Review of Man of Aran (1934) by Jeremy S — 23 Aug 2011

Simplistic, naive even, and insistently exterior, focused on the farmer's relationship to the landscape, and the tasks he performed upon it, rather than any thoughts he might have had doing them. (His speech, too, would be dubbed on in post.

) In short, Flaherty reduced the real-life inhabitants of Aran to mere archetypes - forerunners of the kind of composite characters that would later become such an annoyance in Hollywood's true-life tales, headed up by a figure who isn't even granted so much as a name.

Against this, the crafty, supremely skilful montage - surely indebted to the Soviet masters, and Dovzhenko in particular - would nevertheless succeed in getting up on screen a sense of the rhythms of this hardscrabble existence: the smashing of rocks, the pursuit of fishes big and little, the breaking of the waves into a relentless, deadly-looking froth.

Whatever faults of technique one might be inclined to attribute to Flaherty, such tumults remain stunningly photographed, underpinned by the sense of discovery and adventure that marked the first half of the 21st century.

This camera is as keen to bob up and down on the high seas as it is to explore the insides of a bubbling cauldrom or a shark's carcass. Shame it never wants to do the same with its human subjects, but the whole has a forced poetry that proves quaintly diverting - and it's never looked or sounded better than in this 2011 restoration.