Man of Aran

Eking out an existence in circumstances that are comically wretched, Michael Flaherty's "Man of Aran" often resembles a Monty Python skit. The documentary seems self-parody, a distillation of hoary man versus nature imagery that Flaherty perfected in "Nanook of the North" and, in this 1931 film, amplifies to the point of absurdity. The documentary shows stark, barren headlands battered by towering waves. Inexplicably, three fishermen are paddling a canoe on the turbulent sea -- the ocean is so violent that it seems impossible for the tiny corach to survive. The men make it ashore, observed by a woman and small boy, sheltering in the lea of one of the sea-side boulders. The men drag the little canoe ashore against a backdrop of waves detonating like car-bombs against the cliffs. Two of the seafarers vanish -- Flaherty's formula is to show a small family-group wrestling with nature -- not a team or a village or a community. The man has dropped his nets in the surf and the waves threaten to haul the tackle out to sea. So the fisherman, his wife and son venture out into the pounding waves and are buffeted by them spectacularly, each blow seeming to drag them toward the deadly waters. At one point, a huge wave topples over the family and they vanish into the chaos of white water. When the wave recedes, the man grabs the woman by the hair and hauls her out of the surf. Their nets retrieved, the family makes their way homeward, choosing a sea-side path so close to the waves that they are periodically inundanted and knocked down onto the sharp lava-rock beach. Flaherty films the fisherman's village as some saw-tooth gables, thatched with turf, and half-buried in a landscape that looks somewhat less inviting than the surface of the moon. The film shows the small family attempting to farm the stones on the flat-topped cliffs pounded by the sea. The woman goes down to the shore, gets drenched again by the waves, and, then, carries huge bundles of sea-weed up onto the cliffs to manure tiny plots of land walled in by heaps of shattered rock. Her husband swings a sledge-hammer against the boulders and, at one point, lays on his belly to wrest a handful of dirt from a deep crevasse where a thorn plant is growing. The man carries the precious handful of soil to his basement-sized garden and puts it down among the windrows of sea-weed that his wife is dragging, like a mule from the wild waters below. Sometimes, the fishermen go out to sea to hunt huge basking sharks, submarine-sized beasts that they murder with harpoons and drag out of the murderous water to render in big buckets suspended on the rocky shore. The last twenty minutes of the film features the tiny canoe battling 80 foot high waves to regain the shore while the boy and woman cling to one another atop the wind-lashed cliff in desperate panic -- the sea is so huge and deadly and the canoe looks so tiny and fragile that the effect is inadvertently humorous, particularly since the fishermen wear identical tam-o-shanter hats with little ball-shaped tassels atop their berets. The film is completely pure, a poetic depiction of people struggling against impossible conditions -- there is no notion of community, religion, nor is there any explanation for why these people put out to sea in deadly conditions, the nature of their economy or how anyone can possibly survive on a diet of potatoes grown in webs of stinking sea-weed. The film resembles Leni Riefenstahl's work -- ostensibly documentary, it is, in fact, a form of film-poetry of a particularly concentrated form, a sort "Blut und Boden" ("blood and soil") tribute to heroic, if brutish, peasants, and the titanic forces of nature. A documentary made in 1977, and showing some of the people featured in the film as they are today, shows that the movie is a fraud in every possible respect. In one sequence, the 1977 documentary imitates a panning motion in Flaherty's film that shows the desolate lunar landscape of the island with the houses huddled, as if in terror in the center of the frame. But, if Flaherty, had continued his pan for another two or three seconds, the image would have shown lush-looking pastures and gardens with many grazing cattle. Flaherty filmed the sea-sequences on the north headlands of the island, an area where, in real life, no one ever went because of the dangerous wind and waves. Many of the villagers are still bitter about him importuning them to venture out into those waters for his cameras. In a village meeting, a man and a woman quarrel violently about whether women, "in the old days", were used as beasts of burden. Both people are old and their memories poor and the man's sense of chivalry is outraged by the images of the woman hauling seaweed on her back from the rocky beach -- present-day images show this being done with mules and shetland ponies. Flaherty completely neglected the religious conflicts on the island, a struggle between the Catholics and Protestants that was still raging in 1977 when the second documentary was made. Apparently, Flaherty had to forge harpoons and teach the islanders to hunt basking sharks, a practice that they had abandoned as too dangerous and pointless a hundred years earlier. Werner Herzog observes that the greatest documentaries eschew literal accuracy in favor of "ecstatic truth" and Flaherty certainly was a pioneer with respect to this view of film-making (pronounced by the Aran Islanders as "fillum-making). In "Man of Aran," the deceit is so thorough-going and complete that the movie will always be, I think, intensely controversial. But the images of the tiny canoe battered by colossal waves, once seen, are unforgettable.