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.
