Editing Man of Aran (section)

==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.<ref>McLoone, Martin; The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, ed McFarlane, Wallflower Press 2005</ref> 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.<ref>O'Brien, Harvey; The Real Ireland: The Evolution of Ireland in Documentary Film. MUP</ref> Others see it as a betrayal of documentary's mission, "to tell it like it is".<ref>MacBean, James Roy: Two Laws from Australia, One White One Black, Film Quarterly Spring 1983, Vol 36, No.3</ref> 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.<ref>Barsam, R: The Vision of Robert Flaherty, The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker; Indiana Press 1988</ref>

According to anthropologist John Messenger, there are over 100 factual errors in the film.<ref>Barsam</ref> 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.<ref>Kimball, S.T: American Anthropologist, Vol 79, No3</ref> 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".<ref>Messenger, John C: Visual Anthropology 2001, Vo 14, 343, 368</ref> Flaherty himself admits the shark fishing sequence was needed for the box-office.<ref>Hockings Paul, American Anthropologist, Vol 109, No.1</ref>

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.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.marinetours.ie/wildlife-log/64-captain-whalesgalore-wonderful-winter-wildlife-log.html|title=100 years of Irish Whaling}}</ref>

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.<ref>Winston B, "How the Myth Was Deconstructed", ''Wide Angle'', Volume 21, Number 2, March 1999, pp. 71-86</ref> 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.<ref>Messenger</ref> And Kimball points out that religion, which is rooted in the islanders lives, even among the locally recruited actors, is entirely absent.<ref>Kimball</ref> 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.<ref>Calder-Marshall, The innocent eye; The life of Robert Flaherty. Pelican 1963</ref> 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".<ref>Calder- Marshall</ref>

The full extent of ''Man of Aran'''s artifices was revealed at the 1978 [[Ethnographic]] Film Conference in Canberra, Australia.<ref>MacBean, James Roy: Two Laws from Australia, One White One Black, Film Quarterly Spring 1983, Vol 36, No.3</ref> The conference had gathered, in part, to praise [[direct cinema]] which, in contrast to the classic tradition, promised a new level of realistic interpretation.<ref>MacBean</ref> This new form swept away staging and reconstruction to present a more accurate picture of the world.<ref>Winston</ref> The debate was touched off by a screening of Flaherty’s ''Man of Aran'' followed by George Stoney’s just completed documentary exploration of Robert Flaherty’s ''Man of Aran, How the Myth Was Made'', and the resulting exchange was "tumultuous".<ref>MacBean</ref> As James Roy MacBean says: "While appreciative of Flaherty’s poetic imagery [George Stoney] had popped the lid off all the distortions and omissions in Flaherty’s highly romanticized depiction of life on the Aran Islands".<ref>MacBean</ref> At the time, Stoney’s revelatory documentary had left many at the conference incensed at what they now saw as Flaherty’s blatant falsification of the life he had been purported to be documenting.<ref>MacBean</ref>

According to Barsam, "Flaherty’s subjective view of reality – his making it all up – has a romantic basis, idealizing the simple, natural even non-existent life".<ref>Barsam</ref> He argues that even though Flaherty habitually transforms reality, his essential achievement is that of the [[realism (arts)|realist]] filmmaker.<ref>Barsam</ref> The idea of Flaherty as [[Romance (love)|Romantic]] is shared by Aufderheide: "Flaherty had a powerful romantic belief in the purity of native cultures and he believed that his own culture was spiritually impoverished by comparison".<ref>Aufderheide, P: Documentary Film, A Very Short Introduction, OUP 2007</ref> Taken to the extreme, this approach makes no attempt to capture reality but create a romanticized picture of it: "The [[tragedy]] is that, being a poet, with a poet's eye, Flaherty’s lie is greater, for he can make romance seem real".<ref>Montagu, Ivor, cited in Aufderheide</ref>

Aufderheide says, "documentary movies are about real life: they are not real life they are not even windows onto real life. They are portraits of real life, using real life as their raw material...You might then say: [a documentary] is a movie that does its best to represent real life and that doesn’t manipulate it...and yet, there is no way to make a film without manipulating the information.<ref>Auderheide</ref> As Flaherty acknowledges, "one often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit".<ref>Barsam</ref> 
How much a documentarian can manipulate and still credibly claim their film to be a truthful portrayal of real life "is a never-ending discussion with many answers".<ref>Auderheide</ref>

Despite these controversies, Flaherty remains a pioneer of the documentary whose films are situated in a class of their own within the documentary genre.<ref>Malcolm, Derek; Nanook of the North, The Guardian, April 2000.</ref> Kimball argues that ''Man of Aran'' never was intended to be an ethnographic documentary film. As he explains, "in a cosmic anthropological sense it could be counted as an artistic rendition of the struggle of man against nature".<ref>Kimball</ref> Flaherty had immersed himself in the culture to tell the essence of the truth about the Islanders, "[and] for this reason ethnographic accuracy is an unimportant consideration when the larger goal is some fundamental aspect of mankind".<ref>Kimball</ref> In Stoney’s film ''How the Myth Was Made'', John Goldman, the editor on ''Man of Aran'', is emphatic, "it was not a documentary, it was not intended to be a documentary...it was a piece of poetry".<ref>Stoney, George, ''How the Myth Was Made: A Study of Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran'' (1978)</ref> McNab calls it "not so much a conventional documentary as a poetic meditation".<ref>McNab, G, ''[[Sight and Sound]]'', Dec 2006</ref> [[Arthur Calder-Marshall]] explains, "Flaherty wasn’t interested in actuality, he was interested in his own idea of life".<ref>Calder-Marshall</ref> If the film was intended to be a poetic statement instead of a factual documentary, one has no right to treat it as an ethnographic film now.<ref>Hockings</ref> Barsam asks, is it unreasonable for the artist to distill life over a period of time and deliver only the essence of it? Seen as the story of mankind over a thousand years, the story of Aran is this story of man against the sea...It is a simple story, but it is an essential story, for nothing emerges from time except bravery.<ref>Barsam</ref> Calder-Marshall suggests the controversies over ''Man of Aran'' could have been avoided if [Flaherty] had had a publicity adviser, someone as verbally agile as [[John Grierson|Grierson]], who had made it publicly plain that ''Man of Aran'' was not a 'document' but an ‘[[eclogue]]’ – a [[pastoral]] and marine poem.<ref>Calder-Marshall</ref>

Brian Winston cautions against unconditionally praising Flaherty's poetic talent. He argues we have to acknowledge his manipulations and distortions because that is at the heart of understanding both his genius and his contribution to the documentary form.<ref>Winston</ref> What Flaherty grasped was not only our desire for drama, but that it should arise from the life being observed and not imposed from without.<ref>Winston</ref> By using drama and reconstruction, Flaherty created a unique form of documentary, which thrives between "a life as lived and life as narrativised".<ref>Winston</ref>