2025 Essays

Frances Flaherty

Evans, Barbara

Looking through the voluminous writings on filmmaker Robert Flaherty, it is easy to see his wife, Frances Flaherty, as little more than a devoted accessory to her husband and his work. But reading through her extensive correspondence and diaries, held at Columbia University, a different person emerges—an adventurous, sensitive, and poetic and philosophical thinker and an artist in her own right. In fact, Frances played an under-acknowledged but critically important role on all the films credited to her husband, and it is quite probable that without her creative collaboration, it is quite likely that films like Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926) would not have been made. Although her filmmaking career extended into the mid-twentieth century, this career profile focuses on Frances’s work on these two silent films. And, while contemporary film scholars have written about these two films in relation to various social, aesthetic, formal, and ethical aspects of documentary representation and production, both historically and from today’s perspective, the attention here is on Frances’s artistic ideas and contributions as she expressed them.