Robert J. Flaherty - Last Years

Last Years

Back in the United States, Pare Lorentz of the United States Film Service hired Flaherty to film a documentary about US agriculture: a project which became The Land. Flaherty and his wife covered some 100,000 miles, shooting 25,000 feet of film, and captured a series of striking images of rural America. Among the themes raised by Flaherty's footage were the challenge of the erosion of agricultural land and the Dust Bowl (as well as the beginning of effective responses via improved soil conservation practices), mechanization and rural unemployment, and large-scale migration from the Great Plains to California. In the latter context, Flaherty highlighted competition for agricultural jobs between native-born Americans and migrants from Mexico and the Philippines.

The film encountered a series of obstacles. After production had begun, Congress abolished the United States Film Service, and the project was shunted to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). With US entry to World War 2 approaching, USDA officials (and the film's editor Helen van Dongen) attempted to reconcile Flaherty's footage with rapidly changing official messages (including a reversal of concern from pre-war rural unemployment to wartime labor shortages). Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, officials grew apprehensive that the film could project an unduly negative image of the US internationally, and although a prestige opening was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942, the film was never authorized for general release.

Louisiana Story (1948) was a Flaherty documentary shot by himself and Richard Leacock, this one about the installation of an oil rig in a Louisiana swamp. The film stresses the oil rig's peaceful and unproblematic coexistence with the surrounding environment, and was in fact funded by Standard Oil, a petroleum company. The main character of the film is a Cajun boy. The poetry of childhood and nature, some critics would argue, is used to make the exploration of oil look beautiful. Virgil Thomson composed the music for the film.

Flaherty was one of the Directors of The Titan: Story of Michelangelo (1950), which won an Academy Award for documentary feature. The film was a re-edited version of the German/Swiss film of 1938 originally titled Michelangelo: Life of a Titan, directed by Curt Oertel. The re-edited version put a new English narration by Frederic March and musical score onto a shorter edit of the existing film. The new credits include Flaherty, Oertel and Richard Lyford as Directors and Ralph Alswang, Flaherty and Robert Snyder as Producers. The film was edited by Richard Lyford.