Robert Joseph Flaherty was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature-length documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922).
Background
He was born in Iron Mountain, Michigan, the eldest child of Robert Henry Flaherty, owner-manager of an iron-ore mine, and Susan Klickner Flaherty.
In the 1893 depression the mine was closed, and the elder Flaherty left his family to prospect for gold in Canada. Three years later, when he became manager of an iron-ore mine near Rainy Lake, Ontario, he took Robert with him. There young Flaherty first became interested in northern Canada's natural resources and native Eskimo peoples, subjects that occupied him for a quarter of a century.
Education
While his father moved from mine to mine, eventually joining United States Steel Corporation, Flaherty spent a year (around 1900 - 1901) at a secondary boarding school, Upper Canada College in Toronto, and then enrolled in the Michigan College of Mines, where he remained less than a year.
For most of the years between college and marriage Flaherty drifted through Canada, working as a miner, exploring the north, and prospecting for iron ore.
Career
In 1910, under his father's aegis, he was engaged by Sir William Mackenzie, a Canadian mining magnate, to explore islands in Hudson Bay for iron-ore deposits.
From 1910 to 1913 he explored the Hudson and Ungava Bay coasts of northern Quebec, becoming the first white man to cross the Ungava peninsula.
He extended his knowledge of Eskimo arts and culture, and ethnography began to take precedence over prospecting.
In 1913, when Flaherty was outfitting another expedition, Mackenzie suggested he take along a motion picture camera. While stranded on Baffin Island in the winter of 1913-1914, Flaherty devoted his time to filmmaking, and thus began a gradual shift to a new career.
On a last expedition, to the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay during 1915-1916, he discovered ore deposits, but the extraction of the iron was judged too difficult. With 70, 000 feet of film from his last two expeditions, Flaherty determined to complete a film on Eskimo life, but he accidently destroyed his negatives in a fire. He spent the years during World War I in Connecticut, seeking funds to return to the north.
In 1920 Revillon Freres, a fur-trading company in the Canadian north, agreed to put up the money on the basis of the one print of his work he still had. This arrangement set a pattern for Flaherty's filmmaking career; all his major documentaries were financed by commercial firms, government agencies, or film companies.
By 1920, when Flaherty returned to northern Quebec to shoot what became Nanook of the North, he had developed an outlook on life and art that was to shape all his filmmaking. Deeply influenced by the Eskimos' struggle to survive in an inhospitable climate, he saw their existence as an act of creation, a triumph of human will and community in the natural world.
This was the vision that he wished to document, but it was difficult to find such a pristine encounter between man and nature, unaltered by European influence. To attain the images he desired, Flaherty outfitted his subjects in the traditional Eskimo attire they were no longer accustomed to wearing, and staged hunts that otherwise would not have occurred. "Sometimes you have to lie, " he said. "One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit. "
Documentary actuality gave way to an artist's vision of the human condition. Nanook opened at the Capitol Theater in New York in June 1922.
It was a worldwide success. In Europe the film was heralded as a classic depiction of a vanishing "primitive" way of life; as a result of this European recognition Famous-Players-Lasky (which became the Paramount Pictures Corporation) hired Flaherty to make "another Nanook. "
In 1923, with his wife and brother David as co-workers, he sailed for Samoa to see if another story of survival could be found in the South Seas. Filming for a year and a half on the island of Savaii, Flaherty gradually changed his conception, and produced in Moana (1926) a beautiful film of everyday life, climaxed by scenes of the traditional ceremony of tattooing a young man's body when he comes of age.
From 1926 to 1931 Flaherty attempted to work within the framework of the Hollywood commercial system, but he was unable to complete a major project. He left a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer unit on location in Tahiti, and the Fox company aborted a film in progress about Southwestern Indians.
An independent collaboration on Tabu (1931) with F. W. Murnau, the German director, also ended with Flaherty quitting.
In 1931 Frances Flaherty, who worked closely with her husband on many of his film projects, offered Flaherty's services to the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit, a British government agency, where a documentary filmmakers unit was forming under John Grierson's leadership. Flaherty shot extensive footage of working people at their tasks that went into the film Industrial Britain (1931).
During the 1930's Flaherty's work was financed by British motion picture companies. Gaumont-British Pictures Corporation put up the funds for his third major documentary, Man of Aran (1934), a film about life on the Aran Islands off Ireland's west coast.
Like Nanook the film depicts human struggle against natural elements, a harsh sea and a barren land. It is distinguished by remarkable shots of a boat crew subduing a shark more than twenty feet long--even though the Aran Islanders had abandoned the hunting of sharks, and the men had to be trained for the task.
For Alexander Korda, Flaherty made Elephant Boy (1937), filmed in India with the boy actor Sabu. It was his one unabashedly commercial feature.
In 1939 Flaherty returned to the United States to make a film for the Department of Agriculture on problems of farmers and the agricultural unemployed.
He worked for more than two years on The Land (1942), traveling thousands of miles throughout the country, recording the eroded land and migrants sleeping by the roadside, to make a motion picture supplement to the Farm Security Administration's Depression-era efforts in documentary photography.
But World War II began before the film was finished, and the bleak images of the American countryside Flaherty had filmed were considered potentially harmful to wartime morale. The government allowed the film only minimal circulation.
Flaherty's last film, Louisiana Story (1948), was financed by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey; the company gave him complete freedom to make a film about oil drilling.
The resulting documentary centered on the life of a Cajun boy in the Louisiana bayous, depicting his accommodation of the drilling rig to his own natural and cultural environment. It was an aesthetic triumph for Flaherty that also created a favorable image of the company's endeavors.
He died in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Achievements
What he possessed above all was a remarkable filmmaker's eye, the ability to bring to life on the screen the world of distant human beings.
His corpus of films represents one of the great achievements in the history of documentary filmmaking, although many critics prefer to call his work film-poems rather than factual documentaries.
Flaherty was a robust, gregarious man, a noted storyteller who made a powerful impression on other documentary filmmakers in the United States, Great Britain, and Europe.
Connections
He met Frances J. Hubbard, daughter of a mineralogist, whom he married on November 12, 1914, after a courtship and engagement lasting more than a decade; they had three children.
Flaherty was one of the directors of The Titan: Story of Michelangelo
1950
1950
Royal Geographical Society.
which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
BAFTA presents the Robert J. Flaherty Award for best one-off documentary.
Academy Award Oscar - Best Documentary Feature 1950 - The Titan: Story of Michelangelo
1913
