Legacy
Flaherty is considered a pioneer of documentary film. He was one of the first to combine documentary subjects with a fiction-film-like narrative and poetic treatment.
Flaherty Island, one of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay, is named in his honor.
The Flaherty Seminar is an annual international forum for independent filmmakers and film-lovers, held in rural upstate New York. The festival was founded in Flaherty's honor by his widow in 1955.
Flaherty's contribution to the advent of the documentary is scrutinised in the 2010 documentary 'A Boatload of Wild Irishmen", written by Professor Brian Winston of University of Lincoln, UK, and directed by Mac Dara O'Curraidhin. The film explores the nature of 'controlled actuality' and sheds new light on thinking about Flaherty. The argument is made that the impact of Flaherty's films on the indigenous peoples portrayed changes over time, as the films become valuable records for subsequent generations of now-lost ways of life. The film's title derives from Flaherty's own statement that he had been accused, in the staged climactic sequence of Man of Aran, of "trying to drown a boatload of wild Irishmen".
Read more about this topic: Robert J. Flaherty
Famous quotes containing the word legacy:
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)