So I’m in the middle of writing an essay about Robert Flaherty’s “Man of Aran” a supposed documentary film about the life of a family who live on the Isle of Aran.
Firstly, the actor (yes, actor) playing the titular role isn’t even from the isle of Aran, the wife and child, though indeed from the island are neither related to the man nor even each other.
In the film they hunt for basking sharks, using equipment that hasn’t been used there for decades, make oil out of the sharks livers for the lamps in their houses despite the fact that the houses are clearly lit by electricity.
They then farm potatoes by scavanging soil from cracks in the rock (or as the film would have it, magic it from thin air as according to the intertitles “the land [...] has not soil!”). They cart it around on giant baskets on their back… despite the fact that in reality they had donkeys and horses to do it for them. They also break rocks to make room for these potato farms… you’d think after hundreds of years of living on the island they’d just grow the potatoes in the same place?
A boy fishes from the edge of a vertigo enducingly high cliff and spots a basking shark. He’s about 14 years old… and acording to the film the sharks migrate every year in their hundreds. You’d think he’d seen sharks loads of times, not to mention seen his father hunt them and know that basking sharks are harmless and not man eating. Yet the boy looks absolutly terrified and runs off to tell his mother.
The film shows one shot of waves crashing against the cliffs after another, in fact I’d wager half the film is images of waves. Beautiful as they are, they kind of lose their majestic impact after a few hundred times. Not to mention the fact that no matter how violent and high the waves go… the wee boat the father rows around in seems fine. All the danger is done in the editting and music.
You won’t believe the title for the essay I have to write about it.
“Does Robert Flaherty’s ‘romantic vision’ invalidate the ethnographic status of his work in a film like Man of Aran?”
Seriously.
My film is closer to reality than this one and it’s about a bearded lady in a circus who’s star performance consists of a single clown, a knife thrower and a man of indeterminate age in a wheelbarrow. Oh, it’s called ‘Shaved’ now, BTW. And it’s nearly finished!
Romantic vision my arse.
