The cinema : 1952 (1952)

ROGER MANVELL Robert Flaherty Robert Flaherty died on 23 July ig^i. He first began to make film records to assist his work as an explorer about igi3, but it was not until ig22 that his first film, Nanook of the North, had its New York premiere. He was then thirty-eight years old. This article is a brief tribute to the work of a great film-maker. No one ought to write an obituary about a man with the vigour and humour and charm of Robert Flaherty. We called him a film-maker, and he called himself an explorer. He was immensely lucky in his wife, Frances, who shared his nomadic existence, understood what he was doing, and made it a real part of her life. She knew most of the stories, and prompted and reminded him with a word here and there in the flow of his talk. And this seemed to go on all day, all night in pubs, streets, cafes, hotel lounges, and bedrooms. He had his own style of speech, a very soft American spoken with a musical drawl. He would smile and laugh as he talked, for he was obviously a man who had known great happiness, although heaven knows he had had enough trouble and frustration in his film career to sour a lesser artist. But I think what he really did was dramatize his troubles, and so suffer far less from them. They became part of his stories. For he had met a large number of people whose company he had enjoyed and whose goodwill he loved —