When The Shooting Stops

by Ralph Rosenblum

  Flaherty was essentially a lonely and misunderstood man, much abused in his own profession. Even documentarists who hailed him as their founder and flocked to his side during the filming of Man of Aran had, by the time that film was finished, largely dismissed him as irrelevant and even blind. He had no interest in exposing the economic, political, and technological travails of modern man—these things embarrassed him. And few of his politically conscious colleagues could appreciate the importance of the enchanting fables— however naive—that had won him his audience.

  Only in The Land, a film he made for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1939-41 on land abuse and rural unemployment, did he turn his camera to human suffering, injustice, and folly. Unfortunately the Japanese attack killed all government interest in its themes and the film was never commercially released.

  Unsuited to propaganda work, and therefore inactive through most of the war years, Flaherty was sixty-two years old in 1946, when he was offered his final opportunity to make the kind of film he loved best. Standard Oil of New Jersey, aware that Revillon Frères, the French furriers, had sponsored Nanook, asked Flaherty if he thought he could make a film about the oil fields. They would finance the picture, he would own it, and, most important, he would be left alone to film it as he saw fit.

  Flaherty drove thousands of miles through the Southwest with his wife and frequent collaborator, Frances, seeking an appropriate setting for the film. When they came to Louisiana they were immediately enchanted by the French descendents and their picturesque way of life. After steeping themselves in Cajun history and legends, they happened one day to see an oil derrick gliding up the bayou, towed by a launch; they knew they had found the theme for their film. “Almost immediately,” said Flaherty, “a story began to take shape in our minds. It was a story built around that derrick which moved so silently, so majestically into the wilderness, probed for oil beneath the watery ooze, and then moved on again, leaving the land as untouched as before it came.”

  I was barely a year out of the OWI when Helen van Dongen, whom I had met there a few times, called to ask me to be her assistant editor on the film. During part of the preceding year I had worked for Max Rothstein’s hole-in-the-wall editing service, and although Max paid me assistant’s wages, he let me cut without supervision. Becoming a real assistant again seemed like a step backward, so I turned Helen down. Three days later I called her back in a cold sweat, much relieved to discover that the job was still available.

  I had almost made the first serious error of my young career. Not only was this my chance to get back into the big leagues and work on a feature-length film, but it was an opportunity to work with the tiny, serious-minded woman who had traveled the world with director Joris Ivens, her first husband, and was known to those who cared about such things as one of the giants of the cutting room. As Paul Rotha and Richard Griffith wrote in The Film Till Now of Helen’s long association with Ivens: “They worked on equal terms as joint creators, a collaboration which has been one of the most fruitful in film history but which has tended to obscure Helen van Dongen’s own quite distinct talent. . . . No one at work today observes more subtly the implications and possibilities of isolated shots, nor has a surer instinct for the links between them.”

  In the summer of 1947 Helen rented a room at the old Deluxe labs on Tenth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, and that’s where we worked until the summer of 1948. Within a few days I saw that this would be a very different relationship from the one I had had with Sidney Meyers. Helen did not treat me like a son, and she was not interested in my education. She never paused at the Moviola to show me why she chose one cut over another. She never paused to chat or ruminate or philosophize. In fact, pausing was not in her nature. She was indefatigable, and she devoted her energy to the single purpose of conquering the two hundred thousand feet of film—thirty-seven hours’ worth—that she’d brought back from Louisiana.

  My apprenticeship with Helen formed the bedrock of my cutting-room technique. Her rigid professionalism struck a responsive chord in me, and her orderliness reinforced my own working style. At this time in my life, I fretted a great deal over whether my free-lance career would hold together. I still had to support my family, and because I had no college education, the only alternative to film editing seemed to be another job in the garment factories. So I thought much less about how I would become a full-fledged editor one day and much more about doing a good job, working hard, being a little inventive sometimes, and becoming accepted by the people I worked for. I thus fell quickly into Helen’s pace, and I eventually understood that within the crisp efficiency of our work habits there was an intangible warmth.

  Because I rarely spoke, whether in the cutting room or at screenings, I was practically invisible. But I observed things very closely. And of the things that interested me, nothing was more remarkable than the relationship that had developed between the expansive director and the cool cutting-room virtuoso twenty years his junior.

  Never was there a greater disparity between two people. If Flaherty was ebullient and disorganized, Helen was contained and disciplined. If he was politically removed, she was immersed in some of the most political pictures of the era. If Flaherty overspent his time and his budgets, driving his producers and collaborators to despair, Helen operated with a machinelike constancy. If he was informal and garrulous, she was more than slightly forbidding, with a taut mouth that rarely yielded a smile during working hours, and a firm, single-motion, masculine handshake. If Flaherty was raised in the Canadian wilderness among Indians and backwoodsmen and knew little of urban civilization until he was an adult, Helen was brought up by a French mother and had the civility of the Old World embedded in every word and motion.

  Flaherty liked to stretch things out, and never seemed concerned about finishing—perhaps because he wanted to make each precious job last as long as possible. His lackadaisicalness and ingenuousness could be startling. During one of his rare visits to the cutting room, Flaherty came up to the table where I worked, examined the synchronizer, and started fiddling with its wheel. Then he looked at me and said, “What is this for?” I politely explained that the synchronizer is a cutting tool that enables you to keep the sound track and the picture on two separate pieces of film and yet still in synch. But I was momentarily stunned. This was a man who had been making films before I was born, and I was explaining a piece of film equipment to him. It seemed so odd; he was such a giant; I was baffled.

  My guess is that Flaherty was intimidated by Helen and everything she represented—from her businesslike manner to the complexity of her skills. Sometimes he would clam up when she made specific suggestions about how to arrange a sequence, suggestions that went beyond his own thinking at that point, or walk away without a word when she screened a scene that was so finely edited he felt jarred by its unfamiliarity.

  But somehow Helen managed to work within Flaherty’s emotional confines without either threatening him or sacrificing her own self-esteem; and not an unpleasant word passed between them. Never having worked with an egocentric director, I had no idea of the inner acrobatics Helen performed to bring this off—or the extent to which my own career would be devoted to repeating them.

  It is a revelation to have Helen’s own account, certainly one of the most poignant in film-editing history, of how she held this most improbable collaboration together. Her story, which appeared in Film Quarterly twenty-five years later, begins in 1940, when Flaherty invited her to Washington to cut The Land. Awed by his reputation, eager to make a good impression, and frightened by the thought of working with a new director whose habits might be strange to her, she made her way down long, bleak corridors to his office at the Department of Agriculture, where she found him seated behind his desk reading a newspaper:

  “Hello,” he said cheerfully, getting up and extending his hand, “your name is too difficult so I’ll call you Helen, O.K.?” and then, without pause or interruption, held forth on the bad state of the world. This to
ok several hours of the first morning (and was to take as many hours of every following day so long as the film lasted). Then he said abruptly: “Come on, let us screen some film.”

  It took us several days to screen through most of the rushes. In the office I found a long “script” written by someone in the Department of Agriculture. It did not look much used and appeared to have little connection with the rushes I was seeing. During these screenings I waited for a word of explanation from Flaherty as to what some of the scenes represented, expected him to disclose his plans, hoped for some word of enlightenment as to what he had in mind. But he just sat there, rubbing the left hand through that fringe of white hair, smoking, and groaning. Back in the office, after some more desperate sighs, he would start his monologue again, repeating almost verbatim a news report he had read about the war in Europe. He would also speak in general terms about the fantastic abundance he had seen during the shooting. Other topics he continued mentioning were: the waste of human lives, the destructive influence of civilization, and the killing of human skills and crafts through the introduction of machines; but on these subjects we had as yet no film. He would repeat this day in and day out, by telephone if I had not yet come in, over and over again, until it became an incantation.

  After about three weeks we had done no more than screen the same material over and over and still he never came to the point where he would make suggestions, outline a possible narrative, or divulge his intentions. Each time when the lights would go on again in the screening room, he would groan: “My God, what are we going to do with all that stuff.” How would I know, if he did not?

  In this fashion, Helen gradually became familiar with everything Flaherty had shot. She longed to begin editing but dared not make the smallest suggestion for fear it would be contrary to his plans— whatever they were.

  In desperation I wrote to Joris Ivens, explaining that all Flaherty did was talk about the war and attack machines in the morning, screen the same stuff all over again in the afternoon, and tell stories about Elephant Boy in the evening, but never, never a word about what kind of film he was trying to make. I could see, I wrote, that he might not need a script but he ought to have a plan or at least an idea! What did Flaherty want from me? Companionship to relieve the boredom of looking at uncut scenes all afternoon? Ivens, who does not like to write letters and shifts the ones he receives from pocket to pocket until they are beyond answering, wired back, “Observe, look, listen. Love, Joris.”

  To Helen’s great relief, Flaherty soon left his office at the Department of Agriculture to go off on a second shooting trip.

  Before he left, I asked the inevitable question: “What shall I do with all the film we have and all the stuff you are going to send me?” “Oh? Well, you just go ahead,” he said. During his absence I screened Nanook and Moana repeatedly, trying to see if I could discover any particular method in his assembly that could be applied to The Land. But there was too much disparity between the themes, and it was no help to notice that, whenever he got stuck with the visual story line in these two silent films, he would flash a title on the screen and proceed until he got stuck again. I occupied myself with an initial selection and grouping of our rushes.

  Then a breakthrough. Helen noticed that there was a relationship between Flaherty’s endless monologues and what happened on the screen; that his daily litany was his way of slowly perfecting the voice-over narration that he would one day record. She began to listen to him very carefully no matter how often he seemed to repeat himself, and soon she found that she was beginning to see the film through his eyes. Slowly, she discovered the signs that gave her the direction she needed for editing, and to the end she depended on these signs, for Flaherty disliked direct questions about film theories and could become almost inarticulate in response.

  When I had assembled some part of the film and did not want to proceed beyond a certain point, I would ask him to come to the projection room. With one eye I would watch the screen, with the other one, Flaherty. What he did not say was written all over his face during these screenings: the way he put his hand through his hair or squashed out that eternal cigarette; the way he shifted position on the chair, sometimes rubbing his back against its rungs as if it were itching; these gestures would speak more than a torrent of words.

  Helen’s ability to decode Flaherty’s unspoken intentions must have won her passing grades from Flaherty on a whole battery of professional and personal tests, for when the offer came through from Standard Oil, he immediately asked her to join the crew on Louisiana Story as editor and associate producer. Because she was with him from the beginning this time, everything was less chaotic. But Flaherty continued to resist all forms of organization, which he treated like intrusions. If he saw something he liked, no matter how extraneous, he shot it, sometimes thousands of feet worth, and then brought it back to Helen to fit it in. When there were gaps, Helen felt confident enough to request certain shots, and Flaherty might eventually comply—but only months afterward when he had seen the need for them himself. When Helen returned to New York after a year on location, the rushes were barely assembled.

  Our rushes were air-shipped daily to New York [Helen continues] and the laboratory returned them daily. Flaherty would continue to look at the rushes night after night. He seemed happiest when they were screened the way they were shot. Untouched, unorganized, unshortened, they contained all the possibilities, all the potentialities of all the ideas he had in mind, and with his unlimited fantasy and vision he saw behind the screen, behind this incompleted material the story he had envisioned. “It’s going to be great,” he would say in general. But when the scenes were separated into categories, or put in a somewhat chronological order, though still in full length, he began to worry. An “arrangement” had occurred, and gaps began to show. The slight order disturbed the wild flight of fancy. His expectations began to fade. The circle always repeated itself: elation when seeing untouched rushes with all their promises, black moods and despair during the formation and growth of the sequence, until that moment when the composition was fairly completed and he began to see that the old magic he had wanted to instill had taken hold.

  As a realistic matter of time was involved, I could not forever let him indulge his enjoyment of unarranged rushes. Sometimes I suspected that he would be perfectly content to do nothing but shoot, screen whatever he shot, and bewitch everyone with his enthusiasm about “what a wonderful film this will make.”

  Half of the large porch surrounding the house had been screened in and closed off. It was my cutting room and off limits to everyone. It was the only place where I could work undisturbed. Flaherty came into it only once: to have the picture taken which is now the frontispiece of that large volume The Film Till Now by Paul Rotha and Richard Griffith. He avoided coming in, because it would involve him in details he apparently did not want to know about.

  I would search for scenes which might complete a sequence or give it just that atmosphere which was still lacking. Then I would go to Flaherty with suggestions with which I hoped to get his reaction. I often met with a cold shoulder; perhaps he thought that I wanted to take the initiative away from him or wanted to push my ideas to the foreground. “Give me the rushes for screening tomorrow, I want to look at them,” he would counter and then, as if to protect them from contamination, would not return them for a while.

  As time passed I would try out my ideas by myself. If I thought they worked, I would put the sequence back the way Flaherty had last seen it, always leaving in just one change, making it as perfect and as smooth as it ought to be in the final version, meanwhile also always tightening my composition just a little more every time. If I had achieved what I had in mind, I would hand the sequence to Flaherty for screening, and if he did not get restless right away, I knew I had been successful. I was wise enough not to point out what I had done. Then would come that encouraging moment when he would exclaim: “She’s going to come, she’s going to come,” referring to the sequenc
e he had just seen. Then, somewhat with mistrust: “Did you change anything?” and I would say: “No, I don’t think so. Just tightened it up a little.” Because of his apprehensions, his doubts, and hesitations the process of editing dragged considerably.

  The opening scene of Louisiana Story is one of the most effective of the whole movie. We are in the bayou country, lingering on the tiniest of nature’s treasures, a dew drop, a lily pad, and then moving on slowly to alligators and other wildlife, and finally a boy paddling quietly in his pirogue. Then Flaherty’s soft, inviting voice opens the narration: “His name is Alexander, Napoleon, Ulysses, Latour . . .” Each name, carefully chosen to evoke the spirit and culture of the place, is separately enunciated in Flaherty’s slow, cherishing cadence. There’s a feeling of hushed mystery, the opening of a fairy tale.

  As described in Flaherty’s script, we are supposed to “move through the forest of bearded trees” and be “spellbound by all the wildlife and the mystery of the wilderness that lies ahead.” And to make sure Helen had enough to work with, Flaherty shot just about everything in the bayou. “We had scenes,” she lamented, “of alligators sitting on their nests, slithering through the water, basking in the sun, or rearing their ugly heads from a mud-patch in the swamp-forest; strange and magnificent birds perched on tree-tops or sitting on branches sticking out of the lily-pond; snakes gliding up trees, lotus-leaves reflected in the clear water, dewdrops on the leaves, flies skimming the water, a spider spinning its web, Spanish moss dangling from huge oak-trees, fishes, rabbits, fawns, or skunks, and others too numerous to mention.”