Cinema: Man of Aran

Man of Aran (Gaumont-British). Director Robert J. Flaherty (Moana of the South Seas, Nanook of the North) is the cinema’s No. 1 specialist in elemental-struggle-for-existence sagas. When he heard that the Aran Islands, off the Galway coast of Ireland, were so barren that the inhabitants had to gather soil in baskets to grow potatoes in crevices of rock, he went to England’s Gainsborough Pictures Ltd. for financial backing. Man of Aran is the result of his two-year sojourn on Inishmore, largest of the three islands. Decorated with a musical score based on Irish folk songs, equipped with intermittent scraps of Gaelic, the picture proves the Aran Islands to be as inhospitable as Director Flaherty could have hoped. Like his other films, it has no professional actors, no narrative structure. It shows an Aran native (Colman King), his wife, their 13-year-old son, fishing, carrying soil in baskets, catching a shark for oil, trudging along cliffs above an angry sea.

Awarded the Mussolini Cup for the best picture at the International Motion Picture Exposition in Venice (TIME, Sept. 24), Man of Aran was exhibited to U. S. audiences for the first time last week. Critics were quick to appreciate its superb pictorial qualities, the honest artistry with which Director Flaherty photographed his characters as heroic dwarfs against the dark, enormous background of a hungry land and a mighty sea. Audiences were equally quick to feel that somehow, in the absence of dramatic line, Man of Aran missed the essence of its subject.