Louisiana Story

(U.S.A., 1948. Black and White)

Years ago, Robert Flaherty said "I try to make my films a revelation of a country, and of the people who live in it . . . There Is kernel of greatness in all peoples ... it is up to the film maker to find the one incident, or even the one moment, that makes it clear."

Bound by that stern poetic creed, Louisiana Story traces a symbolic story. Its director turns from the India of Elephant Boy, the Pacific of Moana, the Arctic of Nanook of The North to describe the events when the wallowing amphibious machines of an oil company invade the idyllic peace of a Louisiana bayou. Flaherty juxtaposes a tense chase? sequence—alligator versus coon in the swamp water—and the tumultuous pursuit of oil by the monster, man-made drilling derricks which can plunge pipes 14,000 feet into the earth. Throughout this blending of themes, the bonds of humanity between oil riggers and a Cajun bov illumine the recurrent thesis of Flaherty's works: "Mankind is one community."

The music by Virgil Thomson is superb—it utilises some of the local idiom and is along with The Plow That Broke The Plains and The Goddess, one of the composer's best scores. (Louisiana Story will be screened on June 20).