“Man of Aran” comes closer than “Nan-ook of the North” or “Moana” to the life we know or our forebears knew, to our racial past. . . . The nameless man of Aran is separated from us only by the generalions that brought towns and machines and easy living to our own kind. He even speaks a language that is not foreign to us: he is ourselves when we had to feed ourselves, by our own hands, from the earth and the sea.
Flaherty tells no complicated story of this man, he simply but with great eloquence lets his camera show the daily routine events of the man’s life on one of the sea stormed Isles of Aran; and those events are a profound and stirring drama. . . . The epitome of this struggle is caught and fixed again and again and again in the pictures of the woman and boy against bleak land, vast threatening rocks or cloud-tossed sky, or of the man’s boat continually lost to sight among heaving mountains of waves. . . .
It comes, probably, as near as one need wish for to pure cinema, a complete expression of its intention through the camera. Though sounds add immeasurably to its effectiveness-the sound of musical instruments weaving old Irish tunes into eloquent sub-commentary, and the different music of Irish voices, of gulls crying, of wind and roaring ocean – they really tell nothing that the camera does not show … —James Shirley Hamilton (National Board of Review Magazine)
Robert Joseph Flaherty (16 February 1884, Iron Mountain, Michigan – 23 July 1951, Dummerston, Vermont) was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature length documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922), made his reputation, and nothing in his later life equalled its success, although he continued the development of this new genre of docufiction, eg. with Moana (1926), set in the South Seas.
He is a progenitor of ethnographic film. Jean Rouch and John Collier Jr. would practice and theorize the genre as visual anthropology, a subfield of anthropology, in the 1960s.
Flaherty was married to writer Frances H. Flaherty from 1914 until his death in 1951. Frances worked on several of her husband’s films, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Story for Louisiana Story (1948).
Flaherty was one of seven children born to prospector Robert Henry Flaherty (an Irish Protestant) and Susan Klockner (a German Roman… read more
Ramin Bahrani speaks clearly and assertively. He knows what he wants; even more admirably, he seems to know exactly why he wants it. He can