Legendary documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty (1884 - 1951) and his wife Frances Hubbard Flaherty (1883 - 1972) lived in Dummerston, Vermont just north of Brattleboro and in later years the Flaherty Film Study Center was located there. The episode talks about the Flaherty's early life and marriage, and delves into Robert's first work documenting his explorations of the Belcher Islands in the Hudson Bay region of Canada. The cinematic result was “Nanook of the North”, released in 1922. The film achieved widespread critical acclaim, introducing documentary filmmaking to the world as an art form that could capture people, nature and convey our common humanity. While not strictly documentary in today's sense of the genre, Frances said in her 1960 book The Odyssey of a Filmmaker: Robert Flaherty's Story,' quotes from which are included in the podcast, that their work was the essential Flaherty method, capturing "the thing itself for its own sake." Frances was an active partner in filmmaking and won an Academy Award in 1948 for best original story for the couples' 'Louisiana Story.' This episode provides synopsis of several of the Flaherty's films including 'Nanook of the North', 'Moana' (which the narrator refers to as 'Moana of the South Seas') and 'Man of Aran.' The work of Flaherty daughter Monica Flaherty Frasseto and her work adding sound to Moana thereby breathing new life into it, is discussed. After Roberts death, Frances founded The Flaherty Seminar, a film study center for filmmakers, curators, and students that continues today.
Frances Hubbard Flaherty collaborated on every Robert J. Flaherty film and devoted her life after his death, according to the Flaherty Seminars website, "to the articulation and explanation of Robert Flaherty's view on documentary film, both in her writings... and especially her establishment of the Seminars." The Flaherty Seminar is now based in Brooklyn and continues the Flaherty legacy as 'The Flaherty'.
The Flaherty's daughter, Monica Flaherty Frasseto, added sound to Moana and directed the Flaherty Study Center in Dummerston for many years before she died in Dummerston in 2008. An obituary of her life appeared in the local Brattleboro Reformer here.
Other sources include A Documentary Life, 1883-1922, published in 2005 by Robert J. Christopher, which provided insight into the years Flaherty spent in northern Canada making Nanook of the North and Robert and Frances' 1914-16 diaries and correspondence. Hidden and Seeking (1971) directed by Peter Werner, is another source for those interested in delving deeper into the Flaherty phenomenon.
Robert Flaherty
Host Lissa Weinmann: Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.
DAVID HILER, NARRATOR: Winter 1921, the Canadian sub-Arctic. Robert Flaherty is at work filming the world's first documentary showing real people in real life. His subject, an Eskimo family of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay. Robert Flaherty was, by nature, a traveler, a seeker with a boundless thirst for knowledge. His film career would take him all over the world, but in his final years he settled with his wife in a farmhouse in Dummerston, Vermont.
Flaherty is considered to be the originator of the documentary film, as well as the ethnographic film. Film was a new form of visual expression in the early 20th century, and he, as much as anyone, is noted for making it into an art form. His best known films capture moments in the lives of traditional peoples whose daily activities could not be more different from those of the viewing audiences for which the films were made. Yet they capture the common humanity we all share and convey the engaging curiosity about the world that was at the heart of Robert Flaherty's character.
Robert Joseph Flaherty was born in Iron Mountain, Michigan, in 1884, the son of an iron ore explorer. He spent most of his boyhood in Canada and inherited his father's enthusiasm for geology and exploration. Like his father, he became a surveyor and prospector for mining companies and was entranced by the remote places he visited, encountering peoples and cultures as unfamiliar as they were fascinating. He was the first to make accurate maps of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay. As a tribute to his precise mapping skills and his regard for the natives of the region, he was inducted into the Royal Geographic Society and the largest of the islands was named for him. The time he spent in northern Canada in the early parts of the 20th century would change his life. When not surveying for iron ore deposits, he photographed the native peoples with extraordinary skill and sensitivity. His emerging abilities in still photography would lay the foundation for the groundbreaking film work that was to come.
In the fall of 1914, he married Frances Hubbard, the daughter of one of his employers. She was a Bryn Mawr graduate from a background of class and privilege. He certainly was not. By way of explaining her accepting a proposal of marriage from someone her father thought beneath her, she wrote.
STEPHANIE GREENE, VOICE OF FRANCES HUBBARD: "I married my husband because an innate sense for the preservation of his own genius had saved him from educational institutions or instruction of any kind. And because that genius was for exploration. Hence his profession, exploration and mining, and for music and the arts. His avocations: playing the violin and portrait photography."
NARRATOR: Little did she know that in the coming years and with a good deal of her help, he would turn yet a new avocation – the making of motion pictures into a profession that would create for both of them a lasting legacy.
Flaherty is best remembered for three films Nanook of the North, Moana and Man of Aran. Nanook of the North, a story of life and love in the Arctic, is best remembered. It is a silent black and white film with enter titles interpreting the film's action.
The film begins with Nanook in his kayak, with a small child lying on the canvas top when he paddles to shore. One family member after another, including a small dog, climbs out of the kayak, leaving the audience to laugh and marvel that so many could have fit inside. Next, Nanook is seen at a trading post enthralled by the workings of a modern gramophone. In the following scenes, he fishes and hunts walrus. When winter comes, the men travel by dog sled to hunt seals. They build an igloo in under an hour and hook spear a seal beneath the ice and the group feasts on the raw meat. The film ends with family members covered in furs and animal skins, going to sleep as the wind blows outside their igloo and snow drifts across the darkened land.
Flaherty's message in the film is clear. Life in the Arctic requires every action be done with great effort and skill, an overturned kayak or a simple misstep on an ice floe could mean certain death, and the threat of starvation is ever present. Despite this, Nanook goes about his business with an ebullient energy that led film critic Roger Ebert to call him, “one of the most vital and unforgettable human beings ever recorded on film.”
It is important to understand that Flaherty himself was often in physical danger, filming in subzero temperatures, hauling heavy camera equipment to all but inaccessible places and working at the whims of the forbidding climate under the same trying physical conditions as his subjects. Nanook of the North was released in 1922 and became the first commercially successful documentary film hailed by critics worldwide. The film's focus on people living in primitive conditions and what was elemental to human life, working together to get food and shelter became a model for those that would follow.
(Musical interlude)
NARRATOR: With the success of Nanook of the North in 1922, Robert Flaherty became a celebrated documentary filmmaker. Audiences were intrigued by his story of Eskimo life in the sub-Arctic, a life very different from their own.
And so Flaherty set out to find a new locale with similar attributes, a place remote and isolated with a primitive culture in close proximity to the natural world. He found it in the Samoan Islands of the South Pacific, and took his young family there to film his next venture, Moana of the South Seas. (NOTE: Narrator refers to the film in this manner but actual title is Moana). Flaherty's wife, Frances Hubbard Flaherty, became the film's co-producer and writer.
The filming in black and white with no sound, lasted nearly two years. As he did with Nanook, Flaherty documented the life of the Samoans performing their rituals and practices. He assembled the episodes into a loose narrative telling of a boy's coming of age. The boy's name was Moana.
The film begins with Moana climbing a palm tree, a dramatic scene shot in trademark Flaherty style, slowly revealing the scope of the tall climb. This is the opening to life Samoan style, making cloth from mulberry bark, snaring and killing of a wild pig, battling high seas in locally fashioned boats. Moana courts a young girl near the film's end, he is tattooed a solemn and painful rite of Samoan manhood.
The Flaherty's youngest daughter, Monica, was three years old when the family moved to the island of Savai’i, the largest of the Samoan islands. Fifty years later, she returned to the South Pacific to make a soundtrack for her parents’ 1926 silent film. She found young island people for the voices, and synced them to the film's action, along with bird songs, laughter, crashing ocean waves, rustling foliage, blowing a conk shell, and paddling a canoe. Kent Jones, the director of the New York Film Festival until 2019, stated that in viewing the film,” every time you see a leaf, every time you just pick up a random sound, it's astonishing in an unprecedented way.”
The Flaherty's third film, Man of Aran, captured life on the west coast of Ireland and was completed in 1926. Frances Flaherty is listed as a collaborator in the opening credits. One of the titles that begins the film reads, “in this desperate environment, the man of Aran, because his independence is the most precious privilege he can win from life, fights for his existence. There, though, it may be, it is a fight from which he will have no respite until the end of his indomitable days or until he meets his master, the sea.”
These words encapsulate Flaherty's intention in making Man of Aran. The tense drama of the story begins immediately, with mother and son anxiously waiting on the shore as husband and father returned safely from a fishing journey with their help. The man of Aran and his two fishing companions pulled the camera safely onto the rocky shore. The Flaherty story of the fight for existence on the rugged Irish coast, shows simple acts which can turn deadly, such as retrieving a fishing net, which nearly results in a drowning. Ponies carry harvested seaweed and dirt dug from rock crevices to make soil. A boy fishes with a string and bait from a high cliff.
The film climaxes with the men hunting sharks in heavy seas. Their fragile coracle/curragh are in danger of being overturned at any moment. The boy and his mother heat a cauldron by turf fire to render the valuable shark liver oil. The film reveals the infinite breadth and expanse of the land, the sky and especially the perilous sea all set against the minuteness and frightening vulnerability of the people.
Other well-known Flaherty films are Elephant Boy, The Land and Louisiana Story. Frances co-wrote with her husband, Louisiana Story, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing in 1948. (NOTE: and for which Frances Hubbard Flaherty won the Academy Award for Best Original Story.). While Robert Flaherty won other awards as well, his legacy is far greater than any number of prizes he might have collected. He created a non-fiction film genre that was initially his alone.
Robert Flaherty died at his home in Dummerston in July of 1951. Three years after his death in 1954, Frances Flaherty invited a number of people interested in film, critics, producers, musicians and film enthusiasts to the Flaherty Farm in Dummerston for what was to be the first ‘Flaherty Film Seminar.’ Monica moved to Dummerston after her father died to care for her mother, where the two ran the Flaherty Film Study Center from the family home. Frances died in 1972 at the age of 88, and Monica, in 2008, also at 88.
Frances published "The Odyssey of a Filmmaker; the Robert Flaherty Story" in 1960. In the book, she reveals the commonalities between geographic exploration and filmmaking. She offers an authentic distillation of who her husband truly was and how his films speak to their essence.
VOICE OF FRANCES FLAHERTY: "Robert Flaherty's whole life was a passionate and stubborn fight for the exploratory way, for natural poetry, for a greater awareness of the essential truth of things as they are, a deeper communion with all beings. Non-pre-conception is the precondition to discovery because it is a state of mind. When you do not pre-conceive, then you go about finding out. There's nothing else you can do -- you go and explore. The Flaherty films are timeless in the sense that they do not argue. They celebrate. And what they celebrate freely and spontaneously, simply and purely, Robert Flaherty, 1,The early life of filmmaker Robert Flaherty and the making of Nanook of the North, Transcript
Speaker [00:00:05] Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail.
DAVID HILER, NARRATOR [00:00:30] Winter 1921, the Canadian sub-Arctic. Robert Flaherty is at work filming the world's first documentary showing real people in real life. His subject, an Eskimo family of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay. Robert Flaherty was, by nature, a traveler, a seeker with a boundless thirst for knowledge. His film career would take him all over the world, but in his final years he settled with his wife in a farmhouse in Dummerston, Vermont.
Flaherty is considered to be the originator of the documentary film, as well as the ethnographic film. Film was a new form of visual expression in the early 20th century, and he, as much as anyone, is noted for making it into an art form. His best known films capture moments in the lives of traditional peoples whose daily activities could not be more different from those of the viewing audiences for which the films were made. Yet they capture the common humanity we all share and convey the engaging curiosity about the world that was at the heart of Robert Flaherty's character.
Robert Joseph Flaherty was born in Iron Mountain, Michigan, in 1884, the son of an iron ore explorer. He spent most of his boyhood in Canada and inherited his father's enthusiasm for geology and exploration. Like his father, he became a surveyor and prospector for mining companies and was entranced by the remote places he visited, encountering peoples and cultures as unfamiliar as they were fascinating. He was the first to make accurate maps of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay. As a tribute to his precise mapping skills and his regard for the natives of the region, he was inducted into the Royal Geographic Society and the largest of the islands was named for him. The time he spent in northern Canada in the early parts of the 20th century would change his life. When not surveying for iron ore deposits, he photographed the native peoples with extraordinary skill and sensitivity. His emerging abilities in still photography would lay the foundation for the groundbreaking film work that was to come.
In the fall of 1914, he married Frances Hubbard, the daughter of one of his employers. She was a Bryn Mawr graduate from a background of class and privilege. He certainly was not. By way of explaining her accepting a proposal of marriage from someone her father thought beneath her, she wrote.
STEPHANIE GREENE, VOICE OF FRANCES HUBBARD[00:03:20] I married my husband because an innate sense for the preservation of his own genius had saved him from educational institutions or instruction of any kind. And because that genius was for exploration. Hence his profession, exploration and mining, and for music and the arts. His avocations, playing the violin and portrait photography.
NARRATOR [00:03:48] Little did she know that in the coming years and with a good deal of her help, he would turn yet a new avocation – The making of motion pictures into a profession that would create for both of them a lasting legacy. Flaherty is best remembered for three films Nanook of the North, Moana of the South Seas and Man of Aran. Nanook of the North, a story of life and love in the Arctic, is best remembered. It is a silent black and white film with enter titles interpreting the film's action.
The film begins with Nanook in his kayak, with a small child lying on the canvas top when he paddles to shore. One family member after another, including a small dog, climbs out of the kayak, leaving the audience to laugh and marvel that so many could have fit inside. Next, Nanook is seen at a trading post enthralled by the workings of a modern gramophone. In the following scenes, he fishes and hunts walrus. When winter comes, the men travel by dog sled to hunt seals. They build an igloo in under an hour and hook spear a seal beneath the ice and the group feasts on the raw meat. The film ends with family members covered in furs and animal skins, going to sleep as the wind blows outside their igloo and snow drifts across the darkened land.
Flaherty's message in the film is clear. Life in the Arctic requires every action be done with great effort and skill, an overturned kayak or a simple misstep on an ice floe could mean certain death, and the threat of starvation is ever present. Despite this, Nanook goes about his business with an ebullient energy that led film critic Roger Ebert to call him, “one of the most vital and unforgettable human beings ever recorded on film.”
It is important to understand that Flaherty himself was often in physical danger, filming in subzero temperatures, hauling heavy camera equipment to all but inaccessible places and working at the whims of the forbidding climate under the same trying physical conditions as his subjects. Nanook of the North was released in 1922 and became the first commercially successful documentary film hailed by critics worldwide. The film's focus on people living in primitive conditions and what was elemental to human life, working together to get food and shelter became a model for those that would follow.
Speaker: [00:07:07] Explore more at brattleborowords.org.
Robert Flaherty 2, Later Life and Moana of the South Seas
Speaker [00:00:05] Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail.
DAVID HILER, NARRATOR [00:00:23] With the success of Nanook of the North in 1922, Robert Flaherty became a celebrated documentary filmmaker. Audiences were intrigued by his story of Eskimo life in the sub-Arctic, a life very different from their own.
And so Flaherty set out to find a new locale with similar attributes, a place remote and isolated with a primitive culture in close proximity to the natural world. He found it in the Samoan Islands of the South Pacific, and took his young family there to film his next venture, Moana of the South Seas. Flaherty's wife, Frances Hubbard Flaherty, became the film's co-producer and writer.
The filming in black and white with no sound, lasted nearly two years. As he did with Nanook, Flaherty documented the life of the Samoans performing their rituals and practices. He assembled the episodes into a loose narrative telling of a boy's coming of age. The boy's name was Moana.
The film begins with Moana climbing a palm tree, a dramatic scene shot in trademark Flaherty style, slowly revealing the scope of the tall climb. This is the opening to life Samoan style, making cloth from mulberry bark, snaring and killing of a wild pig, battling high seas in locally fashioned boats. Moana courts a young girl near the film's end, he is tattooed a solemn and painful rite of Samoan manhood.
The Flaherty's youngest daughter, Monica, was three years old when the family moved to the island of Savai’i, the largest of the Samoan islands. Fifty years later, she returned to the South Pacific to make a soundtrack for her parents’ 1926 silent film. She found young island people for the voices, and synced them to the film's action, along with bird songs, laughter, crashing ocean waves, rustling foliage, blowing a conk shell, and paddling a canoe. Kent Jones, the director of the New York Film Festival until 2019, stated that in viewing the film,” every time you see a leaf, every time you just pick up a random sound, it's astonishing in an unprecedented way.”
The Flaherty's third film, Man of Aran, captured life on the west coast of Ireland and was completed in 1926. Frances Flaherty is listed as a collaborator in the opening credits. One of the titles that begins the film reads, “in this desperate environment, the man of Aran, because his independence is the most precious privilege he can win from life, fights for his existence. There, though, it may be, it is a fight from which he will have no respite until the end of his indomitable days or until he meets his master, the sea.”
These words encapsulate Flaherty's intention in making Man of Aran. The tense drama of the story begins immediately, with mother and son anxiously waiting on the shore as husband and father returned safely from a fishing journey with their help. The man of Aran and his two fishing companions pulled the camera safely onto the rocky shore. The Flaherty story of the fight for existence on the rugged Irish coast, shows simple acts which can turn deadly, such as retrieving a fishing net, which nearly results in a drowning. Ponies carry harvested seaweed and dirt dug from rock crevices to make soil. A boy fishes with a string and bait from a high cliff.
The film climaxes with the men hunting sharks in heavy seas. Their fragile coracle/curragh are in danger of being overturned at any moment. The boy and his mother heat a cauldron by turf fire to render the valuable shark liver oil. The film reveals the infinite breadth and expanse of the land, the sky and especially the perilous sea all set against the minuteness and frightening vulnerability of the people.
Other well-known Flaherty films are Elephant Boy, The Land and Louisiana Story. Frances co-wrote with her husband, Louisiana Story, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing in 1948. While Robert Flaherty won other awards as well, his legacy is far greater than any number of prizes he might have collected. He created a non-fiction film genre that was initially his alone.
Robert Flaherty died at his home in Dummerston in July of 1951. Three years after his death in 1954, Frances Flaherty invited a number of people interested in film, critics, producers, musicians and film enthusiasts to the Flaherty Farm in Dummerston for what was to be the first ‘Flaherty Film Seminar.’ Monica moved to Dummerston after her father died to care for her mother, where the two ran the Flaherty Film Study Center from the family home. Frances died in 1972 at the age of 88, and Monica, in 2008, also at 88.
Frances published The Odyssey of a Filmmaker; the Robert Flaherty Story in 1960. In the book, she reveals the commonalities between geographic exploration and filmmaking. She offers an authentic distillation of who her husband truly was and how his films speak to their essence.
STEPHANIE GREENE AS VOICE OF FRANCES FLAHERTY[00:07:22] "Robert Flaherty's whole life was a passionate and stubborn fight for the exploratory way, for natural poetry, for a greater awareness of the essential truth of things as they are, a deeper communion with all beings. Non-pre-conception is the precondition to discovery because it is a state of mind. When you do not pre-conceive, then you go about finding out. There's nothing else you can do -- you go and explore. The Flaherty films are timeless in the sense that they do not argue. They celebrate. And what they celebrate freely and spontaneously, simply and purely, is the thing itself for its own sake."
This episode was produced and edited by Sally Seymour. The script was written by Daniel Toomey. The narrator is David Hiler. The Voice of Frances Hubbard Flaherty is Stephanie Greene. Alec Pombriant did post production on the podcast from original Brattleboro Words Trail mastering done by Guilford Sound. Executive Producer is me, Lissa Weinmann. Thanks for listening and look forward to seeing you on the Brattleboro Words Trail.
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