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Bayou Petite Anse, "an account of certain adventures." Named after voyagers and conquerors, the Cajun boy (Joseph Boudreaux) enters as an integral part of the local fauna and flora, a symbol of innocence but also a raw lad who can't help smiling at the codger giving direction behind the camera. Green-haired mermaids and werewolves "with long noses and big red eyes" are his enchanted creatures of choice, a sudden detonation silences his rifle and announces the intrusion of modernity. Wildcatters aboard "swamp buggies," hard at work on a rig and as chummy as funding by the Standard Oil Company dictates. "My father say you crazy, all you sailors." Old and new, as Eisenstein would have it, Robert J. Flaherty's final poem of Nature and technology. A metallic tower above the trees, chains writhing around drilling pipes in a rhyme of the serpent gliding across liquid surfaces. Training grounds for Richard Leacock, bedrock formations for Satyajit Ray. The roughnecks don't upset the young protagonist as much as the alligator that goes snapping after his beloved pet raccoon, their ensuing tussle returns to the primordial Flaherty image (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran) of the animalistic hulk arduously dragged out of the slime. "Holy mackerel! Who got that fellow?" Impressionistic marshland views, a floating carpet of lily pads dispersed by bubbles, the amphibian heart beating behind the denim shirt. The blow-out is a cacophony of hissing machines giving way to a screen blanched by steam, not Dovzhenko's urine (Earth) but salt and spit get the derrick chugging back to life. Elsewhere, the boy's father (Lionel Le Blanc) regales city slickers with a ditty: "I eat when I'm hungry, and I drank when I am dry / If whisky don't kill me, I'll live till I die." The beautiful coda connects prehistoric treasure and suspended childhood, replete studies follow from Ray (Wind Across the Everglades) and Kazan (Wild River). With E. Bienvenu, Frank Hardy, and C.P. Guedry. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |