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ROBERT FLAHERTY 127
Eskimoes, Polynesians, Americans, British and he often seemed to refer to the men who had made his life difficult as if they were, after all, rather funny. He had enjoyed trying to get the better of them. In any case his geniality and generosity were finally irrepressible.
These are some of the qualities that went into his films. As an explorer he had discovered the goodwill he loved in people living in the outer expanses and in the odd pockets of the world to which modern industrial civilization had not come. Here life did not work to a schedule but to a season, and he always took his time both as explorer and filmmaker to get acquainted with his subject by becoming as far as possible a part of it. These people appealed to his abundant good nature. His qualities as an artist an observation of people and places both penetrating and sympathetic, and an imagination which understood the pattern of the life of a man or of a small community made him an ideal film-maker within his own self-imposed limits. His work has not yet been equalled in its own field, and he has now a generation's start over anyone else.
This work of his has not gone uncriticized, even by its greatest admirers among certain other documentary filmmakers. For them it seemed that Flaherty was consciously and deliberately turning away from the full-scale inevitable world of modern industrialized society and squandering his genius in backwaters which no longer really mattered because they were only picturesque anachronisms. It is easy to see how the men who were spending their youth founding a new career of film-making with a social purpose, who were learning to combine the flair of the journalist with the responsibility of the teacher in a medium that had a difficult and exacting technique, would be intolerant of what appeared in their eyes to be the irresponsible romanticism of Man of Aran. It seemed to them that Flaherty had tried to turn the population of an island so near geographically to