---Their primary interest was the depiction of
diverse ways in which human societies relate to their environments, and
they often explored these relationships in contexts of cross-cultural communication.
---And they thought that a defining factor in these
relationships was human creativity and imagination, and sought to show how
the non-fiction film could become a powerful tool for imagination to use
in addressing key issues in the contemporary world.
The Center has served the larger scholarly and
artistic communities through such activities as the production of visual
indices to the Flaherty photographs, of study versions of extensive outtake
and exploratory footage from MAN OF ARAN and LOUISIANA STORY, and of study copies of audio recordings in the
Flaherty collection. The Center also makes original materials available
to other institutions for the purposes of study or exhibition.
Among the institutions with which the Center has
cooperated are the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Brattleboro Art Museum; Directors Guild of America; Indian and Northern Affairs, Government of Canada;
International Center of Photography; International Documentary Association;
Los Angeles International Film Exposition; National Film Board of Canada;
Vancouver Art Gallery. Ministere de la Culture et de la Francophonie
and Ministere de l'Education Nationale,
France; Metropolitan Museum
of Art; National Archives of Canada;
Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University; Southeast Museum of Photography;
Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum of Ethnography, Koeln; and Office of Archives,
American Samoan Government.
The Center has also contributed to the publication
of a wide range of scholarly and popular materials. Typical works include
Cecile Starr, Discovering the Movies;
Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Robert Flaherty/
Photographer/Filmmaker; and George Stoney, How the Myth Was Made, an hour-long film for PBS on social and cultural
aspects of the making of Man of Aran.
The Flaherty collection is divided into four groupings:
photographs, motion picture film, audio recordings, and print materials.
Some highlights of the collection are described below.
STILL PHOTOGRAPHS: During the more than 35 years
during which the Flahertys made films, they also produced a considerable
number of still photographs. As might be expected, a number of these were
made for publicity purposes, and some were perhaps taken for their own sake;
Alison Nordstrom, who has investigated the circumstances surrounding Frances
Flaherty's photography in Samoa, has shown that the Flahertys were familiar
with leading art photography of the time and may have been influenced by
it.
But the larger number of photographs were generated
for a different purpose. The style of filmmaking which the Flahertys evolved
made relatively little use of traditional scripts; Frances Flaherty described
it rather as exploratory, with the structure of the film slowly emerging
out of the screening of considerable amounts of footage taken without any
strong sense of how it might function in the finished film, a process which
editors John Goldman and Helen van Dongen Durant have described in detail.
Especially in the case of the earlier films, and
perhaps because of economic considerations, a good deal of this exploration
was done with a still camera, and many of the photos in the collection represent
efforts to determine how the lens would transform a potential subject into
an image.
The present ordering of images in the collection
is mostly topical, although many of these images were at one time apparently
also organized into rough sequences,
rather like the storyboard in classic animation. Except as noted, this ordering
was largely done in the 1960s by Frances Flaherty and by Robert Flaherty's
brother David, who also worked on several of the films.
The photographs related to the Canadian explorations
and to the production of NANOOK OF THE NORTH are grouped into five subsections:
Canadian studies; geological studies; photographs made during trips on the
schooner "The Laddie"; photographs directly related to NANOOK;
and miscellaneous northern subjects.
Other photographs are assembled into groupings
according to the film or project to which they are related; these include
MOANA, the Acoma project, MAN OF ARAN, THE LAND, and LOUISIANA STORY. There
is also a small collection of photographs of the Flahertys and their collaborators,
to which the Center holds subject but not necessarily other rights.
The Flahertys not only made photographs but collected them as well,
and scholars have over the years assisted the Center to clarify authorship
in uncertain cases.
MOTION PICTURE FOOTAGE: The Center holds study
copies of the major Flaherty films and of THE LOUISIANA STORY STUDY FILM
and HIDDEN AND SEEKING, but has also preserved and prepared study versions
of a considerable amount of motion picture footage not available elsewhere:
A compilation of miscellaneous material has been
made, which includes some early home movies and a very brief clip which
may be related to the preparation of a proposed film about the Acoma pueblo.
It was believed that after the completion of MAN
OF ARAN, Robert Flaherty destroyed all outtake materials, but several reels
had in fact found their way to the National Library of Ireland, where with
the help of its deputy director Alf Mac Lochlainn it was made available
to the Study Center, which has preserved and organized it into a study film.
These outtakes include screen tests of some of
the characters, visual exploration of the sea and cliffs, material from
the garden-building and other sequences, and a rough cut of a deleted sequence
showing Mikeleen riding a donkey into the village carrying fish he has caught.
In view of the rather Eisensteinian rhythms which John Goldman contributed
to the film, the uncut outtakes are of considerable interest in that they
preserve the original rhythms of Flaherty's camerawork.
Approximately ten minutes of exploratory footage
shot in 16mm Kodachrome for THE LAND also survive, comprising primarily
aerial shots of contour plowing similar to those in the finished film.
Sixteen-millimeter color film was also used in
preparation for the films commissioned by Standard Oil, and more than an
hour of this survives. Much of it is given over to extensive studies of
refineries; other footage begins to explore the special qualities of the
bayou country, of its water and plant life and homes, and a short section
introduces some small boys at play. This color footage has also been organized
into a study film.
AUDIO RECORDINGS: The Center holds in excess of
200 audio recordings made by the Flahertys, their coworkers, and participants
in early Flaherty Seminars. These have been catalogued, and study copies
of them are available at the Center.
PRINT MATERIALS AND DOCUMENTS: The Flaherty collection
of written and printed materials has been placed on deposit by International
Film Seminars at Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City, which
also holds parallel collections deposited by others who worked with the
Flahertys. These materials have been organized into broad categories and
microfilmed. Requests for permission to view these documents may be directed
to Butler Library.
A small collection of printed materials is also
available at the Center.
The Center
is open by appointment from mid-September to mid-May; it may be reached
by mail at 1325 North College Avenue, Claremont CA 91711; by phone at 909-447-2531;
by fax at 909-626-7062; or by e-mail at jack.coogan@cgu.edu.