Man of Aran

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Audience Member Gloriously photographed semi-documentary (some sequences seem staged), detailing the hardy lives of the islanders of Aran, off the Galway coast of West Ireland. They fish, repair their skiffs, grow potatoes using seaweed as soil, and battle the terrifying tide to catch basking shark, the oil from whose livers will light their lamps. Impressive and poignant. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/27/23 Full Review Audience Member From the man who founded the documentary genre. Man of Aran is a remarkable film. You need to have an imagination to appreciate it, though. I'm not sure if there's a more restored version, but what I saw was pretty grainy. It doesn't matter because the movie is definitely clear enough that you can imagine what it would be like if you were really there. This isn't a Hollywood production, this is real. The movie is staged, but the event itself happens everyday on Aran Island. I love watching these old survival movies. That's what I call them. A movie like this made after the introduction of color movies would probably look modern in some way. You would see signs that the culture you're watching is in even just a small way touched by outside influence. You'd see things that look familiar and then it stops feeling like a trip back in time. The footage is very raw. The boats, tools, weapons, clothes, it's all old and genuine. These movies are liberating, like casting off the shackles of society and returning to a simpler time when life was all about the struggle between nature and man. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/28/23 Full Review Audience Member Duller than life itself Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 01/30/23 Full Review Audience Member I wonder if living close to the sea means that I am unable to see the beauty that everyone else sees in this film? Nanook of the North conveyed a sense of the power and majesty of nature and of hard, hard lives in a way that Man of Aran failed to do. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/23/23 Full Review Mike M Simplistic, naive even, and insistently exterior, focused on the farmer's relationship to the landscape, and the tasks he performed upon it, rather than any thoughts he might have had doing them. (His speech, too, would be dubbed on in post.) In short, Flaherty reduced the real-life inhabitants of Aran to mere archetypes - forerunners of the kind of composite characters that would later become such an annoyance in Hollywood's true-life tales, headed up by a figure who isn't even granted so much as a name. Against this, the crafty, supremely skilful montage - surely indebted to the Soviet masters, and Dovzhenko in particular - would nevertheless succeed in getting up on screen a sense of the rhythms of this hardscrabble existence: the smashing of rocks, the pursuit of fishes big and little, the breaking of the waves into a relentless, deadly-looking froth. Whatever faults of technique one might be inclined to attribute to Flaherty, such tumults remain stunningly photographed, underpinned by the sense of discovery and adventure that marked the first half of the 21st century. This camera is as keen to bob up and down on the high seas as it is to explore the insides of a bubbling cauldrom or a shark's carcass. Shame it never wants to do the same with its human subjects, but the whole has a forced poetry that proves quaintly diverting - and it's never looked or sounded better than in this 2011 restoration. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 08/24/11 Full Review Audience Member Flaherty's technique of creating the documentary as a drama presages many, including Herzog's use of made-up material to amplify the truth of a moment. The images of the sea pounding the sides of the island that bookend the film are extremely effective. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/20/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Man of Aran

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