Though made in the postwar years, Louisiana Story seems like a capstone of American nonfiction filmmaking of the interwar years. It was as if father of documentary Robert Flaherty decided he could make a film in the mold of Pere Lorenz or the British documentariest - exalting man against Nature, man with Machine - and one-up the genre, turning the populist language into personal statement. When it works, the results are stunning. Cinematographer Richard Leacock’s photography of the bayou hints at Ralph Steiner-ish abstraction…
Whereas the sweeping traveling shots remind us how sublime camera movement can be in revealing even the most static of objects. (O, when will contemporary filmmakers rediscover Bazin?)
Its use of montage is equally striking, not only in the nature scenes (the aligator hunting scene seems downright avant-garde in its editing), but in its industrial scenes:
Yet it’s the personalization and uberhumanism of Flaherty’s pictoralist approach that poses some problems. David Thompson remarks that while presumably about Louisiana in 1948, it might as well be anywhere, at any time. Equally,the film is pure “category E” in film scholar parlance, a film that purports to support a highly ideological worldview but in fact is so riddled with contradictions the spectator is left with opposing impressions. Financed as a Standard Oil propaganda piece, the film tries to show Nature and Machine in placid harmony. At least in our post-environmentalism, post-conservationism historical moment, we can recognize that the oil derricks will in fact very likely spoil the scenery before us.
But perhaps the oddest, most striking thing that makes Flaherty’s film seem so anachronistic is the unselfconscious hybrid of fictional and documentary filmmaking. Louisiana Story is structred, recognizably, as a documentary - without a narrative of conflict between characters, slowly buildling up to an argument about the actual world. And yet, much of what we see is constructed as a fiction film. The Acadian film is not a real family but instead are actors playing out a scenario written by Flaherty and his wife Francis. Editing gives the sense of simultaneity out of footage shot and recorded at separate moments. For instance, shot-reverse-shot patterns give the scene in which the boy approaches the drilling barge all the fantasmatic coherence of a narrative film.
This fiction-documentary hybrid doesn’t even function as mimickry or irony in the manner of a docudrama or mockumentary. Remarkably, Flaherty didn’t recognize any ipso facto contradiction between fictional and documentary filmmaking. For that, as much as its sheer beauty, it’s worth commendation to contemporary viewers who may not be as sold on the utopian view of Standard Oil.
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