After a series of clashes with W.S. Van Dyke and F.W. Murnau, Robert Flaherty travels to the Aran Islands of Ireland with his wife and collaborator Frances Flaherty. Over the course of three years, they make Man of Aran, a film about the people who live on a desolate island with rough seas. As with his previous films, Nanook of the North and Moana, Flaherty takes another controversial approach. While the families featured in the film are indigenous to Aran, they are not real, and the shark hunts that make up a large part of the film are reenactments. Man of Aran reaffirms that for Flaherty, documentary is less about producing ethnographic knowledge through accurate observation and recording than it is about conveying the essence of the lives of people living in a particular environment. The film also showcases Flaherty's remarkable ability to poetically compress the relationship between nature and humanity, as evidenced by the use of a telephoto lens to capture huge waves and people in a single frame. It's an accomplishment that cannot be devalued by debates about fact and re-enactment alone.