I'm afraid this is one of the cases when I went to a good deal of physical effort, not to mention discomfort, to get to see a film, and then had my expectations severely dashed. What I find hard to grasp about this film is just how anyone could take such dramatic footage and create such a sadly tedious result out of it...
In many ways this is a silent film, but as a silent it is ill-served by its (too sparse) intertitles and its (apparently especially composed) music, which is used in talkie-fashion as a bland wash of sound behind the images, rather than responding in any way to what is on screen. The visuals ought to be full of tension, and I felt that the homogeneous deployment of the music actually undermined what tension was there.
Which was not much. The impression I got was that the director was trying to put in *every* frame that he had shot on location, with the result that everything happens with extreme longueurs. Unfortunately very little of what we are seeing is explained, which doesn't help. Eventually it is usually possible to work out what is happening, but the approach is neither conducive to the interest of a documentary nor to the coherence of a narrative film.
Considered as a talkie, on the other hand, the film makes poor use of dialogue -- which is, in practice, largely incomprehensible, and unhelpful when the characters' words can be made out (it's clear why intertitles were felt to be necessary). I wasn't clear whether the characters are in fact speaking Gaelic most of the time, as I had originally assumed, or whether the recording quality is just so poor as to make it hard to understand their accented English.
So far as narrative goes, practically nothing actually seems to happen. I'm afraid I actually fell asleep in the middle of the film (at some point after the interminable shots of the curragh hooking a basking shark in real-time were followed, alas, by an intertitle stating that the action was going to continue for a further two days..!), but worryingly didn't appear to have missed anything when I woke: the woman and boy were still gazing out from the cliffs, the boat was still out on the waves, and the only thing that had changed was the weather. Basically, the curragh arrives at the start of the film, there are some shots of soil gathering and starting the cultivation of a new field (this was the most interesting and 'documentary' section of the whole picture, where we were actually given enough information to learn something!), and then the curragh and its crew set out again after a (quite harmless) basking shark, which is almost as large as the boat. A storm. The boat is smashed after the crew abandon it on the stony beach -- I'm afraid I chiefly hoped the film-makers paid for the loss -- The End.
The rest is all endlessly arty shots of the waves smashing against the cliffs on Aran. Very little shown of the everyday life of the inhabitants; no explanation of the fascinating history and unique handling qualities of the curraghs (the last descendants, as it happens, of the Irish leather-skinned craft of the Middle Ages); not enough human interest to arouse more than an abstract concern over the fate of the little family. The footage is spectacular, and oh! what a film the BBC documentary section might have made out of it -- what an incestuous thriller the silent-era Hitchcock might have concocted around that scenery and those lives...
Flaherty contrives the astonishing feat of making it both remarkably boring and oddly uninformative.
In many ways this is a silent film, but as a silent it is ill-served by its (too sparse) intertitles and its (apparently especially composed) music, which is used in talkie-fashion as a bland wash of sound behind the images, rather than responding in any way to what is on screen. The visuals ought to be full of tension, and I felt that the homogeneous deployment of the music actually undermined what tension was there.
Which was not much. The impression I got was that the director was trying to put in *every* frame that he had shot on location, with the result that everything happens with extreme longueurs. Unfortunately very little of what we are seeing is explained, which doesn't help. Eventually it is usually possible to work out what is happening, but the approach is neither conducive to the interest of a documentary nor to the coherence of a narrative film.
Considered as a talkie, on the other hand, the film makes poor use of dialogue -- which is, in practice, largely incomprehensible, and unhelpful when the characters' words can be made out (it's clear why intertitles were felt to be necessary). I wasn't clear whether the characters are in fact speaking Gaelic most of the time, as I had originally assumed, or whether the recording quality is just so poor as to make it hard to understand their accented English.
So far as narrative goes, practically nothing actually seems to happen. I'm afraid I actually fell asleep in the middle of the film (at some point after the interminable shots of the curragh hooking a basking shark in real-time were followed, alas, by an intertitle stating that the action was going to continue for a further two days..!), but worryingly didn't appear to have missed anything when I woke: the woman and boy were still gazing out from the cliffs, the boat was still out on the waves, and the only thing that had changed was the weather. Basically, the curragh arrives at the start of the film, there are some shots of soil gathering and starting the cultivation of a new field (this was the most interesting and 'documentary' section of the whole picture, where we were actually given enough information to learn something!), and then the curragh and its crew set out again after a (quite harmless) basking shark, which is almost as large as the boat. A storm. The boat is smashed after the crew abandon it on the stony beach -- I'm afraid I chiefly hoped the film-makers paid for the loss -- The End.
The rest is all endlessly arty shots of the waves smashing against the cliffs on Aran. Very little shown of the everyday life of the inhabitants; no explanation of the fascinating history and unique handling qualities of the curraghs (the last descendants, as it happens, of the Irish leather-skinned craft of the Middle Ages); not enough human interest to arouse more than an abstract concern over the fate of the little family. The footage is spectacular, and oh! what a film the BBC documentary section might have made out of it -- what an incestuous thriller the silent-era Hitchcock might have concocted around that scenery and those lives...
Flaherty contrives the astonishing feat of making it both remarkably boring and oddly uninformative.