Flaherty and Film; 3; Man of Aran

I'm Robert Gardner from the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Today we're going to discuss the late Robert Flaherty's third film, of Aaron. Some people, including myself, look upon this film as his pictorial peak. Its theme is the same as that of Nanook and Moana, the individual coping with his environment. We are again fortunate to have Mrs. Flaherty on this program. Mrs. Flaherty, would you begin by telling me about the events leading up to the making of Man of Aaron? Well, it is now 1934. It's eight years since Moana came out. And in all that time, this is the first chance that Bob has had to make another film of his own. We tried to make a film of the Akamo Indians in New Mexico. That would have been a wonderful story and a very worthwhile film of this culture that was dying in our own country, right under our eyes. And you, who know that country and its breathtaking

landscape, and those people whose whole life and the wholeness of it is the living poetry and religion of that landscape, can understand how we felt when the film, after a year of work, was called off. Just at that moment, sound came in. But then we came to the Arons and I will remember the first time I saw those three barren, treeless islands rising out of the North Atlantic and that incredible landscape of bare broken rock. I dabbled, I remember, in the bright water and I watched dolphins playing in the harbor. And it came over me that this too was fable. Out of this sea and out of these rocks, these

people do their spirit. Yes. How did the idea for making a film about the Aron Islanders actually get started? Well, it was quite casual. It was just a chance conversation that Bob had with an Irishman. It was the time of the Depression around 1930 and they were talking about the hard times in America. And the Irishman said, will you all see in my country how the Aron Islanders live? They even have to make their soil. They break up the bedrock, limestone of their land, they lay on its sand and seaweed in handfuls of soil. They go to sea in frail crux, ribs of

wood covered with canvas, which they mend with scraps of material, no more than just handkerchiefs. For

oil for their lamps. Shows of these great whale -like fish still migrate along that coast. So Mrs. Flaherty, I'd be interested to know if your husband's approach with the people of

the Aron Islands was the same or different from his approach to other people? It was always basically the same. Always we went and lived with the people. On Aron the people at first were shy. As a matter of fact they were suspicious of it. Our name was Flaherty, but how did they know? Maybe we had assumed it and we were Protestants, were we? And they remember the old Cromwellian days when the Protestants had come over and made supers of them, offering them soup if they would change their religion. Bob carried a file of water in his pocket, it was reported, and a drop from that file would turn your Protestant on the spot. Well somehow you must have won them over.

Yes, one by one, little by little, one way or another, they were won. And I particularly remember one old man who had a magnificent long red beard, Pat Shruer. When we decided to put Patch in the film he was quite beyond himself. He came to Pat Mullin, our interpreter, he said, now could you tell me Pat? Why would they be wanting me in the film? And Pat said, well now, Patch, maybe it tears you have some of that drama in you that they're always talking about. Drama, said Patch, where would I be having drama in me? Well, Pat looked at him for a while and considered the matter. He said, well now, Patch, maybe it's in your beard you have it. Well after that

there were times when we would lose Patch. He would disappear, we couldn't find him. One day we were out shooting and Pat Mullin beckoned to me with his finger on his lip. I tipped over. He was standing beside a big boulder. He pointed behind the boulder and I looked and there was old Patch with a bit of broken comb in one hand and a bit of broken mirror in the other and he was carefully, lovingly combing his beard. Tell me, Florida, what was the real turning point in Manabaran? Well the turning point came when we decided that we would film the old shark hunting days. This for the whole island was a great excitement and the people began bringing out the old harpoons that they had stored in their houses and we hired a whaling captain to come all

the way from Dundee and that was a great thing to do. We rigged up a deep -sea trawler with a harpoon gun. That was a great thing to do. We stationed lookouts on the highest points of the island to give warning of the first sharks to appear and that year, as it happened, was the greatest migration of these great fish that there had been since the old shark hunting days. It was a tremendous excitement for the people, not only that but every day as the shark hunting proceeded, they could see it and they could see themselves on the screen and this was something they understood. This was their story. This was something that they felt deeply. It was exactly the same way in the north with Manuk. When he saw himself spearing a walrus on the screen, he then knew what the film was about. He took the film over. He was a great hunter and he took

Bob on such magnificent hunts that they both of them almost lost their lives. In Samoa, as soon as the old chiefs knew that it was the old Polynesian ways that we wanted to film and Edik went through the village and the old Polynesian life came alive. It wasn't dead. The spirit was still there and it welled up like a great wave and we were carried away on it and it was the same way now on Aaron. Maggie, for instance, insisted upon carrying the biggest, heaviest load of kelp she could possibly get on her back even though a wave quarter and she was smothered in it and almost drowned and little Markeline insisted upon getting on the very highest peak of the cliff to fish even though it was trembling under him and some days later broke off tons of it and fell 300 feet down into the sea

and now the last scene in the film is a storm scene and I think when you see those three men in a cork riding through the storm you will certainly ask did we put them out there in that danger just for the film? The answer is they wanted to go but they had taken the film over. It was their film. They were making it. It was a film to show the world what manner of men they were and they put everything they had into it and Bob loved such spirit for this spirit was his film. This spirit was cinema. Those three men in the cork became characters out of one of their own heroic legends. The film became a saga. It was more than a documentary. It was the archetype. It was an old Irish tale. It was poetry.

gather that what you mean by all of that you've been saying is that the exploratory method of your husbands is as valid whether it's used to search a person's present or people's present as to search his past. Well I think you can't divorce the present from the past. Mrs. Flaherty, how was Man of Aron received? There was a great opening in London for the film. The cast was all there. They had a great ovation. They stood up in their seats beaming with happiness and I heard an Aron man who was sitting near me say and God knows tonight I'm glad they are happy. The

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you get Aron, Robert Gardner, Director of the Film Study Center at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. This is NET, National Educational Television.