Robert J. Flaherty

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 Catholic); he was sent to Upper Canada College in Toronto for his education. Flaherty began his career as a prospector in the Hudson Bay region of Canada, working for a railroad company.

In 1913, on his third expedition to the area, his boss, Sir William Mackenzie, suggested that he take a motion picture camera along so that he could record the unfamiliar wildlife and people he encountered. He was particularly intrigued by the life of the Inuit people, and spent so much time filming them that he had begun to neglect his real work. On the other hand, he received an avid response from anyone who saw the footage he shot.

To make the film, Flaherty lived with an Inuit man, Allakariallak, and his family for some time before beginning filming. On his return to the South, the nitrate film was destroyed in a fire started from his cigarette; Flaherty returned to the community, lived another year there, and reshot the film. He later claimed that this was to his advantage, since he was unhappy with the original footage. According to him, it was too much like a travelogue and lacked a cohesive plot.

For the new film, Flaherty staged almost everything, including the ending, where Allakariallak (who acts the part of Nanook) and his screen family are supposedly at risk of dying if they could not find or build shelter quickly enough. The half-igloo had been built beforehand, with a side cut away for light so that Flaherty’s camera could get a good shot. Flaherty also insisted that the Inuit not use rifles to hunt, though they had become common, and pretended at one point that he could not hear the hunters’ pleas for help, instead continuing filming their struggle and putting them in greater danger.

Nanook of the North (1922) was a successful film, and Flaherty was in great demand afterwards. On a contract with Paramount to produce another film on the order of Nanook, Flaherty went to Samoa to film Moana (1926). The studio heads repeatedly asked for daily rushes but Flaherty had nothing to show because he had not filmed anything yet — his approach was to try to live with his subject, becoming familiar with their way of life before building a story around it to film. Flaherty was also concerned that there was no inherent conflict in the islanders’ way of life, providing further incentive not to shoot anything. Eventually he decided to build the film around the ritual of a boy’s entry to manhood. Flaherty was in Samoa from April 1923 until December 1924, with the film completed in December 1925 and released the following month. The film, on its release, was not as successful as Nanook of the North.

Louisiana Story (1948) was another heavily fictionalized “documentary,” this one about the installation of an oil rig in a Louisiana swamp. The film stresses the oil rig’s peaceful and unproblematic coexistence with the surrounding environment, and was in fact funded by Standard Oil, a petroleum company. The main character of the film is a Cajun boy. The poetry of childhood and nature, some critics would argue, is used to make the exploitation of men and nature look beautiful. Virgil Thomson did the music for the film.

Flaherty and Dziga Vertov are considered the pioneers of documentary film.

While living in Northern Quebec for the year of filming Nanook, Flaherty had an affair with his lead actress, the young Inuit woman who played Nanook’s wife. A few months after he left, she gave birth to his son, Josephie, whom he never acknowledged. Josephie was one of the Inuit who were relocated in the 1950s to very difficult living conditions in Resolute and Grise Fiord, in the extreme North (see High Arctic relocation). Flaherty knew of his son’s difficulties, but took no action. —Wikipedia