Robert J. Flaherty

Robert J. Flaherty
Flaherty filming at Port Harrison, Quebec, 1920–21
Born	1884-02-16 Iron Mountain, Michigan
Died	1951-07-23 Dummerston, Vermont
Occupation	Filmmaker, explorer, prospector
Father	Robert Henry Flaherty
Mother	Susan Flaherty (née Klockner)
Partner	Frances Hubbard Flaherty

Robert Joseph Flaherty (16 February 1884 – 23 July 1951) was an American-born filmmaker and explorer who spent his teens and early twenties in Port Arthur, Ontario. He directed Nanook of the North (1922), widely called the first documentary feature, and is often described as the father of the documentary film.

Early life and Port Arthur

Flaherty was born in Iron Mountain, Michigan, one of several children of the prospector and mining engineer Robert Henry Flaherty and Susan Klockner; accounts differ on whether he was the eldest of six or one of seven. He was about 12 when his father was appointed manager of the Golden Star Mine near Rainy River, Ontario, and took him north, hoping outdoor life would settle a clever but troublesome boy. At first the rest of the family stayed in Houghton, Michigan; the family later moved to Port Arthur around the turn of the century. (The Menominee museum puts his move to Canada at age 13.)

He was sent to Upper Canada College in Toronto but was sent home, apparently after a dormitory bowling game that used porcelain water pitchers as pins. Back in Port Arthur he went to Port Arthur High School, practised the violin and took up photography, which became a passion. His father then enrolled him at the Michigan School of Mines in Houghton, which he left after seven months, but there he met the president's daughter, Frances Hubbard.

Flaherty then worked in a copper mine and on survey crews, and set up bachelor rooms above a paint store on Lincoln Street in Port Arthur. His friends included the adventurer Captain H. E. Knobel, whose lodge on Loon Lake had a grand piano and terraced gardens. By 1906 he was moving west, surveying and prospecting, and later explored north of Lake Huron and the Hudson Bay region for the railway builder Sir William Mackenzie. He and Frances became engaged and married in 1914 after a long engagement.

Film career

A first film made on a 1913 expedition was destroyed in a fire; Flaherty then won backing from the fur company Revillon Frères and in 1920–21 filmed Nanook of the North at Port Harrison and Cape Dufferin in northern Quebec, with the hunter Nanook as its central figure. Pathé distributed it, and it opened at the Capitol Theatre in New York in June 1922. His later films include Moana (1926), Man of Aran (1934), Elephant Boy (1937, with Zoltan Korda), The Land (1942) and Louisiana Story (1948). His close friend John Grierson, founder of Canada's National Film Board, shared his belief in a new kind of motion picture. Frances Hubbard Flaherty worked on several of his films and was nominated for an Academy Award for the story of Louisiana Story.

He died at Dummerston, Vermont, of a cerebral thrombosis. The museum's account says that on a last visit to his family before his death he gazed out at the bush along the Superior shore, "perhaps thinking of his early life".

Newspaper record

Local newspaper indexes record several items about him:

Date	Newspaper	Index note
26 September 1934	Fort William Daily Times-Journal	Man of Aran receives an award
1 March 1949	Port Arthur News-Chronicle	Movie wins British title
17 June 1950	Fort William Daily Times-Journal	Honoured for films
26 June 1950	Port Arthur News-Chronicle	Back in Port Arthur for a holiday; a photo notice the same day is indexed "Back in PA with husband", presumably showing Frances
26 June 1950	Fort William Daily Times-Journal	Famed maker of films here
24 June 1980	The Chronicle-Journal	A display salutes the filmmaker

Two earlier stubs, "Robert Flaherty (fl. 1950)" and "Robert J. Flaherty (fl. 1950)", held these items and were merged here.

Sources used by the museum

The museum's essay by Jim Farrell (1973, written for an exhibit of Flaherty's original photographs) draws on interviews with local people and on the museum's Robert Joseph Flaherty collection, and lists Flaherty's own articles and several biographies.