LOUISIANA STORY (1948)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Propaganda

Director: Robert J. Flaherty

Cast: Joseph Bordeaux / Lionel Le Blanc / E. Bienvenu

Plot

A Cajun boy is fascinated by the arrival of an oil rig on his family’s land.

What I Liked

Hired by Standard Oil to create a film depicting a beneficial relationship between the oil company and the Louisiana swamplands, director Robert Flaherty intended to capture the unique beauties of both machine and nature in “Louisiana Story,” but succeeded much more successfully at the nature portion than he did at the machine portion.  From the opening shot forward, Flaherty successfully imbues the swamps with an otherworldly lushness, capturing a sort of dark wonderland promising adventure, danger, and fantasy around every bend.

The impact of the enchanted marshes is most impressive in the film’s beginning (though it never goes away completely) and is greatly accentuated by Virgil Thompson’s Pulitzer Prize winning score.  Of course it is typically the case that the score lends mood to a film; that’s why the score is there.  However the music in “Louisiana Story” endows many of the animals and machinery alike with unique personalities.  Because these personifications are indispensable to both the intentions and the beauty of the film and because that beauty substitutes for the lack of a conventional storyline, the film’s score is really as much the story as the pictures.  Without it, “Louisiana Story” would have been an incredibly ineffective film.

What I Disliked

Flaherty is often referred to as the father of documentary filmmaking.  However, looking back at this film from the vantage point of more than sixty years, there is clearly no alternative but to really consider “Louisiana Story,” his last significant work, as propaganda.  Funded by Standard Oil and giving a ridiculously biased and romanticized portrayal of oil drilling’s effects on the environment; the movie is certainly not historically or scientifically accurate.

Nor is it factually accurate concerning the family it claims to depict.  As was the case with most of his productions, Flaherty created a fictional story and passed it off as documentary.  The Cajuns depicted in the film were indeed local people, but were cast in fictional roles.  They were strangers, not members of the same family, and did not own the land on which the oil rig was built.  Flaherty hired them to portray a version of Cajun life he imagined would play well to his audience and set them up in staged sequences to tell his story.

Most Memorable Scene

Staged or not, one of the scenes in the film is frightfully dramatic.  When the main character believes an alligator has eaten his pet raccoon, he sets out after the beast, subsequently trapping it and trying to pull it up onto the muddy banks.  At least portions of this scene were shot with a real alligator, and the tug-of-war that ensues definitely makes for some white-knuckle suspense.

My Rating: 2 out of 5