1940 - THE POWER AND THE LAND, 1933 - INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN, a couple of short "classic" documentaries.

I doubt The Power and the Land would even be produced today by the United States Government since it glorifies rural electric cooperatives and the government's involvement in bringing power to the rural areas of the country in the late 1930's, this stuff is way to socialist for the present mood of the country.

The real life farm family in The Power and the Land.

The Power and the Land has some nice photography but not unexpectedly looks hopelessly dated, with the narration glorifying the "simple people" working the land.  Television has completely killed this kind of informational film.

38 minutes.

Industrial Britain is just hopeless.  The film was started by Robert Flaherty for the Grierson film unit and then taken out of his hands and reedited.  The stereotypical British narrator intones about the merits of industrialization across the British empire.  The word "stogy" comes to mind.  This is the kind of short film that played before before the main feature in theaters during the 1930's and 40's.  It's primary function was to torture the audience by boring them to death.

22 minutes

1926 - MOANA, Flaherty's study of Savaii Island in Samoa is boring but it wasn't his fault

Robert Flaherty had a big success with his film Nanook of the North.  Paramount wanted to repeat that success and hired Flaherty to film another docudrama in the Pacific south seas.  Paramount was looking for another Nanook of the North only this time on a tropical island.  Flaherty traveled to Savaii Island in Samoa and was pretty much screwed as soon as he arrived.

Instead of finding an island culture untouched by western civilization.  Flaherty found that Christian missionaries had already established themselves on Savaii Island and had changed a lot of the island's customs and traditions.  To start with the missionaries had gotten the islanders to start wearing clothes and abandon their traditional dress or lack of dress as it were.  Flaherty further came to realize that the Savaii islanders actually got along with each other pretty well and there was not much in the way of dramatic conflict to photograph.  

Forced to reconsider his approach, Flaherty paid the Savaii Islanders to reenact the customs and traditions that were quickly vanishing.  Flaherty filmed scenes of people fishing, picking coconuts out of palm trees, catching crabs and making clothes out of tree bark. Interesting but kind of dull stuff.

Flaherty also needed an action climax like the snowstorm in Nanook, but lacking this he instead choose a ritual tattooing of a young male to be his exciting ending.  However this was not exactly thrilling either. Watching the tattooing being done to the boy is also pretty boring,  however it does look like it really really hurts. 

Moana is kind of a disappointment, it has some spectacular photography and some very pretty scenery but the lack of  action makes it pretty slow going even at 65 minutes.  Paramount was extremely disappointed with the film and made Flaherty reedit it into something shorter.

Moana is almost a warmup for Man of Aran.  The shots of the ocean crashing into the island and Flaherty's insistence on having people actually canoeing around in dangerous ocean waves are repeated in Man of Aran.   Flaherty's focus on a typical island family is an approach he repeated as well in Man of Aran.

An interesting film, unfortunately pretty dull.

1934 - MAN OF ARAN, Flaherty's classic if suspect documentary

An acknowledged film classic, whatever that is.  Robert Flaherty lived and shot a lot of film for 2 1/2 years on the Aran Islands.  Considered a documentary at the time, the film was about people surviving in a very harsh north sea island environment off the coast of England.

As reviewers and film scholars looked into the film, it was apparent that Flaherty had recreated many of the scenes in the film.  The shark hunting sequence on the Atlantic Ocean had been completely staged. The growing food with seaweed scenes were apparently something that the islanders had abandoned years ago.  Even the family was phony, the husband, wife and son were not even related, they had been hand picked by Flaherty to play a "typical" Aran family unit.

 

What wasn't faked was the amount of danger Flaherty put the Aran islanders through while filming.  The scenes at sea are still amazing to watch and seeing people out rowing in boats with a hull that looks like it was made out of paper mache is an unnerving sight.

Flaherty's film making technique was to shoot lots of film and then watch it over and over looking for a story to emerge.  Slowly he would eliminate film footage as the basic story revealed itself to him during the editing process.  Unsurprisingly, the editor John Goldman got an additional credit on the film as a story consultant.   Goldman's editing used a lot of the techniques that Eisenstein and the Russians had pioneered with fast moving montages. 

The film had a lot of inaccuracies but Flaherty had a deeper purpose in mind.  Robert Flaherty was  a romantic.  He distrusted modern civilization and found it a corrupting influence on the human race.  Flaherty liked a more simpler, world where people lived and tested themselves against nature.  If he couldn't find sequences in his films to fit into his theme while filming, he ended up faking them.

Man of Aran is pretty spectacular to watch,  with amazing photography, incredible scenery and very exciting sequences, definitely on the required viewing list.

 76 minutes.