot under commercial conditions be possible. Some of us can make do with a thousand pounds on a production, and we buy our independence accordingly. Flaherty's method involves the larger backing of the commercial cinema. He has of necessity to obey its rules. These rules are not always articulated but they are understood. Whatever Flaherty's carte blanche on the Aran Islands, the controlling factor, you may take it, was that he did not want to let his masters down. This factor was undoubtedly responsible for making his film more sensational and more spectacular than was expected. It was responsible for making it spectacular at the expense of elements — possibly deeper elements — which under other conditions he might have included.
But rather than complain of the result, I wonder that so much was done within commercial limitation. No English film has done so much. Not half a dozen commercial films in the year can compare with Man of Aran in simple feeling and splendid movement. I am all for congratulating Flaherty on pushing the commercial
10