Robert Flaherty (1934)
I’ll never be a proper cinéaste. Five minutes into this classic documentary and I was longing for it to be over. I can see it’s an amazing piece of filmmaking but there’s no point pretending I could appreciate it – emotionally or technically or intellectually. And tedious though the man (from the National Film and Television School) who introduced it was, he did make a difference to my perception of the film. Once he’d explained that Robert Flaherty put the people of Aran (off the West Coast of Ireland) into perilous situations to heighten the excitement of their encounters with the Atlantic Ocean, I assumed that most of what we saw of their lives had been staged for the camera. (The fact that this reflects their way of life surely doesn’t make it any less staged. Perhaps it was a convention of the time but doesn’t having a cast list give the game away?) These are lives that tend to get described as stunning in their close-to-nature simplicity but which I found – again there’s no point pretending – terrifying in their lack of home comforts and their tedium. Needless to say, I simply didn’t understand much of the time what the Aran folks were up to (this gave Man of Aran a surprising kinship with WALL-E). I hope the father of documentary cinema bought the islanders a new rowing boat to replace the one lost in the spectacular storm that provides the undeniably impressive climax to the film.
2 March 2009
