Focus: A Film Review (1950-1951)

244 Robert Flaherty By . . . MARYVONNE BUTCHER Bv the death of Robert Flaherty at the age of sixty-seven the cinema has suffered a grave loss indeed. On mainplanes his was an influence that can ill be spared, and perhaps not least on account of that fertility of geniuswhich at sixty gave us what is possibly his best film, showing no decline in any power and a positive advance in subtlety of theme. The parallel with Dr. Vaughan Williams is too striking to be missed : if The Louisiana Story was Flaherty’s fifth symphony, how can we reconcile ourselves to the loss of that sixth which we shall now never know ? I defy anyone to see a Flaherty film and remain unmoved : about his best work there is a quality of lyricism, of limpidity, that has the immediate impact of a poem and that leaves the same feeling of serenity and inevitability behind. To have achieved this extreme authority of treatment combined with extreme mastery over medium so early, and to have preserved it inviolate so long proves Flaherty to have had a sense of purpose and a tenacity very unusual in the film-world ; and though it may be argued that his personal predilections have perhaps deliberately narrowed his range to subjects which made this singlemindedness more easy, this still does not explain away the achievement. “I’m primarily an explorer,” Robert Flaherty once said, “and only' incidentally a movie-maker,” and it may well be that the indifference generated by this point of view towards the common tools and tricks of the trade is what gives to all Flaherty’s work that effortless visual beauty which is perhaps its dominant characteristic. It is impossible fully to understand Flaherty’s attitude to his subjects or his method of film-making without some knowledge of the details of his early environment and experiences, which are highly relevant to his subsequent career : it is sufficiently rare in the history of the cinema to find a man whose course has run so logically from start to finish. He was born in 1884, in Iron Mountain, in the upper Michigan Peninsula; his father was Robert Henry Flaherty, a mining engineer from that part of the countrv with all the lack of respect for permanence which is the mark of the true mining man. Young Robert was sent to school at the age of six, but it was not a prospect which appealed to him very much, and on the whole he tended to go when it suited him and when there to behave with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. In 1896 his father was made the manager of the Golden Star Mine in the Rainy Lake region of Canada, and he decided to take his eldest son along with him ; it was generally agreed that it made very little difference whether he were at school or not and the township of some two thousand people to which he was going certainly afforded an interesting alternative. It must have been very like an early Western : gambling, shooting and knifing were accepted pastimes, and the female company available was of a generous and full-blooded kind. Robert was left to amuse himself, which he did with the greatest of ease, largely in the company of young Chippewa Indians, who inoculated him for the first time, but permanently as it subsequently appeared, with that love of simple and primitive communities which never left him to the end. After two years of this racy existence Robert’s father went on to another mine in the even more romantically named Lake of the Woods country, where they lived much the same kind of life. It was then suddenly decided to send him to LTpper Canada College, Toronto, to finish his education ; this