Visions in an Ice-Blue Eye

THE INNOCENT EYE by Arthur Calder-Marshall. 303 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.95.

Robert Flaherty was the Blake of cinema, its prodigious primitive. He was the first man of film to demonstrate that the merest reality can inspire the highest art. In arctic desolation he evolved the documentary method and at the corners of the earth produced the early masterworks of the tradition: Nanook of the North, Moana, Man of Aran, Louisiana Story. With the perspective of half a century, the works retain their stature, and the figure of Flaherty is magnified in time. In The Innocent Eye, Biographer Arthur Calder-Marshall depicts Flaherty as an extravagant example of an extravagant type: the artist-adventurer. A great shaggy polar bear of a man with ice-blue eyes and a smile that blazed like a swallowed sun, he created a life as splendid as his art.

Flaherty was born in 1884 with an iron spoon in his mouth. Son of a Minnesota mining engineer, he went to work as a prospector at 16. At 26 he made his first penetration of the far north--outwardly to search for ore in the Hudson Bay country, inwardly to search for an arctic ascesis. He found it among the Eskimos. During the next nine years they led him on a hundred expeditions and taught him to live as men live when they have nothing in life but life. "In the long arctic night," a friend later said, "he saw a great light inside himself." The light glowed in his face--and burned in his work.

His work in film began when he was 30. At a friend's suggestion, he picked up a Bell & Howell, took a three-week course in cinematography in Rochester --the only film training he ever had. Returning north, he shot some terrific footage of a walrus hunt, some beautiful quiet splices of life in an igloo, some hilarious takes in which an Eskimo ate a phonograph record and got bounced on his behind by a seal. All these reels he assembled in a 70-minute film, a polar pastoral volted with the same vitality that sizzles in the Eskimo.

Nanook bombed in the U.S. but ran for six months in London and Paris, and in 1923 Paramount's Jesse Lasky gave Flaherty $250,000 to make a similar picture about village life in Samoa. Photographically speaking, Moana was the most beautiful movie made until that time--but beauty cut no ice with Paramount. Chopped in half, the film was billboarded as THE LOVE-LIFE OF A SOUTH SEA SIREN. For the next seven years the moneymen hid when they saw Flaherty coming.

The British film industry paid for his next film, Man of Aran, an almost too beautiful picture of life on a great spumy boulder set in a western sea. Somewhat unjustly, the critics found it pretentious, and the public couldn't have cared less. So Flaherty waited twelve years to make his next important picture. In 1946 Standard Oil picked up the tab for Louisiana Story, a mellow and charming parable of the encounter between nature and technology, the crocodile and the oil derrick. In 1951, at the age of 67, Flaherty died of a cerebral thrombosis.

Flaherty has always had his detractors. Diehard documentarists call him a showman who manipulated reality. Commercial moviemakers fault him as a glorified shutterbug too lazy or too dumb to write a script. But what his critics fail to see is that Flaherty was not so much a director as a seer. His films are the visions of the original unity of God, nature, man. They confront modern man with his primordial being. They say in fundamental images what Blake said in fundamental words: "Everything that is, is holy."

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