Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Lee Eisenberg Robert Flaherty, known as the Father of the Documentary, made his directorial debut with this look at life on the island of Aran, off the coast of Ireland. The people on the island spend their days digging through the rocks to get soil to grow crops, and also hunting basking sharks. Every step of the way it looks like a tough existence, but the inhabitants do what they can to survive.It's an impressive documentary in every sense. A number of the scenes look as if they must have been hard to film, especially when the boy climbs down the cliff. But they accomplished it. I definitely recommend "Man of Aran".The DVD includes an interview with Flaherty's widow Frances years after they made "Man of Aran". She comments on the construction of a nuclear plant not far from her house in Vermont, and worries about how safe nuclear plants are (in fact, this was a few years before Three Mile Island; since then of course, we've had Chernobyl and Fukushima).

Igenlode Wordsmith I'm afraid this is one of the cases when I went to a good deal of physical effort, not to mention discomfort, to get to see a film, and then had my expectations severely dashed. What I find hard to grasp about this film is just how anyone could take such dramatic footage and create such a sadly tedious result out of it...In many ways this is a silent film, but as a silent it is ill-served by its (too sparse) intertitles and its (apparently especially composed) music, which is used in talkie-fashion as a bland wash of sound behind the images, rather than responding in any way to what is on screen. The visuals ought to be full of tension, and I felt that the homogeneous deployment of the music actually undermined what tension was there.Which was not much. The impression I got was that the director was trying to put in *every* frame that he had shot on location, with the result that everything happens with extreme longueurs. Unfortunately very little of what we are seeing is explained, which doesn't help. Eventually it is usually possible to work out what is happening, but the approach is neither conducive to the interest of a documentary nor to the coherence of a narrative film.Considered as a talkie, on the other hand, the film makes poor use of dialogue -- which is, in practice, largely incomprehensible, and unhelpful when the characters' words can be made out (it's clear why intertitles were felt to be necessary). I wasn't clear whether the characters are in fact speaking Gaelic most of the time, as I had originally assumed, or whether the recording quality is just so poor as to make it hard to understand their accented English.So far as narrative goes, practically nothing actually seems to happen. I'm afraid I actually fell asleep in the middle of the film (at some point after the interminable shots of the curragh hooking a basking shark in real-time were followed, alas, by an intertitle stating that the action was going to continue for a further two days..!), but worryingly didn't appear to have missed anything when I woke: the woman and boy were still gazing out from the cliffs, the boat was still out on the waves, and the only thing that had changed was the weather. Basically, the curragh arrives at the start of the film, there are some shots of soil gathering and starting the cultivation of a new field (this was the most interesting and 'documentary' section of the whole picture, where we were actually given enough information to learn something!), and then the curragh and its crew set out again after a (quite harmless) basking shark, which is almost as large as the boat. A storm. The boat is smashed after the crew abandon it on the stony beach -- I'm afraid I chiefly hoped the film-makers paid for the loss -- The End.The rest is all endlessly arty shots of the waves smashing against the cliffs on Aran. Very little shown of the everyday life of the inhabitants; no explanation of the fascinating history and unique handling qualities of the curraghs (the last descendants, as it happens, of the Irish leather-skinned craft of the Middle Ages); not enough human interest to arouse more than an abstract concern over the fate of the little family. The footage is spectacular, and oh! what a film the BBC documentary section might have made out of it -- what an incestuous thriller the silent-era Hitchcock might have concocted around that scenery and those lives...Flaherty contrives the astonishing feat of making it both remarkably boring and oddly uninformative.

bscardozo Another movie by a master movie maker.His documentaries make one feel the hardship his subjects undergo, whether real or not.A must see along with Nanook.The visuals are stunning as is the empathy of the director for his subjects.Would there be a documentary director like him today -- except for Frederick Wiseman whom I am sure was inspired by Flaherty's movies such as Nanook (a picture of a long lost world) and Man of Aran.I wonder if people are still farming Aran or if they have all left for the big city.There are other documentaries by the BBC -- See South Georgia Island or the re-creations of Shackleton's unsuccessful trip to the South Pole and you will feel as well as ache along with them. A true pioneer when making films was difficult at best, impossible at worst. But Flaherty make the impossible real and captured a world that no longer exists.

TerraComs We had jounced across Galway bay in a 45 minute ferry ride, boarded a pony trap for an hour's ride in a two-wheeled carriage, upholstered with leather and duct tape and driven by an ancient Irishman named Tom Flaherty, whose first language was Gaelic. He deposited us at the Atlantic side of the island at a tiny museum for break. My husband opted for the hike to the headland to view a crumbling 20th century fort, while I browsed the museum. It was there that I spied a poster for "Man of Aran" - only 2.50 Euros per person. It sounded vaguely interesting, a way to pass time til the pony trap driver returned to take us bouncing back to the ferry boat landing.We climbed the steep stairs and were seated in a room overlooking the centuries old stone walls that crawl haphazardly over the rugged terrain. A large high definition television sat before us, and we waited for the lady at the downstairs desk to come turn it on. We were joined by four more people, the blinds were drawn and the warbly, scratchy sound track and grainy black and white documentary began. We were gripped immediately by the story - part adventure, part documentary, part drama. It was easy to believe the severe conditions, the arduous, back breaking work of gathering kelp, fishing in the heaving surf, rocky, slippery shores, having just witnessed them in person. A few of the scenes are a little fakey, but we're talking 1934 here, and if you'd ever seen that pounding surf at the foot of that towering cliff, you'd know why they perhaps went Hollywood in the shark hunting scene. If you can't see it in its place of origin, by all means make the effort to find a print. This is a classic. By the way, our driver, Tom Flaherty, would have been 12 years old when the film was made but the director/producer Flaherty was an American from Hollywood, and much distrusted by the natives. He had one heck of a time making the movie, so the brochure at the desk informed us. In typical local resident style, our driver had never seen the movie and did not claim to be related to the director. He dropped us at the ferry and, speaking endearing terms in Gaelic to Brownie, his faithful cart horse, urged her back up the path to the pub for his daily pint of Guinness.