Frances Flaherty

Looking through the voluminous writings on filmmaker Robert Flaherty, it is easy to see his wife, Frances Flaherty, as little more than a devoted accessory to her husband and his work. But reading through her extensive correspondence and diaries, held at Columbia University, a different person emerges—an adventurous, sensitive, and poetic and philosophical thinker and an artist in her own right. In fact, Frances played an under-acknowledged but critically important role on all the films credited to her husband, and it is quite probable that without her creative collaboration, it is quite likely that films like Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926) would not have been made. Although her filmmaking career extended into the mid-twentieth century, this career profile focuses on Frances’s work on these two silent films. And, while contemporary film scholars have written about these two films in relation to various social, aesthetic, formal, and ethical aspects of documentary representation and production, both historically and from today’s perspective, the attention here is on Frances’s artistic ideas and contributions as she expressed them.

Frances Flaherty was born Frances Johnson Hubbard to an educated and relatively affluent American family. Her mother, Frances Johnson Lambard Hubbard, had been raised by her grandfather, who had made a fortune in the hardware and sawmill business during the California Gold Rush and who had a background in the Irish whaling industry. Her father, Lucius Hubbard, was a distinguished academic who would later become the state geologist of Michigan. The couple traveled to Germany so that Lucius could obtain his degree in mineralogy, and it was there, in 1883, that Frances was born. Later, as a young girl back in the United States, Frances reveled in accompanying her father on surveying trips, opportunities that gave her a taste for “life in the wild and of seeing country that hadn’t been seen before” (Calder-Marshall 20). She was prone to “go off alone on her horse, following the faint, overgrown trails of the old logging days…What she liked best was to wander all night on the shore of the lake by moonlight” (Calder-Marshall 21). Her adventurous and risk-taking nature was to find its counterpart in her future husband.

Frances was no ingénue when she married Robert in 1914. In 1905, she had graduated with a degree in History, Economics, and Politics from Bryn Mawr College, then a hotbed of the women’s suffrage movement. Widely traveled, she had visited the West Indies, South America, and Europe, where she studied piano in Paris. As evidence of her feminist inclinations, in her role as secretary of the Suffrage Society in Houghton, Michigan, she had played host to Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the British suffragette movement, the Women’s Social and Political Union (Christopher 227).

Frances’s future husband, Robert J. Flaherty (1884-1951) had led a much less refined life. In contrast to Frances, Robert had little academic schooling. However, he had traveled extensively in the Canadian North with his father, a mining engineer and prospector, in search of mineral deposits, a life more suited to Robert’s temperament than the world of academe. After a mere seven months, his short stint at the Michigan College of Mining ended in expulsion.

Frances met Robert in Michigan in 1904, shortly after he left the College. Although they were from very different and, at first glance, incompatible backgrounds, in addition to their shared love of adventure, they were united by a love of travel and music. She played the piano, he played the violin, a combination, she later recalled in a documentary interview, resulting in the musical duets that ignited their relationship (Hidden and Seeking, 00:17:50-00: 18:04).

Frances’s parents had hoped her time in Europe would quell the romance, but in 1914, after a turbulent decade-long relationship, the two were finally married. “And so we lived together,” Frances wrote in her diary, followed by:

I would have no life but his, risk everything, endure everything, give everything for the sake of that perfect sharing of life in all things great and small. We were so passionate toward each other, and with all the superficial differences between us in breeding, education, disposition, and temperament, fundamentally we believed and loved and desired of life the same things. Between us were the makings of a rare relationship, a wonderful passionate partnership” (qtd. in Christopher 219-220).

Frances had sold her jewelry to buy the wedding ring for the marriage, which took place in a civil ceremony in New York City.

During his last mineral-seeking expedition to the north the year before their marriage, Robert had succeeded in shooting 30,000 feet of film of Inuit life while traveling on the Belcher Islands, and the footage lay waiting to be assembled into its finished, edited form. Although Frances delighted in the domestic duties her marriage entailed, her ambitions had a much wider scope, and she was determined to find a way to bring the film to the theatrical screen, energetically taking on the work that today we would attribute to a producer. Indeed, her considerable artistic and managerial talents were to carry them through the economically challenging years ahead. She had a sharp instinct for promotion and publicity and committed herself to ensuring the production and completion of the film that would eventually become, in 1922, the now well-known Nanook of the North. In her diary, the year after her marriage, Frances wrote: “R. is full of the idea of the use of moving pictures in education, in the teaching of geography and history. Someone might well make it a life work. Why not we?” (Diary, February 1, 1915).

Initially, their time was spent traveling between Toronto and New York, searching for funds to complete the Belcher Islands film. As a writer, Frances threw herself into the task of providing scenarios for the film in progress (Diary, January 3, 1915). To stir up interest in the project, throughout 1915, she attended meetings, along with Robert, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and with Franz Boas, “the foremost ethnologist and authority on the Eskimo in America” at Columbia University (Diary, March 10, 1915). She arranged interviews with the New York Times and other newspapers. “I would market Robert’s material myself,” she declared. “I was as capable as the next person” (Diary, March 2, 1915). In Toronto, on March 30, 1915, to promote the Belcher Islands film and raise funds for its completion, Frances had arranged for what was to be the first screening of the work in progress at the University of Toronto and, four days later, on April 3, a second screening at the prestigious Arts and Letters Club there. At the same time, she was laying the groundwork for a book, based on Robert’s diaries and photos, to be published in 1924 as My Eskimo Friends: “Nanook of the North,” for which she received credit as collaborator. Additionally, she and Robert met with celebrated photographer Edward S. Curtis in New York where they screened their footage for him, while he showed them his feature, In the Land of the Headhunters (1914) (also known as In the Land of the War Canoes). Curtis gave them advice based on his movie-making experience, although Frances noted that, “in all their crudity [Robert’s pictures] stood out as human, real, convincing and big in contrast to the spectacular artificiality of Curtis’s, wonderful as they were as a mere spectacle,” articulating her belief that it was human stories that audiences would respond to, and not “blood and thunder” (Diary, April 13, 1915). In April, her meeting with photographer Alfred Stieglitz proved transformative, “a mountain-peak experience” (Diary, April 30, 1915). Sharing ideas about image making, Frances noted how closely they overlapped. It was through these encounters that her philosophy on the importance of human drama and authenticity, rather than spectacle and artificiality, crystallized.

Frances had hoped to accompany Robert on his next expedition to the Belcher Islands later that year, to establish herself as “… a real and valuable partner. All my heart was in this new ideal; the winter at the Belchers would be the first step, the definite beginning” (qtd. in Christopher 270). But, by then, she was expecting their first child, and it was thought too dangerous for her to make the difficult journey. A compromise was reached; she would travel part of the way by ship, accompanied by her close friend, Margaret Thurston, along with Robert’s father and brother. The group would then leave the expedition and embark on a Hudson’s Bay Company steamer to begin the long journey home. It was with deep regret that Frances parted from Robert as he sailed off to the north, her feelings expressed in letters, full of passion and longing. This moment of separation also filled her with unease—fear that while she would be returning to a life of domesticity, Robert’s “living alone again crudely and carelessly” would create a gulf between them. As it was, she returned home to resume work on the marketing of the film (Christopher 270).

In 1916, disaster struck when the unfinished film, still in its editing phase, was destroyed by fire from Robert’s carelessly dropped cigarette. Rather than abandon the project, with her typical sense of purpose, Frances turned again to raising funds to reshoot the entire film, reaching out to her Bryn Mawr network and other sources. This was not the first time that Frances helped the family financially. In addition to the modest monthly allowance she received from her parents, Frances, an accomplished musician, supported the family by giving piano lessons to meet their daily living expenses, Robert’s reckless spending habits having led to frequent bouts of severe financial difficulty (Christopher 322).

Finally, in 1920, the French fur-trading company Revillon Frères agreed to finance the reshoot of the film and a further expedition to the north in 1921 to secure the footage for Nanook as we know it today. Again, Frances, with her growing family, was unable to take part in the journey and one cannot help but wonder how different Nanook would have been if she had been part of its ultimate filming. Later, it was discovered that Robert had fathered a child during this expedition (Christopher 387).

In addition to her many other contributions, Frances’s role in the editing of Nanook has been largely ignored. However, critic and curator Richard Griffith notes that Robert was “egged on and aided” by Frances in the editing of the film (36). The critic and documentary filmmaker Paul Rotha also acknowledges that Frances was influential in the editing of Nanook (52). She was later to remark on the importance of maintaining the Inuit perspective in the editing process: “You don’t impose yourself on the material. What’s there is there. You just bring it out” (Hidden and Seeking, 00:09:28 – 00:09:36).

The finished film features a central character, Nanook (played by an Inuk hunter named Allakariallak), along with his family, chosen to typify the Inuit people. In Frances’s words, the film is “the biography of a family over a year and their struggle to come to terms with their environment” (Flaherty and Film, 00:05:50 – 00:07:45). Hinting at her Zen Buddhist leanings, she later commented: “When Nanook and Nyla and little Allegoo 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. Everything that might separate us from these people falls away. In spite of all our differences, indeed the more because of them, we are one with these people…The secret of Nanook lies, I believe, in these two words, being themselves. Not Acting, but Being” (F. Flaherty, Odyssey of a Film-Maker, 17-18). The Flahertys’s expressed aim was not to depict contemporary culture with its colonial influences, but rather to portray traditional Indigenous ways of life as authentically as possible before they they were completely subsumed by outside influences and lost to posterity.

Although her contributions were ignored in the press, the success of the film opened up exciting new possibilities for Frances and her husband.  It drew the attention of Jesse L. Lasky, the production head of Famous Players-Lasky who, according to Robert, invited them to make “ … another Nanook. Go where you will, do what you like – I’ll foot the bills.  The world’s your oyster” (qtd. in Rotha 52). Frances delighted in the prospect of the careers that lay ahead of them.

For their next film, the couple planned to pursue a similar model. After lengthy deliberation, they chose Samoa as their location, where they hoped to find another character or characters on whom to center the film, much in the way Nanook had provided a central focus for the earlier film. The new film was to become the 1926 Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age in which Frances hoped that, “We would present the drama of Samoan life as it unrolled itself naturally before us, as far as possible untouched by the hand of the missionary and the government” (qtd. in Griffith 54). Nowhere, it should be noted, did she or Robert use the term “documentary.” (The phrase “documentary value”—not “documentary”—was coined by Scottish filmmaker John Grierson, writing under the pseudonym “The Moviegoer,” in the February 8, 1926, issue of The New York Sun, after viewing the completed version of Moana [Rotha 77-8].)

By the time of departure in 1922, Frances was the mother of three young daughters, but this was not to deter her from making the journey to Samoa, and bringing her children (and a nursemaid) along too. Frances and others’ recollections of the trip reveal a great deal about her desire to finally be present during film production. Richard Griffith, who knew the Flahertys well, observed: “This adventure-anticipating young wife had had to spend nearly ten years in a placid Connecticut suburb, minding the children, while her husband finished off his mineral explorations and made and remade his film of the North. Her chance had come, and she took it” (50). Frances’s need to work while in Samoa is echoed by Arthur Calder-Marshall, who noted: “Frances Flaherty was a very active woman—frustrated for years at Bob’s vanishing away to make moving pictures, she had taught herself still photography. She had been following his methods, and if she went to Samoa, she wasn’t going to be just a mother” (40).

The Flahertys settled in the village of Safune on the island of Savai’i, where, now a skilled photographer, Frances spent much of her time creating photographic storyboards for the film, casting the lead characters, and researching locations, processes she describes extensively in her papers. Her presence can also be felt in the emphasis on the closely observed details of domestic life portrayed in the film. The extended scenes of preparing food are filled with sumptuous detail; similar dedication is given to the process of creating the tapa barkcloth worn by the Samoans, with the complex stages of shredding and dyeing carried out by the women of the village. These subjects feature prominently, too, in the exquisite photographs Frances took during their two-year stay in Samoa.

Frances’s brief voiceover included in the trailer for the 2014 version of Moana with Sound states that, “It was our intention, of course, to present an authentic picture of a dying culture. That was our mission” (00:00:25-00:00:31). In her papers, she discusses the difficulties they encountered finding traditional dramatic elements in Savai’i. Every day, as they tried in vain to find a longed-for giant octopus or shark to visualize the drama of man against the elements, they were disappointed. They had come to Samoa with the goal of making another Nanook, carrying with them preconceived ideas about the dramatic struggles necessary to make a successful film, this time with the drama to be found in the sea. However, their search for sharks and giant octopuses met with no success. But drama was to be found another way. In her papers, Frances discusses in detail the happy discovery during filming that panchromatic black and white film, with its wider spectrum, was better than the standard black and white orthochromatic film. According to Frances, panchromatic film gave an “extraordinary stereoscopic effect. The figures jumped right out of the screen” (qtd. in Griffith 62). She realized that this powerful effect could provide an answer to their problem: “The drama of our picture should lie in its sheer beauty, the beauty of fa’a Samoa [the Samoan Way], rendered by panchromatic film” (qtd. in Griffith 63). The gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is revealed in the 2014 digitally-restored version that incorporates the soundtrack recorded in 1975 by Monica Flaherty, the youngest of the Flaherty daughters who had lived in Safune during the making of the 1926 film.

The film ultimately tells the story of a young Samoan man, Moana, and his family, depicting in detail many traditional aspects of daily life and ceremonial practices which, as in Nanook, the Flahertys hoped to preserve. Much like documentary filmmakers today, Frances scoured the island for characters to cast in the central roles of the film. To her consternation, finding a young woman to play Moana’s betrothed was complicated, with several unexpected romantic liaisons requiring recasting.  The film culminates in the often-criticized tattooing scene, particularly important to the Flahertys not only for its dramatic value but also to show a practice suppressed by local missionaries in their zeal to assimilate the Samoans into Western culture, away from their traditional practices. According to Frances, the actor playing Moana agreed to be tattooed, but only for the essential closer shots, with the full-body tattooing we see in the film carried out on another young Samoan male who was less hesitant about being tattooed (Moana with Sound: A Short History, 00:8:37 to 00:8:51). This tradition of tattooing, carried on clandestinely in the face of suppression, is still practiced today.

According to Frances, the film was developed and printed on location and nightly screenings were held for the people of the village. They would project it “under the coconut palms, with all the village looking on, making the film with us, telling us what they thought, particularly the older chiefs who still remembered the old forgotten ways and could help us to recapture them and tell us if our film was true” (F. Flaherty, The Odyssey of a Film-Maker, 21). It was during the making of the film that Frances developed her theory on the “genius” of the camera, along with her detailed study of Samoan social and cultural practices and her strong sense of empathy for the people there.

Despite all the archival evidence of Frances’s behind-the-scenes labor and tireless dedication to the film, Moana is almost universally hailed as a film by Robert Flaherty alone and Frances’s role in the making of the film has been obscured. Yet the film’s opening credits read: “Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age, by Robert J. Flaherty, FRGS, and Frances Hubbard Flaherty.” The credit that follows underscores this, claiming Robert J. and Frances Hubbard Flaherty equally as producers of the film. Furthermore, while later in the credits, titles and editing are assigned to writer Julian Johnson, David Flaherty, Robert’s brother, later assured Paul Rotha that all the editing of the film and writing of the titles had been carried out by Robert and Frances alone (Rotha 71). The up-and-coming Hollywood-based Johnson was reportedly used as a form of “collateral insurance” (Calder-Marshall 94).

Frances would go on to collaborate with her husband on such future sound films as Man of Aran (1934) (shot in Ireland), The Land (1942), and Louisiana Story (1948) for which she, along with Robert, received an Academy Award nomination for screenwriting. Writing of their working relationship, Arthur Calder-Marshall noted:

How they worked together neither could exactly explain, but you could sense a bit of it if you watched a Flaherty scene being filmed… In the foreground, standing beside the cameraman or at the camera himself, stood Flaherty, gesticulating, cajoling, encouraging, cursing. Somewhere off to one side there was usually a motionless figure with a light meter in one hand and a camera in the other, silently snapping her own record of the scene. (50-51)

As a young bride, Frances had written in her diary: “Between us were the makings of a rare relationship, a wonderful passionate partnership. I would throw myself and all I possessed, my mental equipment and my heart’s enthusiasm, into his work and its fulfillment; his the conception, mine the detail; his the sowing, mine the garnering; surely as my nature and gifts were complementary to his, I could be a real and valuable partner” (qtd. in Christopher 220).

Her participation is inscribed in each of the films she and Robert made. But although she referred to their films as “Flaherty films” and the process of making them as “the Flaherty way”—what Frances termed as an approach of “non-preconception” (F. Flaherty, The Odyssey of a Film-Maker, 10)—she would continue to focus on the achievements of her husband for the rest of her life. In her writing and work, she adeptly deflected discussion of her own contributions in order to promote the “genius” of her husband. In 1952, the year after his death, she honored his legacy by forming the Robert Flaherty Foundation, perpetuating Robert’s name and filmmaking spirit.  In 1955, she founded the celebrated, still ongoing, Flaherty Seminars. Her book, The Odyssey of a Film-Maker, written in 1960, celebrates Robert’s work and methods with almost no hint of her own contributions.

Her passionate, all-consuming attachment to Robert and his work was summed up late in her life: “There was one thing that mattered…that Bob should be making films. And I’d go to any length to make it possible or just to carry on until something came along. And maybe that was my function in the whole business” (Hidden and Seeking, 00:21:28 -00:21:59). A woman of immense talent, sensitivity, and purpose—and “the more intellectual and well-read of the duo” (Zimmerman 2)—the period in which Frances lived was unused to women foregrounding their own accomplishments or taking credit for the roles they played in their husband’s success. But beyond this, can we speculate that this need to eulogize her partner sprang not only from her deep admiration for his cinematic art, but also to convince herself that the years in which she had to push him forward and make the films happen, of sacrificing herself for his needs and his films, had not been wasted?