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By PAUL BRENNER
The pioneer filmmakers (Griffith, Eisenstein, Gance) had something that has been
tarnished and lost in the hundred plus years of film history -- a passion for
pure cinema and an obsession that motion pictures would change the world. Robert
J. Flaherty ("Nanook of the North") was one of those men, considered the father
of the documentary but was more appropriately the first cinema poet and one of
the first independent filmmakers, scrounging from hand to mouth to wrest funding
for his next film project.
One his greatest works, "Man of Aran," is now
available on Home Vision Entertainment. Flaherty spent two years with the
poverty stricken Aran Islanders, off the coast of west Ireland, an unforgiving
landscape of jutting rocky crags slammed mercilessly by an angry ocean. Casting
Aran islanders in an idealized nuclear family, Flaherty depicts the harsh
conditions of life (searching for scraps of soil amid the rocks to grow
potatoes, shark fishing in dangerous ocean currents) and glories in the triumph
of man against an unfeeling nature. No matter that the events depicted in "Man
of Aran" were no longer practiced -- even in 1934. Flaherty in his expansive
imagery and idyllic sentimentality sought a vision for the way life as it should
be led. And it is an incredible piece of filmmaking to witness, especially for
someone who can't get through a day without a credit card and a vat of whiskey.
The extensive special features include an hour long 1977 documentary in which
filmmaker George C. Stoney revisits the Aran Islands, footage of Flaherty
commenting on "Man of Aran," a 1960 discussion with wife and collaborator
Frances Flaherty and ethnographer Robert Gardner, a 1971 film profile of Frances
Flaherty at 87 years old, and a stills gallery. |
