Focus: A Film Review (1950-1951)

246 X to buy a movie-camera ; then back north again to find and eventually to map the islands, one of which is officially named Flaherty Island in recognition of his work. It was some six years since he had first gone north : he was now an experienced prospector and explorer of thirty-two, but it had taken all his resource and toughness to come back with his life, some specimens of indifferent iron-ore and several thousand feet of film from this expedition. After weeks of work on what lie would subsequently have called “editing” his film, he accidentally set fire to it with a match, the whole thing went up in flames and he was badly burned. And in more ways than one, for his immediate reaction was to resolve to go back again as soon as possible and make the film of a lifetime about the North. 1920 saw the meeting between Flaherty and Captain Thierry Mallett, a representative of Revillon Freres, the great furriers, which led directly to the making of Naiiook of the North. Mallett was immediately interested in the idea of a film about Eskimos as a commercial asset in the competition between his firm and the Hudson Bay Company, and readily agreed to send Flaherty north to the Barrens again, with all the equipment he needed. This time he knew exactly what he meant to do and this certainty of attack remained a constant in all his work from Nanook to Louisiana Story and it stems directly from those early formative years. To live with the people on their own terms, to observe their lives without condescension, to make a faithful record of everything that happens in the community life over a long period of time, and then to edit the bulk film with the greatest austerity, so that the final result, the emotion recollected in tranquillity, is eloquent both of the economy of ultimate selection and the significance of the poet’s single eye. It is not a cheap, nor a facile method of making documentary films, as Eisenstein later found to his cost, but in the hands of a master it has yet to be improved upon. This, then, was how Nanook of the North grew : for sixteen long months he lived and hunted and starved and nearly died with the Eskimos, filming a record with the utmost fidelity of the rigorous hardships which were the lot of all. Then he came south to New York, never again to return to the North where he had spent so many years. He settled down to the task of editing, and showed the result to Revillon Freres who, to their eternal credit, recognised it as a masterpiece and have, moreover, always regarded it as a major financial asset; Hollywood, on the other hand, held neither opinion. Appalled at a piece of work which they considered at once bad film and bad box-office, the film barons would not even arrange for ^ a showing and this was secured at the C Roxy, New York, by little less than a trick. Here it did average business for the week, but was acclaimed by the critics at once and was something like a sensation when it reached Paris and London. In England, particularly, it had an immediate and fertile effect on the makers of what we have sequentlv learned to call “documentary”, which is, I suppose, the field in which British film-makers have shown most originality and reached their liigliest achievements. John Grierson, for one, was able to see for the first time on the screen his own precept that this kind of film should “be the creative treatment of actualitv”. Reassured by the clamour of the critics’ applause, Hollywood began to reconsider its first instinctive response to this ugly duckling of their industry ; Paramount came forward with an offer to Flaherty to go anywhere and do anything, filming what he liked. New to this kind of thing, Flaherty believed that this meant that he was indeed expected to make the kind of film he considered right. So, after a certain amount of discussion and reflection, he decided to go to Samoa and make a film about the life of the islands, which he intended to approach in the same way as with Nanook. With his wife and three daughters he spent nearly two years in Samoa, making a film that | he called Moana of the South Seas, j Partly as a concession to what even he 4 had gathered of Paramount, but largely because it was in fact an integral side of island life, this film did carry a definite love-interest ; but the central and dominant theme was a loving and faithful study of initiation into manhood by the ordeal of pain — ( in this case of tattooing. At the end of two years he was ready to edit the vast quantities of film and had, with his