Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 24) Robert Flaherty paddles his film crew into the swamps aboard a pontoon. STANDARD OIL (NEW JERSEY) COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE evoke. “[H]e had an impression, he knew what feeling he wanted to get, what impression. So we would start shooting, and it really was a process of looking through the camera.” Exploratory filming was at the heart of the Flaherty method. The director used a conceptual script rather than a detailed plan to construct a fable about the petroleum industry’s impact on the primitive bayou dwellers in coastal Louisiana. The film’s editor, Helen van Dongen, assumed responsibility for submitting a supplementary budget for an additional $83,000 to Standard Oil when the improvisational nature of Leacock’s filming and Flaherty’s direction, represented by the 57 miles of film generated in production, exhausted their resources. Production began in earnest when Helen van Dongen arrived in Abbeville on August 10, 1946. “The crew went out shooting during the day,” she explained, whereas “evenings and rainy days were spent almost exclusively in screening rushes.” Every day a member of the Flaherty staff shipped encountered while on location in Louisiana. “Take, for example, Lionel LeBlanc who plays [the protagonist’s father] Jean Latour in the picture,” she wrote in her diary on September 5, 1946. “He is the overseer of McIlhenny’s Avery Island and a renowned experienced trapper in these surroundings, who knows the value of money and makes an excellent living … he speaks a beautiful, precise, excellently pronounced, though slow, English.” And yet, Flaherty directed him to speak “the sort of pidgin-English always used to make natives ridiculous in the eyes of ‘superior’ white people. It is condescending and uncalled for.” Van Dongen faced a challenge greater than arguing with Flaherty about the politics of ethnicity: the 300,000 feet of raw footage she had to edit into an 8,000-foot (80-minute) film. Flaherty demanded artistic control over the final product and often took great offense when his editor made suggestions. However, van Dongen claimed two of the their raw footage to a New York photography laboratory, who then returned daily the processed reels via air mail to the Flaherty headquarters. The real labor began on receipt as van Dongen and Flaherty worked to make sense of their raw footage. Van Dongen was a crucial and critical member of the production team. Louisiana Story’s editor frequently challenged the director’s depiction of locals as illiterate, ignorant, and detached from American capitalism. “People here are that simple,” Flaherty insisted. Helen van Dongen vehemently disagreed. She deplored that Flaherty adhered strictly to the stereotypical characterization he scripted while in New York before the director ever had any sustained interaction with the Cajun community. To make matters worse, he refused to rewrite the script to reflect the reality he THE DIRECTOR EXAGGERATED THE CAJUN COMMUNITY’S ISOLATION TO EMPHASIZE LOUISIANA STORY’S CENTRAL PREMISE: TECHNOLOGY’S EFFECT ON RURAL COMMUNITIES. 24 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2009 film’s most famous montages as her own, “the introduction and especially the section which is usually referred to as the ‘ballet of the roughnecks’ (the drilling pipes going down the hole). Those,” she maintained in a 1974 interview with Film Quarterly, “I can freely say, are my creations.” “Except for the drilling sequence, which was shot wild sound,” Richard Leacock explained to Film Quarterly in 1982, “it was essentially a silent film.” Hence, for the first time in his career, Flaherty opted to hire a composer to create a score that could complement the movement and emotional timbre of the sequences van Dongen edited. The director took a proactive role in the soundtrack, partly because of his love affair with music. He wanted a composer who could generate a contemporary score, filled with folk overtones, in lieu of “paste-and-scissors jobs on
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