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A MISCELLANY OF FILMS
ing down the sunlit waterways and through the creepered woods of the Louisiana bayous. Suddenly he is brought face to face with the outer world of industry when an oil-boring operation is carried out in his neighbourhood. It is typical of Flaherty that he keeps rigidly to the boy's-eye view of this operation. There is no question of explaining the social significance of oil in the economy of this waste land or of the change in the fortunes of the Latour family with whom the contract to carry out the operations is signed. They simply make friends of the engineers who arrive with a floating derrick, which looks like a vast electric power pylon towering over the water.
The boy is a romantic child ; he has names which link him to the adventurers and conquerors of the past, Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Latour. He has skill and cunning in his own world, but is very shy in the new world of the engineers. His father is friendly but old and slow of speech, with his mixture of French and English. The oil is tapped after a terrible battle with an escape of gas and steam which silts the area with slippery mud and leads to a period of despondency in which both the Latour family and the engineers share. Then the boy lets his superstition overcome his fear, and secretly empties down the empty shaft the little bag of salt that he always carried with him for luck, and then spits after it for good measure. When the oil is actually tapped he feels his belief is justified. The story ends in happiness.The rest is hunting and fishing, and the engineers depart leaving behind a sealed pump which they call a Christmas tree. The Latours get a few simple domestic utensils, and the boy a new gun. That is all.
The film somehow has the atmosphere of a Chehov short story. Its shape lies in its continuity of atmosphere. It certainly has a beginning and an end in the coming and going of the engineers, but these are incidents and not ingredients of the true story. This story is the boy himself and the Petit Anse bayou country where he lives. The opening of the film is just photographic magic, with the sun glistening on a huge umbrella-leafed plant looking like gossamer floating above
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