The men of Aran
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The men of Aran |
| Original title | Man of Aran |
| Country of production | Great Britain |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1934 |
| length | 77 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Robert J. Flaherty |
| script | Robert J. Flaherty |
| production | Michael Balcon |
| music | John Greenwood |
| camera | Robert J. Flaherty |
| cut | John Goldman |
| occupation | |
| |
The Men of Aran (Original title: Man of Aran ) is a British documentary directed by Robert J. Flaherty from 1934 .
action
A family of mother, father, son and small child lives on the small western Irish archipelago of the Aran Islands . The islands are rocky, without trees and without a layer of earth. Men row at sea in their curragh to catch fish and struggle with the wild surf on their return. The boat leaks on the rock; it is only with great effort that they can save their fishing net. Growing potatoes on the island is only possible by composting seaweed and collecting naturally formed soil.
The boy fishes fish from a high cliff until he sees a basking shark and reports its appearance. Five men in a boat try to catch the fish. This escapes at first and only leaves behind a bent fish hook. In a second attempt they harpoon a fish from a group of basking sharks and defeat it after a two-day battle. All the men rush out to sea in their boats and help pull the animal ashore, where it is cut up right on the shore. Lamp oil is extracted from its liver.
The men have rowed out again and the woman and her son await the return of her husband, looking out over the stormy seas. You reach the coast unharmed after the fight against the waves, but the surf is so strong that the boat is thrown back into the sea. The family runs home along the coast with the raging sea.
background
After the failure of the collaboration with Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau at Tabu , Flaherty went to Berlin in 1931, where, however, neither the hoped-for possibility of making a film in the Soviet Union or in Germany came about. After seven months he traveled to London and shot the documentary Industrial Britain , which was only shown in 1933 , with little financial means and with John Grierson in the film department of the Empire Marketing Board .
At the same time, Flaherty managed, through Grierson's mediation, to inspire Michael Balcon with his idea of a film about the Aran Islands . At the end of October 1931 Flaherty briefly visited the Aran Islands for the first time and met the local Pat Mullen, who helped him with his local knowledge and as a mediator with the islanders. In January 1932 Flaherty came with his family and a cameraman to Inishmore and settled in Kilmurvy . For the interior shots, he first had a small Irish house built and, with Pat Mullen's support, looked for suitable actors among the locals. Work on the Aran Islands for the film took a total of 20 months.
In the spring of 1932, Flaherty discovered a huge fish that swam through the water with its mouth open and that the locals called "sunfish". Through a friend, Flaherty found out from a book from 1848 that they were basking sharks, which at that time were hunted for oil on the entire west coast of Ireland because of their liver. He was determined to incorporate a spectacular harpooning scene into his film. None of the men on Aran had ever used a harpoon, but Pat Mullen found that these fish were still being harpooned on the Aran Islands 60 years earlier. Before Flaherty's cast even learned to harpoon, however, the basking shark season was over offshore. Flaherty decided to stay on the island for his movie scene until the end of next summer. Flaherty filmed several storm scenes over the winter. The shark hunt was also filmed by August 1933.
In the winter of 1933/34 the film was edited in Gainsborough Studios in Islington in collaboration between the studio editor John Goldman and Robert Flaherty. Flaherty wrote the subtitles , which were inserted into the film against the resistance of the distributor Gaumont-British , although in 1934 they were already considered a relic of the bygone silent film era. To develop a soundtrack for the film, the actors were brought from the Aran Islands to London, where they stayed for nine weeks and sound recordings were made of them. John Greenwood wrote the score.
Man of Aran premiered on April 25, 1934 at the New Gallery Kinema in London. Contrary to the reservations of the distributors, the film, which cost around £ 25,000 to make, grossed £ 50,000 in just six months. At the 2nd Venice Film Festival in September 1934 he was awarded the Coppa Mussolini for best film . The National Board of Review also recognized it as the best foreign language film of 1934.
The film brought notoriety and relative prosperity to the Aran Islands through increased tourist interest.
On May 25, 2009, a new version of the film was released on DVD including a soundtrack CD. The English band British Sea Power had been made aware of the film during a tour of the Republic of Ireland . The film, which was presented with live concerts at the Edinburgh Film Festival, among others, is now accompanied by experimental guitar pop. The inside cover of the soundtrack CD released by Rough Trade Records contains a quote from British Sea Power guitarist Martin Noble: “We made this soundtrack because we liked the romantic notion of people living on the edge of existence. It's something I'd like to think I could do, but know I never will. ”The soundtrack CD reached number 68 in the official UK sales charts.
criticism
Some contemporary critics in Great Britain criticized the alleged documentary as anything but an authentic image. Iris Barry made this accusation in her book Let's Go to the Pictures (1926) to Flaherty's Nanuk, the Eskimo . Caroline Lejeune wrote in The Observer : Man of Aran has no story, it hardly recounts the daily activities of its nameless protagonists.
For the British filmmaker Ralph Bond (1904–1989), two storms and a shark hunt do not make a movie. Flaherty's escapism is evident in the fact that the film only raises questions about Aran's actual life, which the director does not show, and therefore cannot be called a documentary film.
In his essay Subjects and Stories (1938) Graham Greene notes the insignificance of the magical recordings. Man of Aran does not even try to describe life truthfully; the residents had to learn to hunt sharks in order to serve Flaherty with a dramatic film sequence.
John Grierson responded to these criticisms and defended Flaherty's film, citing the circumstances of the commercial film industry.
literature
- Men of Aran. A Gaumont Ufa film . In: Through all the world , issue 5, February 1935, pp. 26-27.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Iris Barry, Let's Go to the Pictures , p. 57
- ↑ Ralph Bond, Cinema in the Thirties: Documentary Film and the Labor Movement , in J. Clark et al. a. (Ed.): Culture and Crisis in Britain in the 30s , 1979, pp. 245-246
- ↑ John Grierson Replies in Cinema Quarterly, Fall 1934
Web links
- The men of Aran in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Europe, England and the Atlantic ( Memento of June 6, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (3rd chapter in Paul Rotha : Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography, Philadelphia 1983) (archive version)
- Man of Aran
- Review of the DVD release
- Man of Aran at screenonline.org
- satt.org: How Man Of Aran came up with a new soundtrack after 75 years.