Man of Aran (1934) on Netflix
NR19341h 16mDocumentaryDrama
On the Aran Islands, a man, his wife and their son farm potatoes in soil scraped from rock crevices. He joins other islanders hunting basking sharks for lamp oil.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.1/102,553 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
Off Ireland's west coast, on Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands, a man, his wife and their son live by working thin soil and fishing from small boats. Together the man and his wife make a field on bare rock, spreading seaweed and soil scraped out of crevices, and he mends his currach with cloth and tar. Their son fishes from a cliff edge, using a crab as bait. When basking sharks pass on their migration, the man and four other fishermen take a larger boat out to harpoon one, and the wife renders the liver into oil for the lamps of the island.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Man of Aran (1934)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Robert Flaherty promised Michael Balcon he could shoot the entire film for £10,000; he shot over 200,000 feet of film for a 74-minute documentary over the next two years, and Balcon halted filming when costs approached £40,000.
- The Aran islanders did not know how to make or use the harpoons and had to be taught the skills of the hunt, so Robert Flaherty brought fishermen from Scotland over to teach them how it was done for the film.
- None of the islanders could swim, yet Robert Flaherty asked them to perform the most astonishing feats in stormy seas; he later said he should have been shot for the risks he asked of them, all for a keg of porter and five pounds apiece.
- The Aran family in the film was artificial: the mother, father and son were played by unrelated islanders handpicked by Robert Flaherty for the roles.
- Robert Flaherty kept experimenting with the long focal lens he first used on Nanook, using a range of lens sizes including a seventeen-inch long lens that was twice the size of the camera.
