Amoeba Music

If you went to film school, or took a course in college on the history of documentary film, you were probably introduced to the name Robert J. Flaherty with Nanook of the North, a 1922 silent-documentary following the lives of Eskimos that would be his first major accomplishment and is regarded as one of the first, if not the first, feature-length documentary. Though some shun the work for being scripted (which most documentaries are), it is incontestable that Flaherty followed and exposed his subjects with depth and compassion. Nanook is certainly impressive, but nothing about it placed the director on my list of filmmakers to track down; perhaps young people are often made anxious by history.

I recently stumbled upon Louisiana Story and assumed that it was a historical documentary on the place. Though it is listed, for some strange reason, as a documentary, it is really a scripted, dialogued film about a Cajun boy's adventures in a bayou. I suppose they classify it as a documentary because he and his family are just acting out their lives and adding a little extra dramatization for the camera. More intriguing than the realization that Flaherty did more than silent documentaries was the story behind how the movie came to be made.

A New Jersey oil company commissioned Flaherty to do a film with an oil rig and its derricks as the focal point. The project was to be an important documentary, or at the least, survey, of the excitements and importance of oil drilling. This job would pose a challenge for the director, as it was several steps from the primitive subjects he was known for. Unfamiliar with oil and drilling, he and his crew went on a sort of expedition across America, visiting several rigs in order to get a feel for how to approach their new subject. Once their trip was exhausted, they made a final stop in Louisiana. Just before departing, they were invited by a local oil inspector to go out on a motorboat with him and inspect the pipeline as part of their research. While drifting through the marshlands and swamps, they became enchanted with the local wildlife and all of the Cajun people who lived at the mouth of the bayou. Deep within a land filled with alligators and fishing communities were French descendants who had preserved a lifestyle that Flaherty was instantly drawn to—one with heavy folklore and traditions that had been passed down and held sacred across many generations.

Soon the original survey of the Louisiana rig was forgotten and Flaherty crafted a story, which was partly autobiographical, about a young boy's whimsical look at a world consumed by a gold rush. Though the director's childhood was during the actual gold rush, he captured the frenzy and optimism that came with "black gold" territory, very well. Richard Leacock's camerawork follows the gorgeous movements of the bayou's wildlife and the little Cajun boy, Alexander (Joseph Boudreaux). Each day he travels on his boat deeper and deeper into the dangerous swamps to get a glimpse of the new oil rig being erected in the center of the bayou's waters. His father has recently signed a contract, seemingly with other locals, which gave the men permission to drill on their land. Most of the locals think that their presence is almost comical and that their optimism of striking oil in their homeland is silly, if not extremely selfish. Young Alexander seems to only be distracted by their presence, and becomes fascinated with their work, or more specifically, the head driller (Frank Hardy). The men allow him to come onto the rig barefoot and watch them work. Before long, he is spending all of his time there fishing and amusing the workers, until his father (Lionel Le Blanc) feels that his presence is not only uncalled for, but perhaps a bit of a burden. The men do find oil there, but due to the bizarre ways of the young boy, the film presents it as if he had something to do with it, or at least plays on Cajun folklore by making it appear as though he's good luck.

And that's the entire story. Nothing spectacular about it really, and yet, it was truly mesmerizing. Unlike Flaherty's other films, this one has dialogue and a Pulitzer Prize-winning score by Virgil Thomson, with Eugene Ormandy conducting members of the Philadelphia Orchestra. This quality, along with the incredibly endearing performance by Boudreaux, turned it into a children's story of sorts. It reminded me of Old Yeller, except the dog is replaced by Alexander's half-wild, half-pet raccoon, George, and instead of bears and rabies as the major worries, the boy is afraid of mermaids (and yet he wrestles with alligators). I'm still impressed that what was supposed to be a survey on oil rigs, funded entirely by an oil company, turned out to be a film that features a rig, and yet really has more to do with imagination and child's play.

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Louisiana Story was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story.