The cinema : 1952 (1952)

128 THE CINEMA the industrial heart of Britain into a community practising artificially the traditional pattern of life he admired so much in remoter parts. But between 1939 an<^ *942 Flaherty made The Land, a film few people have seen. Its sponsors, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, did not permit it to be shown in public because by the time it was finished its subject was considered too melancholy for the war was then beginning to preoccupy the American mind. This film was about soil erosion and the problem of the consequent displacement of the farmers. It showed also the difficult impact on men's lives of the machines they invent to ease their work and better themselves. When official policy permits the public showing of this half-hour film, it will be more widely recognized that Flaherty was in full command of the technique of the kind of documentary film which faces the difficult social problems of advanced communities. Nevertheless, in his last work, Louisiana Story, Flaherty featured a family living a trapper's life in the swamplands of the bayou country. He observed the social changes represented by the oil-boring derrick only from the point of view of the wonderment and superstitious awe its arrival inspired in the mind of a shy and lonely boy whose circumstances had cut him off from the normal forms of modern education. But the great gift of Flaherty to the film remains his observation of human expression. His own generous humanity gave him an uncomplicated love for people, and because of this he had the patience and the affection to watch over his subjects and photograph them, by himself or with the help of assistants, so that the smallest characteristics of their movement and expression should not escape the artistic emphasis of the screen. Out of this wealth of material he made his major personal films, JVanook of the North (fifteen months in production), Moana, Man of Aran, The Land (each of them two years in production), and, lastly, Louisiana Story. No