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Between the Depression and the war, the globetrotter rediscovers his own terrain. "Land and people" versus "erosion and poverty," swaths of the American South and Midwest contemplated through Robert J. Flaherty's elegiac-pantheistic-analytical lens, a Department of Agriculture project. Dilapidated Tennessee shacks, the abandoned plantation keeps a crumbling bell dusted daily by a spectral Black attendant. Millions of tons of topsoil blown away in Arkansas, the once-mighty river now congealed, "you can almost walk across it." A single emaciated cow stares at the camera, so do wizened migrant children in the Texas cotton town gone to ruin. The new pioneers huddled around a fire, Mexican and Filipino workers dotting Rio Grande fields, "thousands upon thousands on the move." (The teenage pea-picker is characteristic of Flaherty's portraiture, the boy's mother tenderly strokes his hair while his hands continue harvesting in his slumber.) Alliance with Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, a quote from the Book of Job: "If my land cry out against me / Or that the furrows thereof likewise complain / Let thistles grow instead of wheat / And cockle instead of barley." Arid Arizona resurrected by colossal electric reservoirs, abundance in Iowa from threshers and bulldozers—miraculous mechanization complicated by a scrupulous concern for dispossessed workers, "crumbs of the machine." Either feast or famine, between shifts a grizzled laborer remembers the Cumberland Mountains. Amid the waste and penury, a flash of Eisenstein exultation (The General Line) over contour farming, an aerial view turns curving hillside furrows into living sculpture. "It looks practical. It is practical." Louisiana Story expands these studies majestically. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |