A Film Canon

Possibly the most lyrical film ever made, Louisiana Story was commissioned by the Standard Oil Company to promote drilling in the Louisiana bayous. As such, it attempts to integrate the derrick into the ecosystem, most explicitly by stressing the sensual continuity between oil and water, but most pervasively by outlining the mechanics of each in a manner that foregrounds their similarities. On the one hand, this produces some spectacular depictions of machinery, culminating with a derrick fire that blows gas and salt water for ten days. Even more sublimely, it induces Flaherty to construct a rough narrative around a local Cajun boy, whose negotiation of the bayous in a home-made boat involves some of the most beautiful imagery of nature in all cinema, culminating with an extended drama between himself, his pet raccoon and an alligator (with a side cast of heron, frog and spider), which comes as close as may be possible to a cinematic evocation of animal consciousness, while generalising that consciousness to the ecosystem itself; or, more accurately, giving a proper sense of the ecosystem as a dynamic network, rather than a discrete collection of organisms. In this way, any propagandistic element is ultimately subordinated to the urgent beauty of the bayous, or relegated to a surreal, visionary mode that is encapsulated in the framing image of the derrick being floated along the water, while the shy, deflective beauty of the little boy resists any straightforward appropriation, if only because it speaks to his status as another organism, only alive within the ecosystem of which he is an inextricable part, or receptive to those parts of the derrick that respect it.