Cinema: Old Master

More than a quarter of a century ago, Robert J. Flaherty, weighted down with camera equipment, slogged into the Eskimo country of north Canada and came back with a film called Nanook of the North. Now both the film and its maker are full of years and honors. Nanook has been shown all over the world, and Flaherty is known as the father of the documentary film.

This week, Flaherty was riding tandem on fame. Nanook had just completed a successful revival in Manhattan and begun another swing around the country. And a new Flaherty film, Louisiana Story, was to have its U.S. premiere next week.

Cited for its “high lyrical worth,” the new picture split honors with two other films* this month at the ninth Italian international film competition. With 46 features from 13 nations entered in the scramble for prizes, Louisiana Story won over such box-office boomers as Duel in the Sun, Gentleman’s Agreement and The Big Clock. The Manchester Guardian wrote of the new Flaherty documentary: “The actions of these people, as Virginia Woolf once wrote of Homeric characters, ‘seem laden with beauty because they do not know that they are beautiful.’ ”

Kernel of Greatness. Today, at 64, Flaherty reaps the rewards of a pioneer who has never stopped pioneering. Before Nanook, factual films were mostly travelogues—patronizing glimpses of exotic peoples in far-off places. Flaherty concentrated on the struggles of man against his environment. Because of his choice of settings and subjects (Moana, in the South Seas; Man of Aran, on a remote island off the coast of Ireland; Elephant Boy, in India), he was sometimes attacked as a romanticist. The “realists” who belabored him later discovered that much of their own “realism” was merely a fad; Flaherty’s pictures have not faded nearly so fast.

Years ago Flaherty said: “I try to make my films a revelation of a country, and of the people who live in it … There is a kernel of greatness in all peoples . . . it is up to the film maker to find the one incident, or even the one movement that makes it clear.”

Bound by that stern poetic creed, Louisiana Story traces a symbolic story. The wallowing amphibious machines of an oil company invade the idyllic peace of a Louisiana bayou. Flaherty juxtaposes a tense chase sequence—alligator v. coon in the swamp water—and the tumultuous pursuit of oil by the monster, man-made drilling derricks which can plunge pipes 14,000 feet into the earth. Throughout this blending of themes, the bonds of humanity between oil riggers and a Cajun boy illumine the recurrent thesis of Flaherty’s works: “Mankind is one community.”

Sheep & Goats. Nanook cost $53,000 and the bill was paid by a fur company. Louisiana Story cost $258,000 and an oil company picked up the tab, specifying that its name was not to be tagged on the film. For oilmen, the film does its job by showing that oil comes from the sweat and courage of common men, not from an inanimate “industrial octopus.” As a subtle piece of public relations, Louisiana Story may inspire many successors.

But the trouble with documentaries is basic: box office-minded theater exhibitors detest them. They have no name stars. If run on a double bill, they slow up the process of cramming customers into the theaters, and rushing them out again.

Old Master Flaherty is now regarding television with deep interest. Says he: “Documentaries haven’t begun to be what they could be. They’re a wonderful art form. But they need a segregated audience … the sheep from the goats . . . Television will do the segregating, then we’ll see.”

*John Ford’s The Fugitive (an arty bowdlerization of Graham Greene’s excellent novel, The Power and the Glory) and the Italian work, La Terra Trema, by Luchino Visconti. Sir Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet took the “International Grand Prize of the City of Venice.”