Must See Movie...

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

I suppose this movie will always be controversial as a "documentary", but as a narrative about primal Man vs. Nature, this is a very good film. The shots of the sea and the intertitled emphasis on it are used almost to the point of pure abstraction, as it boils, shifts, foams, slaps, storms, and retreats while the characters try to stay alive against formidable (and if the documentary were actually true, impossible) odds.Flaherty's true focus seems to be more on the idea of the matter than the historical actuality of it. He shows these documentaries as testaments to the power of the human spirit against a world of impossible coldness and odds, and it definitely shows in the way he makes his characters small against huge landscapes and environmental effects. Still, the persistence of Man to Flaherty is heroic, and it's hard not to appreciate that sentiment in what is really a very powerfully edited and shot film.--PolarisDiB

I watched this film in my documentary film class and was bored to tears. This film is supposedly a documentary, but most of it looked staged, which is Flaherty's style. Watching people search for soil in the cracks between rocks with very little dialogue is not the most exciting thing to see on the screen, however the time frame needs to be taken into account. This was probably some exciting stuff back in the 1930s. The big dramatic man versus nature scene at the end was snooze worthy. It was, perhaps, the most boring thing I have ever sat through. Nanook of the North was a better made film of Flaherty's, however that is not a true 'documentary' either.

I taped "Man of Aran" back in 1992 off a TV broadcast. I'm glad I still have it, because I'm certain I've never seen it on the air since. My father grew up on the smallest of the Aran Islands (hence my user ID), and I heard quite a bit about the film before finally seeing it. The baby girl in the crib, for instance, grew up to marry the brother of our one-time neighbor. Dad also assured me that Robert Flaherty didn't follow the islanders around unobtrusively with his camera, but staged all the action. Hunting sharks, for instance, may still have been done at the turn of the last century, but not by the 1930's. That same year (1992), Dad came across Robert Flaherty's daughter at an Irish festival. She mentioned that she had some unused footage from "Man of Aran" back home in New Hampshire. That would be great to see on a DVD version. Of course, who knows what kind of shape that film stock is in by now? Call it a 'documentary fantasy' if you will (which the British film magazine Sight & Sound did). To me, it will always be a powerful look at how harsh, and beautiful, it is to live off the sea.

This review is being written by a man who absolutely despises everything about realist style films. However, Flaherty's depiction of life on the Isle of Aran captivated me from start to finish. Filled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, Flaherty would have been lying through his teeth to have called this a documentary (the man of Aran wasn't even from Aran). Man of Aran remains realist however in that, I believe, in that it only speaks to you if you hold a connection to the sort of life it depicts. Flaherty brings forth the essence of that life but will only hold your interest if you actually care how someone might farm in a soilless field of broken rock.If that isn't your bag, you can still at least enjoy Flaherty's visuals. Waves pound against rocky cliffs sending spray a hundred feet high. It is quite a spectacle.