Books: Visions in an Ice-Blue Eye

THE INNOCENT EYE by Arthur Calder-Marshall. 303 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.95.

Robert Flaherty was the Blake of cinema, its prodigious primitive. He was the first man of film to demonstrate that the merest reality can inspire the highest art. In arctic desolation he evolved the documentary method and at the corners of the earth produced the early masterworks of the tradition: Nanook of the North, Moana, Man of Aran, Louisiana Story. With the perspective of half a century, the works retain their stature, and the figure of Flaherty is magnified in time. In The Innocent Eye, Biographer Arthur Calder-Marshall...

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