I racconti della Louisiana

A Cajun boy is fishing and hunting with his pet raccoon out in the Louisiana bayou. He comes upon a crew of oil drillers and has various adventures.

This was Oscar nominated for writing which is probably the least compelling part of this movie. It can be argued that there is barely any writing involved. Its strength is the sense of reality in the swamp and the oiler crew. It's a slice of life. It's the docu-style of filmmaking. The kid may not be a great actor but he has realism on his side. There are some great scenes. I can't forget the raccoon and it's great to see a real drilling crew working. The plot isn't much. It's really just a series of swamp adventures.

Joseph Boudreaux is a Cajun boy living in the bayous. When a wildcat rig starts to drill near his home, he makes friends with the crew.

It's directed by pioneer documentarian Robert J. Flaherty. Flaherty for decades was considered the model documentarian. This was in large part because his NANOOK OF THE NORTH was wildly successful. Nowadays, the admiration has died down.He imposed story lines on his movies, and directed scenes to support them, as opposed to the modern ideal of shooting a tremendous amount of footage of things happening, and then editing the results to bring some sort of coherence to the resulting film. You can see his story-telling technique in the sequence where Boudreaux captures an alligator. In addition, the presence of the drillers is portrayed as completely benign, with no impact on the local wildlife. Modern understanding of global warming and the impact of oil spills and the Deepwater Horizon disaster makes this seem naive. However, Standard Oil underwrote this movie, just as NANOOK had been underwritten by furriers.

The resulting movie is a warm and idyllic one, with amusing details of Cajun superstition and the beauty of the local setting. Although not as informative as modern documentaries try to be, it's beautifully shot and well put together. Virgil Thomson won the Pulitzer Prize for best composition, the only time a movie score has achieved that distinction.

This is a classic film that blurs the line between documentary and fiction. Here, you won't find a very good plot, but some very interesting sequences and some of the most visually pleasing imagery ever put to screen.

From watching both this and "Man of Aran" you can tell that Flaherty is a very unconventional filmmaker. His films have staged scenes that, as I mentioned earlier, blur the line between fiction and nonfiction creating a nontraditional signature style.

In this film, we follow a young boy (and his friend, a raccoon) living an average life in his hometown. We see him paddle down rivers, walk through the woods, and have tons of entertaining adventures. Then, a bunch of oil drillers move to town. We watch these oil drillers do their work with very minimal dialogue. It's almost all expressed in visuals.

While the film may sound boring and seems to start off kind of boring, in the end, it's a truly adventurous masterpiece! One of my favorites!

The opening scenes paint an idyllic picture of nature as well as the relationship it shares with people. With vegetation reflected off the surfaces of ponds, animals roaming about, and the sounds of nature in the background, the bayou feels like a slice of heaven. Even the people who occupy this land don't disrupt the environment since they appear to be one with nature. This is until we're introduced to the threat of industrialization. It starts with the boy (he's referred to as Alexander in the opening, but he's credited as "The Boy" in the film) being knocked into the water due to the wake of a motorboat. We then see an oil tower poking through some trees in the background. The interference of industrialization keeps spiraling until we're introduced to an oil well. With smog being released from its exhaust pipes and the sounds of its machinery being audible throughout much of the bayou, it seems out of place and sacrilegious.

The more one watches the film though, it becomes readily apparent that we're watching a glorification of the oil industry since the film refuses to properly acknowledge the problems it causes to the bayou. You're clearly asked to support the oil well, but given the glaring issues it causes (in addition to the real-world negative effects oil drilling has on the environment), this puts the film at odds with itself. Coming mainly from the perspectives of the working man and those impacted by the oil well, the potential for a great critique on industrialization is there, but we're instead left with an incongruity between the depiction and the endorsement of the industry. Flaherty was commissioned by Standard Oil to make the film though, so it's no surprise that it's propaganda.

The best parts of the film concern the boy's trials within the bayou. As idyllically shot as the bayou is, we're constantly reminded of the danger some of the wildlife poses, specifically in regards to an alligator which recurs throughout the film. Its scenes are memorable, with the standout being a middle scene where the boy attempts to catch it. That scene is tense, but Flaherty was undoubtedly a madman when shooting it. Boudreaux's and the alligator's scenes weren't recorded separately or anything. Rather, they were in fairly close proximity to each other, thus putting Boudreaux in actual danger when that scene was shot. As a result, the suspense in that sequence concerns worrying about real-life harm coming to the actor. To be clear, I don't approve of this as it's clearly child endangerment, but on a gut level, it made for a certain kind of thrill which left a visceral impact on me.

Overall, it's fairly interesting and I enjoyed it in some respects, but the propagandistic elements made it feel like a missed opportunity.

Robert Flaherty had a great eye for the interesting shots. Never more so than this oil company funded film about a young boy seeing the oil rig come to his Louisiana bayou. Although there is not much of a story the shots of the oil rig, life in the bayou, and the moods that Flaherty captures make it a film well worth seeing. If you see "Man of Aran" or "Nannok of the North" remember it was the same great documentary filmmaker. I've seen it twice and probably will see it again someday.