On demand: "Louisiana Story"

1948's Louisiana Story found Robert Flaherty picking up where he left off when World War II interrupted, with another peaceable, poetic, artfully constructed documentary-fiction hybrid, albeit now with an ominous sense of things to come. Non-fiction legend has it that the veteran filmmaker only got this one, his final feature before his death three years later aged 67, over the line thanks to a sizeable financial contribution from the Standard Oil Company. Yet a certain editorial nous is evident in the way Flaherty folds in this encroachment, and makes a film about a paradise being lost. First, he gives us the paradise: a small Cajun family unit (mutely devoted ma, "colourful" pa, their cheeky, gap-toothed offspring, his pet raccoon) living a broadly idyllic existence on the banks of the Mississippi. Then he introduces the complications, via signs of American modernity: the slick speedboat of the corporate forces pursuing an interest in this territory, its backwash capsizing our young hero's canoe; a vast oil derrick hoisted into position to blot the landscape; a soundtrack that suddenly fills with clanks and bangs. For a while, Flaherty gives his backers what they may have wanted from their investment. While the Pulitzer-winning score by Virgil Thomson busily signals progress, development and that everyone before the camera is going to be in the money once the desired black gold is struck, we watch the kind of friendly human faces one might have seen in early Esso or Shell commercials, lingering close-ups on drill bits and mining infrastructure, and cutesy-funny interactions between the boy and the engineers overseeing the project. (Here, the movie meshes with another of the era's forms of industrial filmmaking: Disney's live-action nature tales.)

Yet the overall picture we're looking at is markedly different from the unspoilt, essentially 19th century landscapes of Flaherty's Nanook and Tabu. In shifting his focus back to America, the filmmaker raises one of the bigger questions hanging over the second half of the 20th century: now that we've agreed war isn't the way forward, just how much is big business going to (be allowed to) take? You wouldn't necessarily have to stretch too far to see Flaherty constructing a parallel between the oil men tampering with nature and the frankly terrifying alligators floating down river, putting that cute raccoon (among other examples of local wildlife) in mortal danger. These are hunting grounds, after all, and it takes on-the-ground smarts, real resistance and unity, to outwit and see off such predators. Over the next 75 years, profits and waters would rise, the levees would break (if not the levies), and man would continue to pump petrochemicals into the sky and hope for the best; for much of that time, successive waves of documentarists (starting with the Direct Cinema movement spearheaded by Richard Leacock, one of Flaherty's assistants here) sought a back-to-basics purism that led to Flaherty being written off critically as either a figure of white paternalist condescension, a faker or a hopelessly wide-eyed naif. You can't fail to be struck by the wonder still present in this filmography - wonder at what's been put before the camera, that we should all see such sights - yet the films now appear far more complex, revealing and rewarding than any of the above labels would allow for: what Flaherty signed off with here is, at heart, an uncannily beautiful film about despoilment.

Louisiana Story is currently available to stream via Sands Films online.