Man of Aran is a 1934 Irish fictional documentary (ethnofiction) film shot, written and directed by Robert J. Flaherty about life on the Aran Islands off the western coast of Ireland. It portrays characters living in premodern conditions, documenting their daily routines such as fishing off high cliffs, farming potatoes where there is little soil, and hunting for huge basking sharks to get liver oil for lamps. Some situations are fabricated, such as one scene in which the shark fishermen are almost lost at sea in a sudden gale. Additionally, the family members shown are not actually related, having been chosen from among the islanders for their photogenic qualities.
George C. Stoney's 1978 documentary How the Myth was Made, which is included in the special features of the DVD, relates that the Aran Islanders had not hunted sharks in this way for over fifty years at the time the film was made. Man of Aran is Flaherty's recreation of culture on the edges of modern society, even though much of the primitive life depicted had been left behind by the 1930s. It is impressive, however, for its drama, for its spectacular cinematography of landscape and seascape, and for its concise editing.
Synopsis Man has to fight for his existence in the Aran Islands. Three men, among them "A Man of Aran", land a flimsy currach in the midst of high winds and huge waves with help from "His Wife" and "Their Son". The Man and his Wife work to make a field on the barren rocks using seaweed and soil scraped out of rock crevices. The Man fixes a hole in his boat with a mixture of cloth and tar. His Son sits on the edge of a cliff and uses a crab he caught earlier as bait to catch a fish in the water below.
The Man, working with four other fishermen in a slightly larger boat than before, harpoons a giant basking shark. They lose that one after a fight and later spend two days wearing another one down before they can bring it back to shore. The whole village comes down to the beach to either watch or to help drag the carcass out of the water. The Wife renders the shark's liver to get oil for the lamps on the island.
More sharks are still passing by on their migration, so the local fishermen head back out to sea, even though the weather looks like it might turn. No one will take the Son with them. There is a storm, and the Wife and Son can only watch from shore while the Man and his two shipmates struggle to get their boat to land safely against the elements. Everyone is reunited, but the Man's boat is crushed by the waves and rocks. The family turns and makes their way back to their cottage.
Cast Colman 'Tiger' King as A Man of Aran Maggie Dirrane as His Wife Michael Dirrane as Their Son Pat Mullen as Shark Hunter Patch 'Red Beard' Ruadh as Shark Hunter Patcheen Faherty as Shark Hunter Tommy O'Rourke as Shark Hunter 'Big Patcheen' Conneely of the West as Canoeman Stephen Dirrane as Canoeman Pat McDonough as Canoeman
Production Stung by criticism that British films were flaccid imitations of those being produced in Hollywood, Michael Balcon of Gaumont British hired the acclaimed writer/director Robert Flaherty and his wife Frances (Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926), Elephant Boy (1937), The Land (1942), Louisiana Story (1948)) to prove the British film industry's cultural excellence as well as commercial success. In 1931, Robert Flaherty set up a studio and laboratory facilities on Inishmore, the largest of the three Aran Islands.Calder-Marshall Flaherty had promised Balcon he could shoot the entire film for £10,000.Croft, Thomas Andrew, Balcon's Folly, the manufacture and assessment of Man of Aran Over the next two years, he shot over 200,000 feet of film for a 74-minute documentary, oftentimes filming the same event time after time.Calder-Marshall As Flaherty says, "our films are made with film and time, I need lots of both."Leacock, Richard; On Working With Robert and Frances Flaherty 26 April 1990 Balcon eventually called a halt to filming as the costs approached £40,000.O’Brien
Like most 1930s documentaries, Man of Aran was shot as a silent film.Russell Patrick, Sight and Sound 21.5 (May 2011) The intermittent voices, the sound effects, and music are only accompaniments to the visuals and not considered integral to the production.Barsam Paul Rotha in Documentary Film says, "Man of Aran avoided all important issues raised by sound".
Flaherty continued to experiment with cinematography especially the long focal lens that he first used in Nanook. He used a variety of lens sizes, even a seventeen-inch long lens, which was twice the size of the camera.Barsam He used a spring driven camera that "was simpler in operation than any I have seen and not much heavier to carry than a portable typewriter".Barsam, Richard, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, IUP 1992
Release and initial reception On 25 April 1934, Man of Aran premiered at the New Gallery in London. The screening had been preceded by a major publicity drive. A stuffed basking shark was put on display in the window of Gaumont British in Wardour Street, and Irish Guards played Irish folk music in the theater foyer on the first night. The islanders were brought over from Aran and paraded before the press and public in their simple homespun island garb. Man of Aran won top prize for the best foreign film at the 2nd Venice International Film Festival, the Mussolini Cup.McLoone During the first six months of its release the film grossed about £50,000; many films had grossed more, but according to Michael Balcon it brought Gaumont British the prestige he wanted.Calder-Marshall
When it opened in Dublin on 6 May 1934, Man of Aran was a major political and cultural event to the nascent Irish Free State and was attended by the President of the Executive Council, Éamon de Valera.Blake, Martin: A Critical Study of the Implications of the Problem of Reality in the Documentary Film: University of Southern California, Dissertations Publishing, 1972. The Irish government saw it as confirmation of their social and economic policies and so enthusiastically received the film. Man of Aran suited Fianna Fáil, as it encouraged an image of Ireland that was fiercely traditional, definitively rural, and resilient in the face of hardship.O'Brien
The film's depiction of man's courage and repudiation of the intellect also appealed to the Nazis, who raved over it during the Berlin Festival in 1935.McLoon As Luke Gibbons has written, this portrayal of the harsh life on the west coast of Ireland was often taken to heart by those who viewed it.
Some critics believed Man of Aran socially irrelevant. Instead of returning with a film about Island poverty and an indictment of the absentee landlord, they claim Flaherty brought back a film about dewy-eyed urchins.Corliss Grierson argues that Flaherty's 'NeoRousseauism', the glorification of a simpler and more primitive way of life, meant he could not develop a form adequate to the more immediate material in the modern world.Tagg, John; The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning UMP 2009 Paul Rotha faulted Man of Aran for its alleged avoidance of economic and social reality.Barsam At the time of Man of Aran'''s release, socialist critic Ralph Bond commented “…we are more concerned with what Flaherty has left out than with what he has put in…Flaherty would have us believe that there is no class struggle on Aran despite ample evidence to the contrary".Bond, "Man of Aran Reviewed," Cinema Quarterly, II, No. 4 Summer, 1934 It is claimed that Flaherty ignored the effects of such worldwide events as the depression of the 1930s, suggesting to the audience that the Aran Islands were isolated economically as they were geographically.Barsam
Subsequent analysis and criticism The current reputation of Man of Aran rests as much on controversies over truth and accuracy as on its aesthetic achievement.McLoone, Martin; The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, ed McFarlane, Wallflower Press 2005 Some contend that Man of Aran is more valuable as a documentary of Robert Flaherty's vision of life than it is of life itself.O'Brien, Harvey; The Real Ireland: The Evolution of Ireland in Documentary Film. MUP Others see it as a betrayal of documentary's mission, "to tell it like it is".MacBean, James Roy: Two Laws from Australia, One White One Black, Film Quarterly Spring 1983, Vol 36, No.3 And yet, according to Richard Barsam, Flaherty is one of the great innovators of the documentary form...creating a nonfiction genre all of his own.Barsam, R: The Vision of Robert Flaherty, The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker; Indiana Press 1988
According to anthropologist John Messenger, there are over 100 factual errors in the film.Barsam Among the more notable is the shark-hunting sequence, which dominates the latter half of the story. Kimball says this practice had disappeared so long ago that the islanders did not know how to make or use the harpoons and had to be taught the skills of the hunt.Kimball, S.T: American Anthropologist, Vol 79, No3 Messenger, who visited Islands between 1958 and 1968, goes further, claiming that the islanders never had engaged in shark hunting then, or at any time in the past. Flaherty brought fishermen from Scotland to teach the locals how it is done. "Flaherty...created new customs, such as shark fishing, and seriously distorted numerous indigenous ones in order to make the Man of Aran fit his preconceptions and titillate the camera".Messenger, John C: Visual Anthropology 2001, Vo 14, 343, 368 Flaherty himself admits the shark fishing sequence was needed for the box-office.Hockings Paul, American Anthropologist, Vol 109, No.1
However, the claim is not correct as whale and shark fishing were both known to occur and commercially viable operations up until a few years prior to the filming. Arranmore Whaling Co., 1908–1913; Blacksod Whaling Co., 1910–1914; and Akties Nordhavet Co.(Northern Seas)/Blacksod Whaling Co 1920–1922, may be adduced as evidence that it was a few years and not the hundreds claimed by some critiques. Only 11 years prior to filming, whaling was occurring on a commercial scale.
Other claims and controversies include the artificial creating of the Aran family out of unrelated cast members. They were handpicked by Flaherty to play the roles of mother, father, and son.Winston B, "How the Myth Was Deconstructed", Wide Angle, Volume 21, Number 2, March 1999, pp. 71-86 In another sequence, Flaherty shows the mother buffeted by a storm as she carries seaweed along the Inishmore cliffs. What appears to be a traditional activity carried out by Aran women is a fabrication.The seaweed is collected for fertilization and is gathered from the low-lying shores twice per month, and only when the tides are absolutely calm.Messenger And Kimball points out that religion, which is rooted in the islanders lives, even among the locally recruited actors, is entirely absent.Kimball Flaherty also exposed the islanders to great risk, asking them to perform the most astonishing feats in stormy seas despite the fact none of the islanders could swim.Calder-Marshall, The innocent eye; The life of Robert Flaherty. Pelican 1963 As Flaherty says, "looking back I should have been shot for what I asked these superb people to do for the film...for the enormous risks...and all for the sake of a keg of porter and five pound a piece".Calder- Marshall