In 1941, Jean Renoir shot part of his rural noir Swamp Water on location in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. The film, which was a success for 20th Century Fox, cast the swamp as an unmapped and impenetrable morass, spurring a body of postwar American cinema that used the country’s disappearing wetlands as settings for death, crime, and femmes fatales. (“Swampsploitation” might be an apt name for titles such as Louisiana Hussy, Swamp Women, and ‘Gator Bait.)
Documentarian Robert Flaherty’s final and most plainly fictional film, Louisiana Story (1948), is a strange exception. The script, co-written with Frances Flaherty, centers on a Cajun boy named Alexander Napoleon Ulysses LaTour who faces the arrival of big oil in his family’s bayou. Funded by Standard Oil of New Jersey as part of a post-WWII public relations gambit to promote new drilling in the gulf, Louisiana Story stars non-actors from a nearby oil rig and the local Acadian community. Flaherty shows the bayou through the boy’s eyes, teeming with orb-weaving spiders and gliding water snakes. Shot by Richard Leacock in the Bayou Petite Anse, the camera pans slowly across bald cypresses and Alexander’s pirogue, framing the bayou as a languid and fertile ecosystem where rural whites live in semi-mystical harmony with the water. We could not be farther from Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934), a dramatic portrait of subsistence fishermen fighting to survive the harsh coastal environment of West Ireland.
Much of Louisiana Story’s beauty comes from Helen van Dongen’s montages of oil drilling. In the 1930s and 1940s, van Dongen gained prominence as a documentary editor through working with Joris Ivens and with Flaherty on his 1941 film about rural American labor, The Land. (The USDA shelved the film because they were concerned its images of poverty would demoralize Americans during the war). At the end of The Land, van Dongen’s montage sequence of threshing machines recalls the heroic tractors in Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth (1930). But in the US, this amounted to celebrating the technology that boosted corporate agriculture while sending more Americans into destitution. In Louisiana Story, which she also co-produced, van Dongen’s sequences of the drilling machinery incorporate the choreography of slick, weathered bodies of oil workers. Their almost erotic penetration of the bayou cross-cuts with Alexander’s curious gaze (that boy, Joseph Boudreaux, would later work on oil rigs). When the drill malfunctions, an explosion blackens the air, an apocalyptic set piece achieved by the crew opening a high-pressure valve to release mud and simulate a blowout.
Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil) spent $250,000 (about $3.5 million today) on the film, and Flaherty delivered something that was smaller in scope than what he had promised. Nevertheless, the company got what it wanted. Louisiana Story is ultimately a corporate myth about American prosperity: Alexander’s family profits from the drilling, and the bayou’s creatures somehow survive the blowout. The film received critical acclaim and widespread publicity, reaching #5 on Sight and Sound’s “Greatest Films of All Time” poll in 1952. In his 1960 book Theory of Film: the Redemption of Physical Reality, Siegfried Kracauer compared Louisiana Story’s massive oil derrick to the battleship Potemkin, a man-made object that cinema raises to the status of protagonist.
Louisiana Story screens this afternoon, September 7, at the Museum of Modern Art on 35mm as part of the series “When the World Broke Open: Katrina and Its Afterlives.”
