Cinema: Documentary Daddy

To cinema devotees who believe that the movies are an art, not just entertainment, documentary films. are what symphony is to a music lover. To them, bluff, white-haired Robert Joseph Flaherty, who made the first documentary, Nanook of the North, 20 years ago, is almost the cinema equivalent of Composer Ludwig van Beethoven.

Buffalo, N. Y. last week saw an exhibition of Flaherty films as well as still pictures taken by his wife, Frances Hubbard Flaherty. The month-long exhibition was sponsored by Buffalo’s Albright Art Gallery, included free showing of Nanook, Moana, Man of Aran. As they had done before, with paying customers, Flaherty’s documentaries packed them in.

Michigan-born, son of a mining engineer, Flaherty used to spend months with Indian guides in Canada’s north woods, prospecting for his father. He turned explorer in 1910, for ten years wandered about the barren islands of subarctic Canada, living with Eskimos. On his later expeditions he took along a motion-picture camera, during the long winters at home with his wife cut and spliced film, trying to piece together an Eskimo travel picture.

In 1920 Flaherty got the idea of doing a documentary film. A cross between a feature picture and an old-fashioned travelogue, it was to have a central story (man’s struggle against Arctic cold and hunger), a cast of characters (Nanook and his family). He persuaded John Revillon and Thierry Mallet, of the famed fur-trading Revillon Freres, to back an expedition to Cape Dufferin on the northeast coast of Hudson Bay.

Every big distributor in pictures turned down Nanook of the North—it had no love interest, no box-office names—until Trader Revillon talked Pathe into releasing it. A smash hit, Nanook was the end of Flaherty’s career as an explorer. He went to the remote Samoan island of Savaii to produce Moana, to a rugged island off the coast of Ireland to make Man of Aran, to the native state of Mysore, India to film Elephant Boy.

A blue-eyed, husky, apple-cheeked giant of a man, Robert Joseph Flaherty will be 57 this month but he has not finished his work. In 1939 another master of documentaries, Pare Lorentz, who made The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains for the U. S. Government, cabled Flaherty an invitation to film The Land for AAA. In the past 18 months Producer Flaherty has traveled some 20,000 miles about the U. S., making pictures on soil erosion. The Land will be completed this spring.

On view last week were two documentary shorts that showed in different degrees the Flaherty influence:

Hydro (U. S. Department of the Interior) was filmed by a onetime MARCH OF TIME director, Gunther von Fritsch. A slick job of cutting and photography, Hydro gets at the problems back of the New Deal’s Columbia River power project in the Northwest: denuded forest slopes, timber markets cut off by the war, abandoned farmlands that thirst for water. A propaganda picture, Hydro shows how Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams will irrigate barren fields, provide power for new defense industries, put jobless men to work. Best shots: the wild, glistening waters of the river undammed, royal Chinook salmon fighting their way upstream.

Christmas Under Fire (Warner Bros.) is also propaganda, like Hydro is notable for reason and restraint. Produced by Britain’s General Post Office film unit, Christmas Under Fire tells how Britons celebrated their second war Christmas—with bits of holly tied to barbed-wire fences, tinsel hung on gun emplacements, in basement shelters under their smoking towns. Reminiscent of the blasted countryside and ruined cities in H. G. Wells’s Things to Come is the bleak, dark, stormy landscape of Christmas Under Fire. But inside are the same cheerful Britishers Quentm Reynolds, Collier’s London correspondent, provides a solemn script solemnly narrated.