American film-maker and explorer who pioneered the 'contrived' documentary,
poetic, lyrical and cleverly romanticised accounts of life in the wilds.
His main thought was to capture the true, primitive spirit of the far-flung
lands to which he travelled, and he was not above taking people back
to their long-forgotten roots to do it. His documentaries are among
the most pictorially beautiful films ever seen, especially those films
that he managed to complete without interference of one kind or another.
In the early days of the 20th century, Flaherty's father explored Canada
in a search for iron ore, taking his son with him.
Flaherty developed a longing to push further into the wilderness, and
was commissioned in 1910 to set up his own expeditions to the far north,
also for the pursuit of iron ore. In 1913, his patron, Sir William Mackenzie,
suggested that Flaherty take a camera with him on his next expedition
- and the legend was born. Flaherty's first film, or least such footage
as he had assembled for a documentary on Eskimo life, was destroyed
by fire, a fate that was also to overtake another Flaherty film, Acoma
the Sky City, many years later. After exploration and mapping expeditions
in the Hudson Bay area, notably to Belcher Islands (one of which is
named after him).
Flaherty decided to try his hand again at film-making. Ever the perfectionist,
he was determined to put on film exactly what he wanted to, working
for two to three years on a film, a pattern repeated more or less throughout
his career which wore the patience of some of his bosses very thin.
The result on this occasion was Nanook of the North (1922), a magnificent
portrait of the hardships of Eskimo life. Many of the experiences that
followed this triumph were not entirely happy ones for Flaherty, but
he did make Moana (1926), about the Samoan people, on which he pioneered
the development and use of panchromatic film; parts of White Shadows
in the South Seas (1928) and Tabu (1931);
Man of Aran (1934) off the west coast of Ireland; some beautiful
background work for Elephant
Boy (1937) in India; and back in America, the evocative The Land
(1942) and Louisiana Story (1948), both in their ways accounts of the
uneasy truce between nature, man and machines.
