Documentary News Letter (1942-1943)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER JANUARY 1942 THE GIANT SHINNIES DOWN THE BEANSTALK By THEODORE STRAUSS An interview with Robert Flaherty reprinted from the New York paper "P.M." rHi giant was in a jovial mood. Despite the tact that a commiserating waiter was bringing distressing minute-by-minute reports on the backward progress of the Dodgers. Robert Flaherty continued to scatter his dollars like chaff — probably to bolster his own failing confidence— in even money on "dem bums." But when the cataclysmic blow finally fell, Mr. Flaherty's shaggy while head was only momentarily bowed. Raising his flagon with a fullblooded oath that would have rent the veil in a tabernacle he was shortly launched on the reasons why Hollywood morticians are the wiliest entrepreneurs at large. Faughter shook his mighty frame like an inner tempest. The Dodgers had lost? "I am absolulelv heartbroken," he said sincerely, but already his mirth was erupting. He had thought of another story. Listening to Robert Flaherty one listened to a great romantic and a great romancer. Put him in a cassock and you might have had Friar Tuck — a great tumbling man with massive red cheeks, brilliant blue eyes and the sharp profile of an eagle. His size was matched only by the exuberance of his wit ; he tossed ideas like an agile bull lifts the matador. A born raconteur, he talked fabulously out of a memory shot full of colourful. bawdy and heroic reminiscence of all the places he had ever been, from the dangerous straits of Hudson Bay to the fragrant islands of the Pacific. from Mysore and the elephant hunts to the Aran Islands where they shoulder the northern sea. He talked like a man who had just finished a long and gruelling job. In fact he had. It is nearly two years since Mr. Flaherty was summoned by Pare Forentz and the then existing United States Film Service to make The Land; nearly two years since he returned to his homeland for the first time in a decade of wandering. It is nearly a year and a half since he loaded his cameras in a station wagon and set out to "rediscover" America. "It was really an exploration," he said. To be sure, his journeys constantly "on location" were but part of the long. e\h, n-nn struggle that goes into the making of a Flaherty film. There were endless conferences with Wayne Darrow, head of information in the Agriculture Department, who. as Mr. Flaherty gratefully remembers, told him "Take your time and don't pull your punches." There were talks with such interested parties is Milo Perkins, and after G.-B. INSTRUCTIONAL LTD. THE STUDIOS • LIME GROVE ■ SHEPHERD'S BUSH • W.I 2 Telephone: Shepherd's Bush 1210 Telegrams: Gebestruct, Chisk, Londo SEND GREETINGS AND BEST WISHES FOR 1942 TO ALL THEIR FRIENDS AND ASSURE THEM THAT THEY ARE AT THEIR SERVICE EQUALLY IN 1942 AS IN THE PAST. travelling 25.000 miles and exposing 100,000 feet of film began the cutting with Helen Van Dongen and the writing of the narration with Russel Lord— a task which Mr. Flahertj said had to be so accurate "that only an expensive corporation lawyer could write it." "Actually," he said, "there wasn't any story. They gave me a camera and threw me out into the field to make a film about the land and the people that live by it. 1 was fresh and had no preconceptions whatever; I was so sensitive you could hear me change my mind. So I merely groped my way along, photographing what seemed to me significant: it was only later that we began to see the pattern. The film is different from my others, it isn't a romance. It hasn't any specific solution for what the camera sees, but it is often critical. And that perhaps is the most amazing thing about it, that it could be made at all. It shows that democracy can face itself in the mirror without flinching." For what Mr. Flaherty met and saw and heard and photographed was often grim. He saw eroded, desolate lands nearly equal in area to the size of Germany, France and England combined. From the rich harvests of the Minnesota river valleys he turned southward, where the long dusty roads were often clotted with migrants too weak to work even if they found it. Elsewhere, in the midlands, he met farmers who boasted of having worn out five or six farms in their lifetimes—and then he saw farms that had been left behind, the rat-infested shells of empty houses. And again the straggling pilgrims on the dusty roads. But just as ominous was the terrible face of the machine. He watched the automatic cornhusker that robbed the rows with blind efficiency, the cotton picker, watched by awestruck workers who hardly surmised its impact on their way of life, which did in twenty minutes what it took a man two days to accomplish. In Minnesota he saw an angle-dozer which cleared an acre of wooded, boulder-strewn land in an hour. The farmer who owned it had paid S6.000 for it, cleared new land for his neighbours at five dollars an hour and was so proud of his machine that he wore a yachting cap at work. "It is incredible," said Mr. Flaherty. "With one foot in Utopia, where the machine can free us all. we have yet to dominate it. That is the problem of our time— to conquer the machine. With i1 new modern countries have been developed in a matter o\' generations rather than centuries. In 1855 Japan, an almost medieval country, sent its ' first Ambassador to the Court of St. James attired in a suit of chain mail. Today it is one of the most highlv industrialised countries in the world. The progress in this country is something that neither Washington nor Jefferson could have dreamed of. Todaj we stand at the threshold o\' a great calamity or a great new era. The decision is ours." Didwesav Mr. I lalicrn w.i a lomantic? lie is. His feet still wear seven-league boots and there is still the aura of legend about his massive shoulders. He still hopes that a kindly deity will allow him some da\ to wander to the Mountains of the Moon, to the Himala>an back-countrv and China. But beneath his great gusto Mr. I lahcrlv has changed. His "•lediscovery" has left its impress upon him. In facing what is the most primitive and most modern of our problems he has not escaped unmoved. Out of the seared hinterland of America he has emerged with what he believes to be his deepest and truest film.