Amateur Movie Makers (Dec 1926-Dec 1927)

FILMING with FLAHERTY From Arctic to Antipodes With The Famous Amateur Who Made -'Nanook" and "Moana. By Mina Brownstein OSSESSING imagination only rarely, the policemen who m an New York's bridges probably cannot understand why a certain seemingly aimless gentleman with a box-like contraption strapped over his shoulder should meander so frequently from Manhattan to Brooklyn or Queens, at strange hours of the day. Fare, they consider, is only five cents, and the gentleman looks prosperous. And were you to ask these same policemen how the city looks at six in the morning through a mist, they would, no doubt, think you also a "nut." But ask this man, Robert J. Flaherty, director of "Nanook of the North" and "Moana of the South Seas," and you would learn that he feels there is a vital spirit breathing from these great piers of steel and stone, a breath which he is seeking to preserve forever with his motion picture camera. For this unique producer, himself an amateur in the best sense of the term, who has heretofore wandered to the far corners of the earth to record with eye of truth and beauty the lives of strange peoples, is now engaged in attemptrng a "camera poem" of New York City, which is to be a sort of architectural lyric where people will be used only incidentally, as part of the background. It is to be short, only a few hundred feet, and is to have as its object the imprisoning of the metropolis spirit as it really exists, in silhouettes of buildings against the sky, in the sweeping span of bridges, the flurry of pressing crowds and the crazy reeling of lights in the subway. Robert Flaherty, mining engineer by profession, and moving picture experimentalist by inclination, has. in the last ten years, attained an enviable position as one of the freshest directing personalities in the moving picture field. His training as an engineer did not touch on the intricacies of experimental photography. And now that he is equipped as a directing and filming expert, it is because an amateur has become professional through personal experience. He proves in actuality what moving picture enthusiasts. Ralph Block on one end, and Gilbert Seldes on the other, have claimed in theory ; that originality and strength, artistry and sincerity will most surely come into moving pictures through the work of amateurs, who are disinterested commercially, and who feel the same sense of intimacy with their FLAHERTY PLUS PANCHROMATIC FILM EQUALS SAMOA cameras that painters feel with their tubes and brushes. When, without trick advertising or publicity agents, Robert Flaherty released "Nanook of the North," to an indifferent public, many felt a signal had been given, a wedge inserted into com^entional production. Cool as most critics were about the box-office merits of the film, there was almost no one whose opinion mattered a continental who did not drink in its simplicity, its sheer photographic effects and its delicacy of interpretation, with joy. The filming of "Nanook" was almost an accident. It was not until his third exploration trip into the North in 1913 that Mr. Flaherty packed in his kit the necessary apparatus for making a motion picture of the life of the Eskimo. For a year and a half he lived among them as an engineer and explorer and his admiration of their life, their games, their struggles, grew on him slowlv. He was immersed in enthusiasm. He knew they made fine film stuff. Then, after many months of hard work, his precious film was drowned while crossing a rotten ice stream within twelve miles of the journey's end. Undaunted, he made new plans immediately for retaking the picture. His next trip to the North, made especially to take the film, was completely successful. He did away with episodic filming; he built his first camera entity. As a critic of present moving pictures Mr. Flaherty has refreshingly clear premises from which he draws his comment. Unlike most critics he is not at all at sea about the several ideal uses he would make of the camera, a fact which is probably responsible for the unadulterated filming he has done till now. "I do not believe in synthetic filming," he states concisely, by which he means such films a s "Metropolis," " Variety", "Caligari." "I do not think that patching and retouching to secure film effects is the wisest or most sensitive use of the camera. To say that life is not like the nightmares and distortions which the Germans have brought to us is not to get my point exactly. To say that these last named pictures Seven