CHAPTER 1
Filming Among Others
Frances Flaherty and Osa Johnson
In this chapter, I revisit the work of Frances Flaherty and Osa Johnson and write new pages into the story of womenâs documentary filmmaking, especially during the early years of both cinema and anthropology. Johnson and Flaherty worked collaboratively with their more famous husbands, which has effectively erased their contributions as producers, writers, actors, directors, and promoters of their films. Their lost labor is indicative of the efforts so dear to me in Subject to Reality, which asks what it means to recuperate the forgotten matrilineal legacy that has shaped the lives and work of numerous women filmmakers. For Johnson and Flaherty documentary filmmaking was a collaborative endeavor in the interstices of their private and public lives. They built their domestic narratives, global families, and family wealth around âcontact filmsââethnographic fictions about their encounters with racial and cultural difference. In turn, these stories, picturized through the veracity machine of documentary, colluded with both patriarchy and white supremacy.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, illustrated lectures about exotic lands, often those in the colonial contact zones, and their âsavageâ or âprimitiveâ peoples drew significant audiences to vaudeville theaters. Burton Holmes, a pioneer adventurer who had started out giving lectures with lantern slides, coined the term âtravelogue,â which he defined as âthe gist of a journeyâ that should âdelight the eyeâ and âcharm the ear.â As Ellen Strain and Fatimah Tobing Rony have observed, the late nineteenth century was a heightened moment of âvisual frenzy,â in which the colonial subject claimed the world as image and thus as object that could be fixed, conquered, and offered back up to the empire as possession. As the decades progressed, performance, photography, and cinema would all be claimed by entrepreneurs and entertainers who largely adopted the âcolonial gazeâ without question. Optical technologies in particular held sway in the new climate of scientific positivism, such that films and photographs that largely trafficked in racial stereotypes became the logical evidence justifying white supremacy. This history entwined with the coeval development of documentary filmmaking, which would benefit from both currents: its ability to travel the globe and its status as authentic evidence. The ârealityâ of documentary, its enmeshment with the colonial gaze, and its tendency to suppress the labor of women would all be aspects of the form that women throughout the decades would inherit and continue to grapple with.
In this chapter I begin to excavate the entwined histories of these âregimes of power and knowledge,â in Alison Griffithâs terms, as together they shaped the cinematic contributions of Flaherty and Johnson. Both women worked in the looming shadows of their more famous husbands, and yet each woman played a significant role in their joint careers. Osa Johnson was vital to all of the films credited to her husband, whether she was cranking the camera or serving pie after a night of filming wildlife from hidden blinds in the Borneo jungle. Similarly, Frances Flahertyâs letters reveal that she was instrumental to Robertâs career; she generated ideas for projects, networked with potential funders and collaborators, and promoted his work and travel while he was away. Yet both women receive only the occasional production credit. Osa Johnson and Frances Flaherty deserve recognition for their pioneering work in ethnographic-entertainment documentary, a kind of filmmaking intimately structured by ideologies of gender, race, and realism. Their collaborative work with their husbands projected visions of far-flung places to audiences hungry for âauthenticâ images of the exotic. In subsequent chapters I will tell you more about how these early pioneersâand the complex legacy of gender and race that their stories animateâare vital episodes in the overarching narrative of womenâs documentary filmmaking.
Frances Flaherty
Historiographies of documentary often begin by referencing the early influence of Robert Flahertyâs Nanook of the North (1922). âThis picture was to have greater consequences than any previous non-fiction film,â writes Lewis Jacobs in 1979. Nanook of the North âis considered one of the first great documentaries,â echoes Patricia Aufderheide in 2007. In the unlikely story of Nanookâa film made by a mineral prospector in one of the most remote and coldest places ever captured on filmâscholars have rooted out many of the formâs best intentions as well as its worst habits. For as much as Nanook brings aesthetic reverence to scenes of real life, the film greatly manipulates audiences into believing that the dramatic story of an indigenous man against the brutal forces of nature is a faithful representation of Inuit life near the Hudson Bay in the early 1920s. In contrast to the other âfatherâ of documentary, Dziga Vertov, Flaherty more specifically signals the ethnographic origins of documentary: the romantic desire to capture disappearing worlds and endangered cultural practices. Contemporary ethnographic filmmakers Lucien Taylor and Ilisa Barbash observe, âNanook was remarkable not just for its style but also for its subject matter and approach to its subject. Never before had a non-Westerner been brought alive on the screen with such sympathy and humanity.â Robert Flaherty thus leaves us a complex legacy, which bears closer analysis, especially because his body of work has so significantly shaped the ethnographic and gendered history of documentary film studies.
Though he was never trained as an anthropologist, Robert Flaherty shared a fascination with indigenous people and the ethnographic impulse that defined a wide range of visual media from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1920s when he made Nanook. Like so many visual representations of exotic peoples and places, Nanook of the North enthralled audiences when it screened in the summer of 1922. Though several distributors initially turned down Nanook, assuming erroneously that the public was more interested in âseeing people in dress suits,â the film surprised virtually everyone when it had a blockbuster run during its first week of screenings in New York. At a time of increasing modernity and globalization in North America, audiences seem to have craved visions of a (mythical) simpler time when humans enjoyed greater attunement with nature and its rhythms. As Frances Flaherty put it: âWhen Nanook and Nyla and little Alleggoo smile out at us from the screen, so simple, so genuine and true, we, too, become simple, genuine, true. They are themselves: we, in turn, become ourselves.â This wry description of Nanook enriches our emotional understanding of the film. Frances Flahertyâs laborâthe work of promoting the filmâis therefore also a unique kind of affective labor; she translates this new visual form and the unfamiliar others it introduces into a familiar humanist narrative of mutual recognition.
By now it is well-known that Robert Flaherty contrived virtually every element of the story in Nanook, from the names of his actors to their familial relationships, down to their clothing, modes of travel and hunting, and the domestic scenes he offered to viewers as âlife and love in the actual Arctic.â In retrospect his blatant disregard for âtruthâ fomented a crisis in the ontological status of documentary: if Nanook marks the origins of the tradition, and Nanook is an artful lie, heavily invested in exoticizing indigenous people, then what does that say about documentaryâa form of filmmaking supposedly exemplary of the truth principle of photographic realism? Perhaps most pointedly, Rony has deciphered the implications of this Eurocentric ideology at the very heart of the documentary tradition and certainly throughout the Flahertysâ body of work. She describes Nanook as emblematic of a âtaxidermicâ impulse, which âseeks to make that which is dead look as if it were living.â For Rony, Nanook embodies an imperial and romantic ideal preoccupied with its longing for primitive authenticity, and which in turn requires massive artifice to reconstruct its object: âvanishing races.â Others have also intensely criticized the film for its stereotypical representation of native Others as noble but uncivilized, backward but charming, wise about nature but naĂŻve about modernity. Perhaps more than any other film, Nanook of the North consistently appears and reappears throughout documentary studiesâhaunting our archives and our scholarship with its stark reminder of the colonial and fictional legacy of documentary. Yet, very little has been said about Frances Flahertyâs role in promoting this form of representation in Nanook. For example, her use of words like âgenuineâ, âtrueâ, and âsimpleâ partially signal her gendered contribution to the ethnocentric worldview that shaped the Flahertysâ work. Francesâs affective, material, and analytical labor, notable, for example, in her press promotion of the film, receives little recognition throughout documentary studies, which has tended to foreground the more obvious material labor of directors, who were mostly men.
If Nanook haunts the history of documentary, constantly reasserting itself as the ur-text of ethnography, what explains the relative absence of Moana in these patrilineal narratives? In fact, it was not Nanook but the Flahertysâ subsequent film, Moana, about the idyllic existence of beautiful people in the Samoan islands, that gave rise to the use of the term âdocumentaryâ as a way of distinguishing nonfiction films from fictional ones. When the Scottish filmmaker (and another documentary patriarch) John Grierson saw Moana in 1926 he raved about the filmâs poetic imagery, its beauty, and its rapturous representation of nature: âI think Moana achieves greatness primarily through its poetic feeling for natural elements,â he wrote. However, it was Griersonâs observation that Moana âbeing a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary valueâ that has made the greatest mark on documentary studies.
The origin story of the term âdocumentaryâ is often told; however, remarkably little has been said about Griersonâs emphasis on Flahertyâs gorgeous cinematography and skillful visual narration in Moana. Nor have documentary scholars, highly attentive to Nanook and Flahertyâs other âman against nature films,â (Man of Aran [1934] and Louisiana Story [1948]), paused to reconsider either Moana or the gender imbalance at stake in the focus on âmanâ against nature for themselves. In my story, however, Moana opens a new conversation about hidden gendered labor at the conceptual and material birth of documentary film. Recentering Moana destabilizes the patriarchal history of documentary filmmaking in a number of ways because Moana, far more than Nanook, is a film that brings to the surface the collaborative labor and significance of Frances Flaherty, who shares credit on the film as co-writer, co-director, and co-producer.
Indeed, from the beginning of their relationship, Frances saw her marriage to Robert as a strategic partnership and was highly involved in his filmmaking. Flaherty biographer Robert Christopher calls Frances âa significant architectâ of his career as a writer and filmmaker. With âBob,â Frances felt she had come up with a âbeautiful new scheme of life.â In her diary, Frances described her partnership with her husband as a deep commitment to him, but also as a means of fulfilling her own dreams. Bob, she wrote, was âthe instrument of my desires, such a nice healthy, interesting, convenient âtoolâ ⌠surely as my nature and gifts were complementary to his, I could be a real and valuable partner.â As Christopher has observed, however, Francesâs career as writer, publicist, photographer, and editor alongside her husband has been obscured in most works devoted to Flaherty. Like so many women of the twentieth century who collaborated with their husbands, Frances Flahertyâs legacy has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves.
Throughout their early years of marriage and before Nanook, Francesâs cooperation with her husband took place largely behind the scenes. Raised in an affluent and cultured household, Frances had benefited from an elite education and experiences abroad. She saw her literary and social skills as the exact and necessary complement to her husbandâs wild and unschooled talents in photography and exploration. She transcribed his notes, archived his diaries and photographic materials, and took dictation for his writing projects. In the early years, as he slowly began to attract media attention for his expedition photography, Frances wrote and coordinated his publicity materials and coverage. She used her contacts in the world of publishing to secure a book contract for expedition notes that she also edited. In early 1915, during their first year of marriage, Frances worked on the written narrative that would accompany film footage of his expeditions.
Frances Flaherty was both ambitious and optimistic. She was determined to make a life of âprofit and pleasureâ from her husbandâs talents, about which she was certain and fiercely protective. âI am willing to slave to the bone for it, i.e. for my ambition for him,â she wrote. Indeed, throughout their decades of marriage, art, and travel, Frances Flaherty would make many sacrifices for her ideal of a powerful partnership. She endured years of separation, financial uncertainty, and the more profound injustices of their long-distance intimate lives. Nonetheless, her work has rarely been highlighted in terms of âwomenâs documentary filmmaking.â Francesâs ethos and vision, especially related to the representation of Others and the translation of their humanity to an audience at home, are key examples of womenâs suppressed labor in the long history of documentary filmmaking. Despite the fact that Frances was not the technical creator of Robertâs films, her gendered laborâaffective, reproductive, and as the âemotional translatorâ of her husbandâs workâwere key to their mutual collaborations.
If her visible work on Nanook was largely that of a producer and promoter of the film, and her invisible labor shaped the ethos and reception of the work, her role in Moana (and all their later films) was more direct. In a much later interview with acclaimed documentary filmmaker Robert Gardner, Frances describes the journey that took their entire family to Samoa to make Moana in the late 1920s. The reception of Nanook had been so positive that, as Frances explained, Paramount gave Robert complete license and support as long as he brought back âanother Nanook.â A friend named Frederick OâBrien had just published the bestseller White Shadows in the South Seas, and recommended that they visit a particular Samoan islandââthe village was beautiful; the people were beautifulââand assured...