The Cinema
"Man of Aran." At the New Gallery.
FLAHERTY lived for nearly two years on the island of Aran in order to make this film. He converted a stone shed into a laboratory, installed a petrol engine to provide electricity, did his own developing and cutting on the spot. In the evenings he and his assistants played billiards with the Islanders, danced with them, or sat by their firesides drinking poteen and telling stories. Nearly 1,200 persons live on the island, a barren slab of rock 30 miles off the Galway coast. There are no trees because there is scarcely any soil. For their potatoes the islanders cut trenches in the rock, filling them with a little imported earth and manuring them with loads of seaweed. Their life is a perpetual battle with the sea ; and this battle is the theme of Flaherty's film—indeed, its only theme.
The programme says that a few cattle are kept in artificially grassed pounds surrounded by stone walls. The film omits this ; it omits the poteen and the dancing-; scarcely touches the indoor life in the cottages ; does not tell us whether the children ever go to school or how the islanders corn- mtmicate with the mainland. There are four main sequences— the rescue of a boat from the surf, the preparation of a potato patch, the hunting of a shark, and a storm which nearly drowns four men and smashes their boat on the rocky beach. No doubt Flaherty wished to avoid the chatty style of the usual travel picture, which skates over a variety of events without attempting to recreate them as experience. But often his treatment seems to me too elaborate, as though he had fallen in love with visual details for their own sake. In order to discover what life on the island is really like, we have to turn to the programme. The film gives us a series of magnificent photographic studies, with the islanders present more as figures in a landscape than as human beings.
When Flaherty made Moana in the South Seas he created a warm golden atmosphere by working only in the early morn- ing and evening, when the sun's rays were low. The atmosphere of Man of Aran, quite rightly, is entirely different —a sombre, steel-grey atmosphere of water, rock and sky. Flaherty has a masterly command over these aspects of nature ; and no one, I think, has ever captured so vividly on the screen the surge and movement of ocean waves against the shore. But there is something a little precious in sacri- ficing so much daily life to the multiplication of these photo- graphic effects. The islanders are well-chosen types— particularly Colman King as a fisherman, Maggie Dirrane as his wife and Michael Dillane as their son—and they act their parts with competent ease, but there are times when they are too evidently posing for the director's camera.
This suggestion of artificiality is emphasized by the dialogue, which had all to be added in the studio and is thus only roughly synchronized. This was no doubt an unfortunate necessity, but Flaherty could have made it matter less if he had put more human substance into his picture. Perhaps he spent too long over it, forgetting, after he had lived for months on the island, how little the average audience will know about this remote spot. But in the shark-fishing sequence, and in the rowing of the wicker eurraghs through the breakers, there are graphically exciting moments ; and Flaherty's landscapes and seascapes ought not to be missed.
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