Robert Flaherty

American observational documentary pioneer D.A. Pennebaker traces his embrace of film-making as a ‘witnessing process’ that allows him to reach a unique understanding of his subjects in this conversation on several rarely discussed films: the highly formative early shorts Baby (1954) and Daybreak Express
(1953–1957), the Drew Associates oddity David (1961), as well as Wild 90 (1968), Eat the Document (1972) and 1 P.M. (1972) – collaborations with Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan and Jean-Luc Godard, respectively. He addresses the meaning of cinéma vérité, Godard’s ‘reckless’ approach to film-making, and the sadness behind his second, and ultimately abandoned, collaboration with Dylan.

В статье, на примере классического этнографического фильма «Нанук с Севера» Роберта Флаэрти, проводится рассмотрение кинообраза культуры эскимосов Севера Канады. Методом анализа фильма как визуально-текстового произведения явилась его исследовательская расшифровка – «перевод» в текстовый формат содержания кадров и титров фильма. Исследуется потенциал кино как формы исследовательского познания. Делается вывод о феномене этнографического фильма как многокомпонентного исторического источника.

The article, using the classic ethnographic film «Nanook of the North» (1922) by a pioneer of world visual anthropology, Robert Flaherty, examines the properties and content of a film document about the culture of the Eskimos of Northern Canada at the beginning of the 20th century. Due to the specifics of silent cinema, the film «Nanook of the North» is a kind of cine-text, consisting of an approximately equal number of film frames and text captions alternating in the narrative. And in this regard, an effective method for the analysis of this film, used in this article, was developed by its research decoding – «translation» into textual format. The obtained cinema text made it possible to identify and analyze, on the one hand, the features of the screen image of the evolution of the traditional Inuit Eskimo lifestyle in the studied period, and on the third, the foundations of the specific creative method of the director/researcher.

A full account of Frances Hubbard Flaherty's and Robert J. Flaherty's stay in Samoa and the production history of Moana (1925). This account maps the early development of documentary as a form with a focus on colonial and imperial politics between the two world wars. Key technical developments are discussed, such as Flaherty's use of panchromatic film stock, alongside considerations of racialized representations.

Kuzeyli Nanook filmi 1922 yılında sinemaya getirdiği yeni bir tarz ile sinemanın gelişimine asla azımsanamayacak katkılar sunmuştur. Ama bugün anladığımız ve kabul ettiğimiz belgesel film özelliklerini filmin gerçekliği kurgulanma şekli ve biçimi açısından sorunlar barındırdığı ve kurmaca yönünün gerçekliği bastırdığı sebepleri ile tam sergileyemediği de aşikardır ve filme dair haklı eleştirilerin membaını da bu durum oluşturmaktadır.

The final shot of German director F. W. Murnau’s 1931 masterpiece, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, is an especially suitable coda to this silent-era filmmaker’s career – one that, despite its epic heights and lasting influence, was often shrouded in mystery and coloured by misfortune. The four-letter word ‘TABU’ materializes like a spectral apparition over dark and ominous swells, appearing as an esoteric warning against forbidden transgressions (Figure 1). Before one’s eyes the word transforms from mere text into a veritable icon, a cinematic image of impending doom and inescapable destiny. The portentous icon immediately follows the film’s dramatic finale, one that film critic Lotte Eisner called ‘the apogee of the art of silent film’ (Eisner 1973: 203). In this scene, the young protagonist, the native South Islander Matahi, swims after a ship bearing his forbidden love. Just as Matahi finally reaches the boat, Hitu, the priest, cuts the rope dangling from its deck. Ultimately overwhelmed by a dark and hostile sea, Matahi sinks silently beneath its waves as the ship’s white sail can be seen darting off into the distance...

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در میان سبک های مختلف فیلم، جنبش سینمای بی واسطه یا سینمای مستقیم در آمریکای شمالی که همزمان با سینما وریته یا سینمای واقع گرایانه فرانسه، توسط افرادی چون رابرت درو و ریچارد لیکاک شکل گرفت را می توان از تاثیرگذارترین سبک هایی دانست که نه تنها در مستندسازی، بلکه در فیلم های داستانی امروزی نیز ردپای آن را می توان مشاهده کرد. جنبشی که عمدتا از تلاش های برجسته ریچارد لیکاک در زمینه زیبایی شناسی و مسائل فنی فیلم سازی مستند سود می برد.

From the variety of film styles, the movement of Direct Cinema in North America shaped alongside the Cinéma Vérité (realistic cinema of France) by filmmakers like Robert Drew and Richard Leacock. The movement which could be seen as the most influential style in documentaries, the movement which mostly benefits the significant efforts of Richard Leacock in aesthetics and technical matters of documentary filmmaking.

In 1932, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) started the most popular series of Tarzan films with Tarzan, the Ape Man. Directed by W. S. Van Dyke, the film was not the first big-screen adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ incredibly popular book, but it was the first sound film in the series and it popularized the hero’s famous yell. Tarzan, the Ape Man also features one of the rare sequences in the series with images of “real” African tribes: a succession of shots made by Van Dyke a year earlier in East Africa and integrated in the film by means of back projection. In this particular context, the manifest use of back, or rear projection—the projection of a moving image onto the back of a translucent screen in front of which actors are filmed performing—is especially interesting, since it not only evokes a concrete objectivation of the ethnographic “Other” as an image, but also a real politics of space and time. This essay, a close analysis of the sequence using both mapping and archaeology as paradigms, will allow us to explore the discursive nature of these images, introduce the anthropological notion of “allochronism” (denying the ethnographic “Other” coevalness with the anthropologist and interlocutor, rejecting the fact that they exist in the same time), and think about the multi-layered temporality of film.

Il 1° marzo 1953 esce il n. 4 della rivista di settore “Cinema Nuovo”: al suo interno, un articolo intitolato Proposte per un film contiene un soggetto firmato dal critico cinematografico Renzo Renzi. Ispirato ai racconti di Renzo Biason, que- sto plot denominato L’Armata s’Agapò si ripromette di narrare il disonorevole comportamento delle truppe italiane in Grecia, gravato da barbare ingiustizie (come la fucilazione di ostaggi), atroci incompetenze (quali le ripetute decisioni di mandare la cavalleria al massacro) e meschine vessazioni (dal colossale giro di prostituzione alla requisizione coatta di beni alimentari).
In base alla legislazione vigente, risalente al “Codice Rocco” di epoca mussoliniana, sia il redattore Renzi che il direttore responsabile della testata, Guido Aristarco, si ritrovano accusati di «vilipendio delle forze armate» e finiscono in carcere, attendendo di venir processati da un tribunale militare. La loro pesante condanna – 8 mesi a Renzi e 4 ad Aristarco – fa però scoppiare una vasta mobilitazione d’opinione che spinge infine le autorità giudiziarie ad annullare, dopo quaranta giorni nel penitenziario di Peschiera del Garda, la pena; preparando altresì il terreno per una modifica in chiave de-fascistizzante del codice penale: nel 1957, infatti, verrà revocata la giurisdizione della magistratura militare sui reati di vilipendio.
Per curiosa concomitanza storica, Renzo Renzi e – con ben più alta esposizione mediatica – Guido Aristarco si ritrovano così a chiudere simbolicamente i postumi di quello stesso processo di demistificazione comunicazionale che li aveva visti sottoscrittori esattamente un decennio addietro e che aveva contribuito, fra le molteplici istanze di fronda e di critica eretica germinate sotto l’eccentrico cappello del dicastero Bottai all’Educazione Nazionale, a far cortocircuitare la pretesa monistica, esteriorizzante ed eugenetica della cultura fascista, proprio nella fase in cui il regime tentava lo scatto decisivo verso l’impianto totalitario.
In effetti Aristarco – che sin dai primissimi anni Cinquanta si era avvicinato a posizioni d’estetica “lukácsiana” e che aveva fondato “Cinema Nuovo” nel dicembre 1952 dopo esser stato “dimissionato” da caporedattore di “Cinema” per aver difeso la pellicola (tardo)neorealista Umberto D. dagli obliqui strali del già potentissimo Giulio Andreotti, in quel frangente sottosegretario della Presidenza del Consiglio con delega allo Spettacolo – era stato nel gennaio 1943 curatore con Fernaldo Di Giammatteo di un numero monografico speciale che aveva clamorosamente abiurato, dall’interno della koiné littoria, la mitopoiesi integralista di un «cinema in camicia nera».
In questo senso, il caso de L’Armata s’Agapò si pone come il completamento morale di una decennale campagna d’emancipazione della “settima arte” italiana – ben inteso, solo una delle molteplici, e spesso concorrenti, che ne hanno innervato la strutturazione teorica e compositiva lungo la prima metà del Novecento – volta a liberare l’autorialità registica ed attoriale dai catafalchi dell’e- pica e dell’escapismo (propri della produzione del Ventennio), mantenendola comunque capace di elaborare “politicamente” – senza riduzionismi veristi e cronache documentarie – la carne viva della coesistenza umana.
Il fascicolo d’inizio 1943 s’intitolava evocativamente Invito alle immagini ed apparteneva alla rivista “Pattuglia”, «mensile di politica arti lettere del Guf di Forlì», che in virtù di tale peculiare radicamento editoriale poteva godere di una straordinaria risonanza su scala nazionale. Non determinata solo dal muovere dalla “città del duce” – peraltro priva di sede universitaria – ma anche e soprattutto dalla capacità unica di agglutinare sinergicamente il forgiarsi intellettuale della “migliore gioventù” della nazione fascista selezionata dai Littoriali della Cultura e dell’Arte (istituiti nell’aprile 1934).

In "Flash Flaherty: Tales from a Film Seminar," edited by Patricia R. Zimmermann and Scott MacDonald. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. (Originally published in a companion blog to "The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema" [Indiana University Press, 2017], ed. Zimmermann and MacDonald. September 8, 2017.)

Robert J. Flaherty’s film Louisiana Story (1948) has been categorized alternately as a documentary and a fiction film. Over sixty years after it was made, there remains no consensus among film critics and historians on the film’s genre. I argue that Louisiana Story is not a documentary film because it is bullshit. I borrow my definition of “bullshit” from the Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. My application of his definition can be used to exclude similarly problematic films—such as propaganda films—from the category of documentary. Their exclusion from this category, as I explain, does not automatically place them in the fiction category. I will offer one reason for believing that bullshit films are a type of fiction film.

Resumo: Ao contrário de uma lógica que divide o mundo entre humanidades subjetivas e uma natureza objetiva universal, pensamentos ameríndios nos trazem novas formas de ver relações entre humanos, animais e seus outros, e entre visível
e invisível. O olhar e a escuta assumem dimensões relacionais no xamanismo, nas caçadas, nas pescarias e também no cinema. A partir dessa chave, examinando alguns filmes em que a pesca aparece, especialmente entre o povo indígena Maxakali, aproximamos a atitude do cineasta-etnógrafo àquela de um pescador.
Palavras-chave: Documentário Etnográfico. Maxakali. Filme-Ritual. Filme-Pesca.

Abstract: Unlike a logic that divides the world between subjective humanities and a universal objective nature, Amerindians thoughts bring us new ways of seeing relations between humans and animals, and between visible and invisible. The exercises of seeing and hearing assume relational dimensions in shamanism, in hunting and fishing, and also in the cinema. From this key, by examining cases where fishing appears in some films, especially among the indigenous people Maxakali, we approach the attitude of the director-ethnographer to a fisherman.
Keywords: Ethnographic documentary. Maxakali/Tikmu’un. Ritual-film. Fishing-film.
Résumé: Contrairement à une logique qui divise le monde entre les humanités subjectives et une nature universelle objectif, certaines pensées amérindiens nous apportent des nouvelles façons de voir les relations entre les humains, les animaux
et leurs autres, et entre le visible et l’invisible. Le regarde et l’écoute gagnent dimensions relationnelles dans le chamanisme, la chasse et la pêche, ainsi que dans le cinéma. À partir de cette clé, en examinant quelques films où l’activité de la pêche apparaît, en particulier parmi les populations autochtones maxakali, nous
approchons l’attitude du cinéaste-ethnologue à celle d’un pêcheur.
Mots-clés: Documentaire ethnographique. Maxakali/Tikmu’un. Film-rituel. Film-pêche.

Sengoopta, Chandak (2009) The universal film for all of us, everywhere in the world: Satyajit Ray's pather panchali (1955) and the shadow of Robert Flaherty. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 29 (3), pp. 277-293. ISSN 0143-9685. ... Full text not available from this ...

Link requires subscription. Review in the Times Literary Supplement of "The Long Exile: A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic" by Melanie McGrath. 288pp. Fourth Estate. £16.99. ISBN 978 0 007 15796 9. US edition: Knopf. $24.95. ISBN 978 1 4000 4047 6.

Famed director Robert Flaherty’s first direct sound film, Oidhche Sheanchais, was recently discovered at Harvard University. This article discusses the impact that the discovery will have on our understanding of this short film, especially as concerns film studies and folklore. It notes several misunderstandings reported in the literature over the years that have now been set right with the
finding of the film. The article points to resources held in archives in Ireland and the United States that can additionally address questions related to this film. While a noteworthy contribution to the filmography of Robert Flaherty, the short ‘talkie’ must be approached with caution by folklorists due to the coaching of actors and cinematographic editing.

Cette analyse, à contre-courant de ce que l’on a longtemps dit de l’œuvre d’un cinéaste réputé contemplatif, vise à mettre en évidence le rôle créateur du montage dans L’Homme d’Aran. Elle montre comment, dépassant la contradiction entre deux logiques concurrentes, l’une fondée sur la prise, l’autre sur le plan, le cinéaste et son monteur parviennent, à travers le système des coupes et un usage singulier de l’insert, à exalter la sensation de l’instant pour nous introduire à « un monde où tout est simultané »
Analyse vidéo du film (40 minutes) :
http://www.surlimage.info/ressources/video-pages/documentaire2.html

O grito é uma ação presente no cinema silencioso desde os seus primórdios, quando os ambientes cinematográficos eram caóticos e carregados de todo tipo de som. No crepúsculo do cinema silencioso, nos anos 1930, o grito converge para dentro dos filmes, em representações existencialistas. A partir desta metáfora e de uma aparelhagem conceitual retirada da “Audiovisão” de Michel Chion, analisaremos dois casos extremos da relação entre cinema silencioso e cinema sonoro: a ubiquidade sonora e espacial em Ivan o terrível, de Eisenstein, e o som que ratifica o silêncio em Moana with sound, versão sonorizada do clássico mudo de Robert Flaherty.

Czym jest prawda w kinie? W początkach kina dokumentalnego pojawili się dwaj wybitni reżyserzy o krańcowo różnej wizji dokumentu, mowa tu o Robercie Flahertym skierowanym ku przeszłości oraz Dzidze Wiertowie postulującym przyszłość w swoich filmach.