Riders to the Sea
Man of Aran. By Pat Mullen. (Faber and Faber. Ss. Od.) IT is not often today that one's interest in a film is extended to the circumstances in which it was made. The mechanical elements in cinema production have been brought to such a point of efficiency, the deceptive powers of the studio are so complete, that the most impressionable member of an audience, however exciting the scene shown to him, will feel no more than a trustful admiration for an exercise of technical ingenuity if he gives a thought to the means by which the illusion of danger or disaster was produced. Man of Aran was an exception : the film was made not in the hothouses of Hollywood but on Aran itself, in conditions which gave small opportunity for cinematic sleight-of-hand, and in circumstances that, were clearly always difficult and sometimes extremely dangerous. This account of the making of the film, and of life on Aran while it was being made, is consequently a remarkably interesting and informative document.
In the making of the film Mr. Mullen acted as contact-man between Mr. Flaherty, the producer, and the islanders who were engaged to act in it. The success of the film was in great measure due to him, and Mr. Flaherty has already paid a generous tribute to his assistance. This book is both an account of the making of the.Ahn, and Mr.. Mullen's autobiography, The autobiographical sections make the documentary scope of the book wider than that of the film by touching on aspects of life on the islands which the film omits : the indoor life in the -cottages, the dances and the weddings, the religious convictions which go side by side in the islanders with a• devotion to traditional legend, the poteen-making, the schools, and the intermittent communications with the mainland. Mr. Mullen was born on Inishmore, the largest of the islands, the fourth of a family of eleven, and spent his childhood there when life on the island was even more severe than it is today. The islanders gained their living almost entirely from the sea. ' Fish was fairly plentiful and would generally fetch a good price on the mainland, when the sea was not too rough for the small boats to put out to catch it and convey it there, which it frequently was. Seaweed provided a more valuable but still precarious source of income : quantities of it were dried and shipped to the mainland to be used as manure, and the rest was burned into kelp to produce iodine ; but there was only a limited demand, and latecomers to the market were often disap- pointed. The land was poor, and the cattle unproductive. When he was 19, like most of his fellow-islanders he made the journey to America in search of a fortune, but unlike many of them, he did not find it. Being impatient of any form of control, he seldom remained in the same job for long; and spent most of the time supporting himself by casual employment. The atmosphere was uncongenial, and in 1921 he returned to Aran to help his father, bringing with him his four-year-old son, but leaving his wife and his two Small daughters behind. He spent the next ten years working on Aran as he had before he left it to go to America, and earning a small additional income by taking visitors over the island on a jaunting-car. His wife never followed him back to Aran.
In 1931 Mr. Flaherty first appeared on the scene to make a preliminary examination of the islands, and the following spring he came back to start work on the film. Mr. Mullen Was made contact-man to deal with the 'islanders. The difficulties he. had to overcome in gaining -help from them were considerable : they had not forgotten the Protestant proselytizers who tried to change their faith after the Great Famine by setting up soup-kitchens, and were suspicious that Mr. Flaherty might have similar designs under the cloak of offering employment in helping with the film : there were rumours that he was a Socialist, and Socialism to many of them implied a creed that had the active backing of the Devil; some of them refused to be photographed for fear of the evil eye, others presumed on relationship to demand employment. When these preliminary difficulties had been overcome,; there remained the task of persuading the chosen actors to do what was required of themby no means a simple one with men who generally had their own ideas how a scene should be played. Not infrequently too considerable danger was involved. For example, when the storm-sequence which is perhaps the most moving thing in the film was being taken, a boat was put out on more than one occasion in weather which no one could remember a man having faced for any normal purpose before, and disaster was avoided at a dozen moments only through the genius .of the boatman. It was Mr. Mullen who persuaded the men that the risk was worth taking, and there is probably no one else who could have done so. This sequence certainly appeared dangerous in the film, but probably no one who does not read Mr. Mullen's account will ever realize ju-t how dangerous it was. What remains in the mind mo-t after reading his pleasant and quietly written book is the extraordinary courage of these men -who, on half a dozen occasions, faced what with a single error' of judgement would have been certain death to assist in what they might quite reasonably have considered a curiously irrelevant undertaking.
DEREK VERSCHOYI.E.
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