Flaherty is Dead

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 632, 10 August 1951, Page 16

Flaherty is Dead

|: VEN if one had had a galaxy of great ~ films to discuss, the week would have been overshadowed by a report that reached The Listener office just as this issue was about to go to press. It stated simply that Robert Flaherty had died at Dummerston, in Vermont, after | a long illness. He was 67. | Flaherty, who was born in Michigan, | started off as a prospector in the Can- | adian backwoods, turned explorer in 1910, and spent the next 10 years living with the Eskimos in the sub-arctic barrens. During this period he acquired | a film camera, and in 1920 he managed to persuade the firm of Revillon Fréres, fur dealers, to back a film-making expedition to Hudson Bay. The result was Nanook of the North, the first of the great cycle of documentaries which won for him a secure place in the history of the cinema, Nanook foreshadowed the form and style of most of Flaherty’s work. A superlative observer, he found his most fruitful inspiration in small communities living on or beyond the fringes of civilisation (Moana, Man of Aran, Elephant Boy) and his work has, therefore, permanent value as a record of primitive life and culture apart from its intrinsic worth as film. Listeners

here have recently had the chance to hear Flaherty’s voice in two BBC programmes. It is unfortunate that opportunities to see his work have not been more frequent. Louisana Story, his last film (finished in 1948), has not been shown here yet.