The Long Exile Read Online Free

alone, the couple were married in New York City on 12 November 1914, with Frances buying the ring. A friend of theirs later noted that Robert “was like a light and [Frances] was like a sensitive photographic plate.” The couple passed their first winter together editing what remained of Flaherty's film of Inuit life and the following spring they showed a rough cut at the Convocation Hall in the University of Toronto, where the picture was met with a wall of polite incomprehension.
    By the autumn of 1915, Robert and Frances were apart once more. Robert spent that Christmas back at the Belchers, feasting on pea soup and currant buns and whiling away the time it took for the sea ice to freeze solid teaching the Inuit how to sing “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” Between times he set his camera rolling. The followingSeptember he headed south, with thirty thousand feet of exposed film.
    The Flahertys worked through the early winter of 1916 and by Christmas they had a rough cut of the new film prepared and printed. This they sent off to Harvard in the hope that the university might screen it and Robert set himself to the business of refining the edit. As he was sitting over the negative one day, concentrating on the frames, a cigarette dropped from his fingers on to the film can, and the film flared, and burst into twists of flame before finally slumping to the floor in a heap of blackened celluloid. It was a bad film, Flaherty said later. He would just have to go back out to the Arctic and make a better one.
    But not on Sir William Mackenzie's time. Flaherty's old benefactor had long since turned his real attentions away from Arctic ore to the war in Europe. There was no money to be had for Flaherty's adventures from that quarter and Flaherty had none himself. For a while, he ploughed his energies into the lecture circuit and making babies. Frances gave birth to three girls in close succession: Barbara, Frances and Monica. The new family moved to Houghton, Michigan, to stay with Frances' parents, then found a house of their own in New Canaan, Connecticut. But the empty spaces of the Arctic tapped on Flaherty's heart and he longed to return.
    In the early spring of 1920, he saw his chance. At a particularly dreary cocktail party in New York he was introduced to Captain Thierry Mallet of the Rvillon Frres trading company. Flaherty was a warm, convivial man, and he was used to people gravitating towards him, rewarding them for their attention with his rough-tough tales of the kind of pioneer life which already seemed to belong to another, more fascinating, age. Thierry Mallet was no exception. Mallet knew the settings of Flaherty's tales. Rvillon Frres had recently opened posts in the Ungava Peninsula to capitalise on the Arctic fox populations there. The fur trade was picking up after a long wartime stagnation. As Mallet told Flaherty, a goodwhite Arctic fox pelt was now selling at the wholesale fur market in Montreal for C$25 and Mallet's company was feeling buoyant. Its great rivals still needled it, though. The Hudson Bay Company was celebrating its 350th anniversary that year and Rvillon Frres was hoping to outdo its rivals when it came to celebrating its own 200th anniversary in three years' time. Did Flaherty have any good ideas, Captain Mallet wondered.
    As it happened, Flaherty did. His idea, he told Mallet, was to make an adventure film about an astonishing group of people living in a world of unimaginable harshness, a world in which Rvillon Frres also operated. It would be the first film of its kind, a genuine trailblazer and he, Flaherty, would be willing to sell Rvillon Frres the rights to it. Flaherty saw Mallet's eyes take on a new intensity. He was in.
    A few weeks later, the venerable Rvillon Frres company signed a contract promising Flaherty C$11,000 in exchange for the rights to his as yet unmade Arctic adventure film and on 18 lune 1920 Flaherty found himself at the railhead in northern Ontario with some new