Robert Joseph Flaherty, F.R.G.S. (February 16, 1884; Iron Mountain, Michigan – July 23, 1951; Dummerston, Vermont) was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature length documentary film, ''Nanook of the North'' (1922). The film made his reputation and nothing in his later life fully equaled its success, although he continued the development of this new genre of docufiction, e.g. with ''Moana'' (1926), set in the South Seas, and ''Man of Aran'' (1934), filmed in Ireland's Aran Islands.

He is a progenitor of ethnographic film. Jean Rouch and John Collier Jr. would practice and theorise 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).

Early life

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.

''Nanook of the North''

In 1913, on his expedition to prospect the Belcher Islands, his boss, Sir William Mackenzie, suggested that he take a motion picture camera along. Flaherty brought with him a Bell and Howell hand cranked motion picture camera. 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. When Flaherty returned to Toronto with 70,000 feet of film, the nitrate film stock was ignited in a fire started from his cigarette, in his editing room. His film was destroyed and he received burns on his hands. Although his editing print was saved and shown several times, Flaherty wasn't satisfied with the results. "It was utterly inept, simply a scene of this or that, no relation, no thread of story or continuity whatever, and it must have bored the audience to distraction. Certainly it bored me."

Flaherty was determined to make a new film, one following a life of a typical Eskimo and his family. In 1920, Flaherty secured funds from Revillon Frères, a French fur trade company to shoot what was to become ''Nanook of the North''. On the 15th of August, 1920 Flaherty arrived in Port Harrison, Quebec to shoot his film. With him he took two Akeley motion-picture cameras which the Inuit referred to as "the aggie". Flaherty also brought full developing, printing and projection equipment to show the Inuit his film, while he was still in the process of filming. Flaherty lived in an attached cabin to the Revillon Frères trading post.

In making ''Nanook'', Flaherty cast various locals in parts in the film, in the way that one would cast actors in a work of fiction. With the aim of showing traditional Inuit life, Flaherty also staged some scenes, including the ending, where Allakariallak (who acts the part of Nanook) and his screen family were 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. Additionally, Flaherty insisted that the Inuit not use rifles to hunt, though their use had by that time become common. He also pretended at one point that he could not hear the hunters' pleas for help, instead continuing to film their struggle and putting them in greater danger.

Melanie McGrath, a writer, writes that, 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). According to McGrath, Flaherty knew of his son's difficulties, but took no action. Corroboration of McGrath's account is not readily available and Flaherty himself never discussed the matter.

Hollywood

''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). Flaherty shot ''Moana'' in Safune on the island of Savai'i where he lived with his wife and family for more than a year. 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 the community, 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'' domestically, but it did very well in Europe, inspiring John Grierson to coin the word "documentary."

Before the release of Moana, Flaherty made two short films in New York City with private backing, The Pottery Maker (1925) and The Twenty-Four Dollar Island (1927). Irving Thalberg of M-G-M invited Flaherty to film White Shadows in the South Seas (1928) in collaboration with W. S. Van Dyke, but their talents proved an uncomfortable fit, and Flaherty resigned from the production. Moving to Fox, Flaherty spent eight months working on the Native American documentary Acoma the Sky City (1929) but the production was shut down, and subsequently Flaherty's footage was lost in a studio vault fire. Flaherty then agreed to collaborate with F. W. Murnau on another South Seas picture, Tabu, but this combination proved even more volatile, and while Flaherty did contribute significantly to the story, the finished film is essentially Murnau's.

Britain

After Tabu, Flaherty was considered finished in Hollywood, and Frances Flaherty contacted John Grierson of the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit in London, who assigned Flaherty to the documentary Industrial Britain (1933). By comparison to Grierson and his unit, Flaherty's habitual working methods involved shooting relatively large amounts of film in relation to the planned length of the eventual finished movie, and the ensuing cost overruns obliged Grierson to take Flaherty off the project, which was edited by other hands into three shorter films.

Flaherty's career in Britain ended when producer Alexander Korda removed him from the production Elephant Boy (1937), re-editing it into a commercial entertainment picture.

Ireland

Producer Michael Balcon took Flaherty on to direct Man of Aran (1934), which portrayed the harsh traditional lifestyle of the occupants of the isolated Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland. ''Man of Aran'' was a major critical success, and for decades was considered in some circles an even greater achievement than ''Nanook''. As with ''Nanook'', ''Man of Aran'' showed human beings' efforts to survive under extreme conditions: in this case, an island whose soils were so thin that the inhabitants carried seaweed up from the sea to construct fields for cultivation. As with ''Nanook'', too, Flaherty cast locals in the various fictionalized roles, and made use of dramatic recreation of anachronistic behaviors: in this case, a sequence showing the hunting of sharks from small boats with harpoons, which the islanders had by then not practiced for several decades. He also staged the film's climactic sequence, in which three men in a small boat strive to row back to shore through perilously high, rock-infested seas.

Last Years

Back in the United States, Pare Lorentz of the United States Film Service hired Flaherty to film a documentary about US agriculture: a project which became The Land (1942). Flaherty and his wife covered some 100,000 miles, shooting 25,000 feet of film, and captured a series of striking images of rural America. Among the themes raised by Flaherty's footage were the challenge of the erosion of agricultural land and the Dust Bowl (as well as the beginning of effective responses via improved soil conservation practices), mechanization and rural unemployment, and large-scale migration from the Great Plains to California. In the latter context, Flaherty highlighted competition for agricultural jobs between native-born Americans and migrants from Mexico and the Philippines.

The film encountered a series of obstacles. After production had begun, Congress abolished the United States Film Service, and the project was shunted to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). With US entry to World War 2 approaching, USDA officials (and the film's editor Helen van Dongen) attempted to reconcile Flaherty's footage with rapidly changing official messages (including a reversal of concern from pre-war rural unemployment to wartime labor shortages). Following Pearl Harbor, officials grew apprehensive that the film could project an unduly negative image of the US internationally, and although a prestige opening was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942, the film was never authorized for general release.

''Louisiana Story'' (1948) was a Flaherty documentary shot by himself and Richard Leacock, 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 exploration of oil look beautiful. Virgil Thomson composed the music for the film.

Flaherty was one of the Directors of The Titan: Story of Michelangelo (1950), which won an Academy Award for documentary feature. The film was a re-edited version of the German/Swiss film of 1938 originally titled Michelangelo: Life of a Titan, directed by Curt Oertel. The re-edited version put a new English narration by Frederic March and musical score onto a shorter edit of the existing film. The new credits include Flaherty, Oertel and Richard Lyford as Directors and Ralph Alswang, Flaherty and Robert Snyder as Producers. The film was edited by Richard Lyford.

Legacy

Flaherty is considered a pioneer of documentary film. He was one of the first to combine documentary subjects with a fiction-film-like narrative and poetic treatment.

Flaherty Island, one of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay, is named in his honor.

The Flaherty Seminar is an annual international forum for independent filmmakers and film-lovers, held in rural upstate New York. The festival was founded in Flaherty's honor by his widow in 1955.

Flaherty's contribution to the advent of the documentary is scrutinised in the 2010 documentary 'A Boatload of Wild Irishmen", written by Professor Brian Winston of University of Lincoln, UK, and directed by Mac Dara O'Curraidhin. The film explores the nature of 'controlled actuality' and sheds new light on thinking about Flaherty. The argument is made that the impact of Flaherty's films on the indigenous peoples portrayed changes over time, as the films become valuable records for subsequent generations of now-lost ways of life. The film's title derives from Flaherty's own statement that he had been accused, in the staged climactic sequence of ''Man of Aran'', of "trying to drown a boatload of wild Irishmen".

Filmography

''Nanook of the North'' (1922)

''The Pottery Maker'' (1925)

''Moana'' (1926)

''The Twenty-four Dollar Island'' (1927) short documentary of New York City

''White Shadows in the South Seas'' (1928)

''Acoma the Sky City'' (1929; unfinished)

''Tabu'' (1931) co-wrote with F. W. Murnau

''Industrial Britain'' (1931)

''Man of Aran'' (1934)

''Elephant Boy'' (1937)

''The Land'' (1942) 45-minute documentary made for the U.S. Department of Agriculture

''Louisiana Story'' (1948)

''The Titan: Story of Michelangelo'' (1950)

Awards

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, Fellow, Royal Geographical Society

See also

Ó Flaithbertaigh

References

Further reading

Frances H. Flaherty, ''The Odyssey of a Filmmaker: Robert Flaherty's Story'' (Urbana, IL: Beta Phi Mu, 1960). Beta Phi Mu chapbook no. 4

Calder-Marshall, Arthur, ''The Innocent Eye; The Life of Robert J. Flaherty''. Based on research material by Paul Rotha and Basil Wright (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966)

Murphy, William Thomas, ''Robert Flaherty: A Guide to References and Resources'' (Boston: G. K. Hall and Company, 1978)

Paul Rotha, ''Flaherty: A Biography'' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984)

Barsam, Richard, ''The Vision of Robert Flaherty: The Artist As Myth and Filmmaker'' (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988)

Christopher, Robert J., ''Robert & Frances Flaherty: A Documentary Life 1883-1922'' (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005)

McGrath, Melanie, ''The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic''. ISBN 0-00-715796-7 (London: Fourth Estate, 2006). ISBN 1-4000-4047-7 (New York: Random House, 2007). The story of forced removal of Inuit peoples in Canada in 1953, including Flaherty's illegitimate Inuit son Josephie.

External links

Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database

Robert Flaherty Film Seminar

Revisiting Flaherty's ''Louisiana Story''

A selection of online articles written by and about Robert J. Flaherty

Hand drawn map by an Inuk man named Wetalltok given to Flaherty in 1919

Literature on Robert J. Flaherty

Category:1884 births Category:1951 deaths Category:People from Iron Mountain, Michigan Category:American people of Irish descent Category:American people of German descent Category:American documentary filmmakers Category:American film directors Category:Documentary film directors Category:Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society Category:Silent film directors Category:Upper Canada College alumni

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Richard Leacock (18 July 1921 23 March 2011) was a British-born documentary film director and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema and Cinéma vérité.

Early life and career

Leacock was born in London on 18 July 1921, the younger brother of film director and producer Philip Leacock. Leacock grew up on his father's banana plantation in the Canary Islands until being sent to boarding schools in England at the age of eight.

He took up photography with a glass plate camera, built a darkroom and developed his pictures, but was not satisfied. At age 11 he was shown a silent film ''Turk-Sib'' about the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway. He was stunned, and said to himself "All I need is a cine-camera and I can make a film that shows you what it is like to be there".

At the age of 14 he wrote, directed, filmed and edited ''Canary Bananas'' (10 min. 16mm, silent), a film about growing bananas, but it did not, in his opinion, give you "the feeling of being there".

He was educated at Dartington Hall School from 1934-38, alongside Robert Flaherty's daughters, and where David Lack (''Life of the Robin'') taught biology.

Having filmed in the Canary Islands and then in the Galapagos Islands (1938-9) for ornithologist David Lack's expedition, he moved to the USA and majored in Physics at Harvard in order to master the technology of filmmaking. Meanwhile he worked as cameraman and assistant editor on other peoples films, notably ''To Hear Your Banjo Play'' (1941), filming a folk music festival atop a mountain in south Virginia where there was no electricity, with a 35mm studio camera and 35mm optical film sound recorder using batteries in a large truck, a rare achievement at that time. Three years as a combat photographer in Burma and China were followed by 14 months as cameraman on Robert Flaherty's ''Louisiana Story''.

In the meantime, Leacock had married Eleanor "Happy" Burke in 1941. Daughter of the world-famous literary critic, philosopher, and writer Kenneth Burke, she had studied at Radcliffe College, but graduated from Barnard in New York City. The Leacocks had four children together. After ethnographic fieldwork with the Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi) of Labrador, Eleanor Leacock (1922-1987) earned her doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University (1952). Ten years later, after her marriage broke up, she went on to become a pioneering feminist anthropologist.

Documentaries

Many relatively conventional jobs followed, until 1954. He was then asked to make a reportage on a traveling tent theater in Missouri: the first film that he wrote, directed, photographed and edited himself, since ''Canary Bananas''.

This film, ''Toby and the Tall Corn'', went on the American cultural TV program, ''Omnibus'', in prime time and brought him into contact with Robert Drew, an editor at ''LIFE'' magazine in search for a less verbal approach to television reportage. Another new contact, Roger Tilton wanted to film an evening of people dancing to Dixieland music spontaneously. Leacock filmed ''Jazz Dance'' for him, using hand held camera techniques.

Leacock's search for high quality, mobile, synchronous equipment to facilitate observation was ongoing. By 1960 this had been achieved, and resulted in Robert Drew's film ''Primary'', an intimate observation of a primary election with Democratic hopefuls John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in Wisconsin.

A number of films followed made by Drew, Pennebaker, Maysles and their associates, but the US networks were not impressed. In France at the Cinémathèque Française, when Drew and Leacock screened ''Primary'' and ''On the Pole'', Henri Langlois introduced the films as "perhaps the most important documentaries since the brothers Lumiere". After the screening, a monk in robes came up to them and said, "You have invented a new form. Now you must invent a new grammar!"

When Drew went to work for ABC-TV, Leacock Pennebaker was formed and produced ''Happy Mother's Day'', ''Don't Look Back'', ''Monterey Pop'', ''A Stravinsky Portrait'' and many others ending with the remnants of Jean-Luc Godard's ''One A.M. - One P.M.'' (1972).

In 1968 he was invited to join Ed Pincus creating a new, small film school at MIT. Since 16mm filming was becoming so expensive, his group developed super-8 film synch equipment with modified mass-produced cameras that were much cheaper. Many filmmakers emerged from this program, including Ross McElway (Sherman's March), among others.

In 1989 he retired and moved to Paris, where he met Valerie Lalonde and, together, they made ''Les Oeufs a la Coque de Richard Leacock'' (84 minutes), the first major film shot with a tiny Video-8 Handycam to be broadcast on prime-time television in France. Leacock and Lalonde continued making films of their own choice without the pressures of TV producers.

Leacock died on 23 March 2011 at age the age of 89 in Paris. Before his death, he was raising funds for his multi-format memoir, “Richard Leacock: The Feeling of Being There,” a bound paper book and digital video book set to be published by Semeïon Editions.

Selected filmography

1935 ''Canary Bananas'' (8 min.)

1941 ''To Hear Your Banjo Play'' (20m, dir. Charles Korvin (Geza Karpathy))

1946 ''Louisiana Story'' (cameraman)

1948 ''Mount Vernon'' and ''The New Frontier'' (cameraman)

1949 ''Earthquake in Ecuador'' (director cameraman)

1950 ''Head of the House'' (writer-director-editor)

1952 ''The Lonely Night'' (dir. Irving Jacoby, filmed by Leacock)

1954 ''Jazz Dance'' (20min., cameraman)

1954 ''Toby and the Tall Corn'' (30 min., writer-director-camera-editor for ''Omnibus'')

1956 ''A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp''

1957 ''How the F-100 Got Its Tail'' (20 min., for ''Omnibus'')

1957-9 ''Frames of Reference'', ''Coulomb's Law'', ''A Magnet Laboratory'', ''Crystals''

1958 ''Bernstein in Israel'' (30 min., ''Omnibus'')

1959 ''Bernstein in Moscow'' (55 min.)

1959 ''Bull Fight at Malaga'' (20 min.)

1960 ''Primary'' (30 min.)

1960 ''Adventures on the New Frontier'' (possibly a longer version of ''Primary'', ''Close-Up'', ABC)

1960 ''Yank! No!'' (55 min., ''Close-Up'', ABC)

1960 ''Kenya: Land of the White Ghost'' (''Close-Up'', ABC)

1961 ''The Children Were Watching'' (dir. Leacock, ''Close-Up'', ABC)

1960 ''On the Pole'' (aka, ''Eddie'', 55 min, co-produced and directed, ''The Living Camera'')

1961 ''Peter and Johnny'' (55 min., produced by Leacock, ''The Living Camera'')

1961 ''The Chair'' (55 min., co-produced, directed, and photographed, ''The Living Camera'')

1962 ''Nehru'' (55 min, co-produced, directed, and shot with Gregory Shuker, ''The Living Camera'')

1962 ''Susan Starr'' (54 min., filmed by a number of cinematographers, including Leacock, ''The Living Camera'')

1963 ''Crisis'' (55 min.)

1963 ''Happy Mother's Day'' (30 min.)

1964 ''Republicans - The New Breed'' (30 min., with Noel E. Parmentel Jr.)

1965 ''A Stravinsky Portrait'' (55 min., made with Rolf Liebermann)

1965 ''Geza Anda'' (30 min, with Rolf Liebermann)

1965 ''Ku Klux Klan - Invisible Empire'' (50 min., produced and written by David Lowe for ''CBS Reports'')

1966 ''Oh Mein Pa-Pa!'' (made with Rolf Liebermann)

1966 ''The Anatomy of Cindy Fine'' (20 min.)

1966 ''Old Age, The Wasted Years'' (30 min. x 2 for WNET)

1966 ''Monterey Pop!'' (assisted D.A. Pennebaker)

1968 ''1-AM - 1-PM'' (90 min., with Pennebaker and Jean-Luc Godard)

1968 ''French Lunch'' (cameraman)

1968 ''Hickory Hill'' (18 min., with George Plimpton)

1969 ''Chiefs'' (18 min., with Noel E. Parmentel Jr.)

1969 ''Maidstone'' (cameraman with others)

1970 ''Company'' (60 min., one of three cameramen)

1970 ''Queen of Apollo'' (20 min., with Elspeth Leacock)

1972 ''Thread'' (20 min.)

1977 ''Isabella Stewart Gardner'' (30 min.)

1978 ''Centerbeam'' (20 min.)

1980 ''Light Coming Through'' (20 min.)

1981 ''Community of Praise'' (55 min.)

1984 ''Lulu in Berlin'' (50 min.)

1991 ''Les Oeufs a la Coque de Richard Leacock'' (84 min.) video

1992 ''Rehearsal: The Killings of Cariola'' (35 min.)

1992 ''Les Vacances de Monsieur Leacock'' (20 min.)

1992 ''Kren: Parking'' (3 min.)

1993 ''"Gott sei Dank" eine Besuch bei Helga Feddersen'' (30 min.)

1993 ''Felix et Josephine'' (33 min.)

1993 ''Hooray! We're Fifty! 1943-1993'' (30 min.)

1993 ''A Celebration of Saint Silas'' (30 min.)

1994 ''A Hole in the Sea''

1996 ''A Musical Adventure in Siberia''

Films about Leacock

''Ein Film für Bossak und Leacock'' (1984) – German documentarist Klaus Wildenhahn's homage to Richard Leacock and Jerzy Bossak

''On Being There with Richard Leacock'' by Jane Weiner, a JDB Films and Striana co-production. (work-in-progress)

References

Further reading

Leacock (1988), ''Interview'' in: Mo Beyerle, Christine N. Brinckmann (editors), Der amerikanische Dokumentarfilm der 60er Jahre. Direct Cinema und Radical Cinema, Frankfurt am Main, New York: Campus, 1991, p. 124–133

Mamber, Stephen (1974), Cinéma Vérité in America. Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary, Cambridge, Mass.

Dave Saunders, ''Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties'', London, Wallflower Press 2007

External links

RichardLeacock.com

Richard Leacock – Actor, Camera, Cinematographer – Variety Profiles

Richard Leacock publishes his memoir

Innovator of Journalism, Film Dies. NPR -- ''Remembrances'', 25 March 2011. Retrieved 30 March 2011.

Category:1921 births Category:2011 deaths Category:Documentary film directors Category:English documentary filmmakers Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Old Bedalians

de:Richard Leacock fr:Richard Leacock ja:リチャード・リーコック pt:Richard Leacock ru:Ликок, Ричард fi:Richard Leacock