Premier of Man of Aran

TIMELINE

The Aran Islands played a major part in the literature of the Gaelic revival in Ireland. They inspired Yeats and Synge went there on his recommendation. Their influence was further expanded with the filming of Man of Aran, a film about island life and the battle with the forces of nature.

What The Quiet Man or Ryan’s Daughter were to later decades, Man of Aran was for Ireland in the 1930s. It was a film made in Ireland by a world-famous director, it won international acclaim and enticed many foreign tourists to visit here. What made the Man of Aran different was that it was basically a documentary and featured local people.
Robert Flaherty had made two previous non-fiction films, Nanook of the North about the lifestyle of Eskimos in Canada and then Moana, a similar type of film set in the South Sea Islands. Moana is possibly the first film to be described as a documentary.
Previous similar films had simply filmed daily routine without any attempt to entertain. Flaherty understood the importance of keeping the attention of his audience, so while he filmed his subjects going about their daily lives he was not beyond staging some incidents to help his story line. He arranged for the Eskimos to build an igloo. In Aran he staged a shark hunt in stormy seas to show the oil being gathered to light lamps.
The fact that experienced fishermen would not go to sea in such conditions was ignored. Shark hunting with harpoons and gathering their oil proved a bigger problem. The oil had long since been replaced by paraffin and nobody on any of the islands had fished like that for more than 50 years.
Flaherty wanted the story as the central theme for his film so he found somebody who knew how it was done and brought him to Aran to show the locals. Similarly, the ‘family’ featured in the film was not an actual family but three unrelated individuals, Colman King in the title part, Maggie Dirrane, who played his wife, and Michael Dirrane as their son.
Flaherty’s method of documentary making was unusual. He totally immersed himself in his subject and was prepared to spend as long as necessary to complete his task. He shot literally miles of film that he later edited down. He spent three years on the Aran Islands and it is estimated that he used over half a million feet of film. If it was placed end to end, it would stretch almost 10 miles.
This was to bring him into conflict with the major studios that wanted everything on schedule and on budget and later documentary makers felt that he romanticised his subject too much. Nevertheless, the film won great worldwide acclaim, winning best foreign film at the Venice Film Festival in 1934 and the National Board of Review in the US.
As with everything else in this country, the end product did not please everybody. Maybe Man of Aran gave a fabricated version of life in Ireland but it was hailed by the powers that be as it fitted with their vision of a frugal rural lifestyle. It had its world premier in Dublin on May 5, 1934 – 76 years ago this week.