At a time when "I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!" is an international franchise, and "Shark Week" programming is among our most-watched TV documentaries, it's hard to imagine that proto-documentarian Robert Flaherty was once considered a game-changer. Flaherty's career as an explorer, filmmaker, and armchair anthropologist had long solidified by 1934, when his third film, Man of Aran, stood as the grandest example yet of what had become his trademark style, beginning with 1922's Nanook of the North: traveling to inhospitable regions of the world (in this case, the rocky, sea-scarred Aran islands off the western coast of Ireland) and getting natives to recreate their cultural habits for a worldwide audience of filmgoers eager for safe glimpses of unseen corners of the world. As a filmmaker, Flaherty both solidified much of what we now know as documentary language, and, strangely enough, predicted one of the form's most popular-- and despised-- grandchildren, reality television.
Or, maybe reality television is just an incredibly regressive story form. Either way, it's exactly this strange admixture of the modern and postmodern that makes any of Flaherty's works evergreen and ripe for reinterpretation. Ostentatious, self-serious revisionism has been one of British Sea Power's fortes ever since they packaged their 2003 debut album as a "Classic" work of history, so it's easy to see why, 75 years later, they'd be up to the unique task of redoing the score for Aran. The Quietus wonderfully explained the unique collusion between narrative and time, calling it "a 21st century attempt to complement a 20th century film about an often 19th century way of life."
It becomes quickly clear that, while their interpretation is sympathetic to the original, BSP are meeting Flaherty on their own terms. The band repurposed three of its own moody, atmospheric numbers for inclusion in the score ("North Hanging Rock", "True Adventures", and "The Great Skua"), winkingly name the last piece "No Man Is an Archipelago", and has been brazen enough in the liner notes to regard Aran, which Flaherty intended originally to be a noble man vs. sea tale of survival against the elements, as "at once heroic, stunning, camp, ridiculous... everything a rock band should be." Though Flaherty has been roundly (and often rightly) criticized for romanticizing his subjects as isolated, noble primitives, in this context one of his most notoriously ballsy quotes is innocent enough to unironically headline the liners: "I should have been shot for what I asked these superb people to do, all for the sake of a keg of porter and five pounds a piece."
It doesn't rise to the level of firing squad, but the band's cover of "Come Wander With Me", a 1964 Jeff Alexander number originally included in a "Twilight Zone" episode, is the starkest example of the band's own form of poetic license. The song's lyrics are mundane romantic escapism, standing in stark counterpoint to the scene they butt heads with: a family scours its barren home for seaweed and returns home with their catch strapped to horses, walking waist-deep in water. They'll "wander" later, thanks. Part of the mystery of BSP's score, indeed, is trying to parse if the band's actively playing with the touristic gaze that Flaherty was immune to, or if they're just ignoring it. Either way, it's sort of eerie.
When the score and visuals work together, though, the effect can be stunning. As the men return from an expedition in a small canoe, the opening "The South Sound" sequence flows forward from a nervous first movement of minor key piano and dark cello into a tumultuous post-rock freakout, as the family is thrown against the rocks by the sea's raging waves, trying to bring ashore the day's catch. Later, the "Boy Vertiginous"/"Spearing the Sunfish" section is the best-- both through Flaherty's virtuosic filmmaking and BSP nailing the dramatic tension. The sequence crosscuts between a young boy catching a fish with a rock tied to a string and a group of men showing how adults do it-- killing a shark with a spear, from a tiny fishing boat. As Flaherty cuts to a shot of the grizzled hunters cresting a hill, BSP swell to a crescendo straight out of Hollywood, and it's the most goosebump-inducing moment in the film. The sequence doesn't let up for several minutes, either-- even as a recreation, it took two days to get the shark back to shore-- and when the men are struggling with the shark, Flaherty's rapid cutting works perfectly with BSP's rocking the fuck out.
An important thing to keep in mind when watching Aran is that British Sea Power were most likely not willing (or able) to alter the original film in any way, and this tether often works to their disadvantage. For his part, Flaherty was working several decades before video killed the radio star, and the band doesn't work too hard to meet his 1930s style halfway. There are a more than a few times, then, when BSP's attempts to build dramatic tension feel out of sync with Flaherty's pacing and technique. Right in the middle of "Sunfish", for instance, a title card pops up-- Flaherty informing us how dangerous the shark is-- while the cacophonous music continues with conspicuous indifference. The last third of the film contains some of its most stunning visuals, but BSP's score plays as nostalgic what Flaherty seemed to intend as anxious. Will the father, away on another mission during a storm, return home safe? Let's take a reflective walk along the coast and think about it.
But this is the trick, it seems: The real power of the visual/musical connection between Flaherty and BSP comes if you regard it not as a traditional film, but as a music video. In other words, you have to let the music drive the visual, instead of vice-versa. It's still not a transcendent translation-- 75 years might as well be a thousand in popular-culture time-- and I would still highly recommend screening the original film (might it have been nice to include the original score and ambient sound as a separate track?). The shift in perspective necessary to "get" it, though, does work on that level: at the least, it's a fitting testimonial to British Sea Power's partially effective relocation of a classic film into a modern aesthetic scheme.
