Historians thought that the first Irish
language “talkie” had been lost to a
fire in 1943. But on February 19, at the symposium “Folklore and Flaherty” hosted
by the Harvard Film Archive, an audience in America had the chance to see that film
for the first time, on a print recently discovered and restored by the Harvard
Library. Directed by pioneering documentarian Robert Flaherty, Oidhche Sheanchais (A Night of Storytelling) offers a 12-minute tale of peril and homecoming. In it, four people encircle
the Aran Island storyteller Seáinín Tom Ó Dioráin as he describes how a young
man saved his brothers’ lives at sea by throwing a pitchfork, full of burning sod, into an oncoming wave.
“It was thought that the last copy had
vanished off the face of the earth,” said Catherine McKenna, Robinson professor
and chair of the department of Celtic languages and literatures, in introducing
the event. What McKenna called “the actual premiere of this lost film” had
been a long time coming: a double feature with Man of Aran, Flaherty’s
full-length Irish “fictional documentary,” had been canceled by a blizzard the
previous weekend.
The print had made its way to the University
almost 80 years earlier, and seems not to have been touched since. Harvard
professor Fred Norris Robinson, widely considered the founding father of Celtic
studies in America, paid £20 to purchase a nitrate print for the Harvard
College Library in April 1935, a month after the film’s Dublin debut. That copy
sat safely in the Z closet—the University Library’s category for oddly shaped
objects—and wasn’t logged into the new HOLLIS catalog system until its update
in 2012.
In 2013, Barbara Hilliers, G ’97, an
associate in the Celtic department, was browsing the online list of Irish
manuscripts when she noticed that the number of holdings had changed from 36 to
37. After Hilliers flagged the new catalog entry, the Celtic department
embarked on what McKenna remembers as “a scramble for restoration funds,”
eventually supplied by the Harvard Film Archive, the Office of the Provost, and
Houghton Library. Still in its original film can and wooden shipping crate, the
print went to Harvard’s film conservation center for preservation in 35-millimeter
film and digital formats; it will eventually be available for loan in
non-subtitled, Irish-subtitled, and English-subtitled versions.
“It’s just magic for me to sit here and
see the film,” said Hilliers, who left Harvard to lecture at University College
Dublin just as her colleagues set about, as she put it, “passing around the
begging bowl.” Her talk drew from her study of two years of correspondence
between Flaherty and James Delargy, director of the Irish Folklore Institute
and a friend of Fred Norris Robinson. On Delargy’s recommendation, the Irish
Free State’s department of education commissioned A Night of Storytelling to
teach children about their heritage.
Rather than hire an actor to declaim words
that someone else had composed, Flaherty and Delargy were determined to find a real
storyteller, and document a genuine performance. Though many academics consider
Alan Lomax’s recordings of Lead Belly the earliest folkloric film, said
Hilliers, A Night of Storytelling was made a year earlier. Given that
the term “documentary” itself was less than 10 years old at the time, she added,
“This little modest shoestring operation was nothing short of revolutionary.”
Natasha Sumner, a Ph.D. candidate in
Celtic languages and literatures, then briefly explained the process of
subtitling the film. For the story itself, she was able to work from the companion
pamphlet printed by the Irish Free State for distribution in schools. For other
film elements—the sea chantey sung by Maggie Dirrane at the beginning, the
various interruptions of the listeners—she enlisted the help of experts,
including fellow panelist Deirdre Ní Chongaile, who studies Aran Island song
traditions. The next challenge was technical: getting the English text to
appear on the screen at the right time. Sumner had to count each frame, a laborious
process she repeated more than once. Having spent hours with the characters, she
declared, “I feel like I have gotten to know them pretty well—Maggie, Mike,
Tiger, and Patch—and I am happy to get to introduce them to you like this.”
Those who know Flaherty’s work, the
subject of a Harvard Film Archive retrospective this month, might find their
faces familiar. Ní Chongaile gave further context from behind the scenes:
Colman “Tiger” King, Patch “Red Beard” Ruadh, and Maggie and Michael Dirrane
had been brought to London to record post-synch sound for Man of Aran when
Flaherty repurposed both the studio space and actors for this other, shorter
project, arranging his cast around a replica hearth. She also related the
details of Ó Dioráin’s death by drowning, shortly after he made this film;
though the boat was found, his body was never recovered.
The two other panelists provided further
background about Irish traditions. Maureen Foley, a director and manager of special
projects in the Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities, drew a connection
between the film and the thriving seisiún or “session”
culture in Boston, which draws Irish-American
elders and transient music students alike in meeting halls and pubs to share
stories, poems, and music. Kate Chadbourne, G ’99, a musician who has taught
Irish at the Extension School and has what she calls “the pure dumb luck to be
a fisherman’s daughter interested in sea lore,” elaborated on the many
different versions of the film’s tale, known as “The Knife Against the Wave.” Calling
it “a very flexible frame,” she described it as a teaching tale that offered a
way for fishing communities to “come to grips with their relationship to the
sea”: the hero always takes something from the earth, or the hearth, for good
luck; he is always taught that he belongs, in the end, on land.
These 10-minute talks, and the question-and-answer
portion afterward, made the gathering unusually intimate. Despite inclement
weather and unreliable transportation, the event drew members of Boston’s Irish-American
community and several travelers from Ireland itself. The speakers and audience
members found that they knew people in common, back in the Aran Islands; some
were moved to tears by the chance to see A
Night of Storytelling, and to learn the details of Ó Dioráin’s death.
McKenna drew these proceedings to a close
approximately 15 minutes before a closing reception at Houghton Library. She
wanted to be sure there’d be time, she said, to show the movie once more before
the afternoon was over. As the auditorium lights dimmed and snow flurried
outside, the audience turned to the screen and the hearth projected on it, to
hear the story again.