The Vision of Robert Flaherty: The Artist As Myth and Filmmaker

by Richard Barsam

160 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1988

Reviews

[Nathan Marone]

Reading The Vision of Robert Flaherty was a rare occurrence for me. Though an avid reader of film directory biographies/studies, I have only seen three of Flaherty's films - Nannok of the North, Tabu: Story of the South Seas, and Louisiana Story - and all of those quite some time ago. It's a good thing, too, because Barsam's book doesn't read like a typical filmmaker bio. He does opt for the traditional arc of covering each film, one by one, detailing both the film's production circumstances and the film itself. But where Barsam's book deviates from the traditional format is in his willingness to treat Flaherty's life as an extension of documentary film theory. This is appropriate, of course, because Flaherty is one of the earliest and certainly most well known documentarian in film history.

The tension in Flaherty's life and in his films is between the desire to make something "real" or authentic and his desire to make something romantic. His films claimed, by their documentary status, to show their subjects as they were. But Flaherty is known to have staged some aspects of his films, recreated cultural practices that were long outdated by the time he got to either the far north, the Aran Islands, or the South Seas. He fought with producers, overspent on his budgets, manipulated his subjects, gave little to no thought to film form, and generally cast about pell mell in his film career. But still Flaherty's work shows us all the truth about art: in order to tell the truth, you must distort it a little.