Tonight's program offers, side by side, two very different kinds of documentary truths: Robert Flaherty's poetic, romanticized portrait of the Aran islanders in Man of Aran, and George Stoney's documentary on Flaherty's film that exposes in no uncertain terms the lies in service of a film poet's truth. Flaherty spent two years depicting the arduous life of the inhabitants of Aran Island thirty miles off the west coast of Ireland. While in his first film, Nanook of the North, the enemy is driving blizzards and bitter cold, here the enemy is a barren landscape and a treacherous sea. He shows the toilsome process of planting potatoes in handfuls of soil amid the rocky cliff edges, and with stunning long-focus lens photography follows the perilous process of hunting the basking shark, the small boats appearing and disappearing among mountainous waves. Man of Aran is a film of extraordinary beauty and brilliantly succeeds in creating a vision of the human will to prevail, made all the more compelling against the backdrop of a monumentally cruel and withholding nature.-Marilyn Fabe