No clear­er exam­ple of this direc­to­r­i­al aware­ness can be found than in his film Perm-mis­sion, in which Rom­bout trav­els to the small vil­lage of Perm, Rus­sia to film a doc­u­men­tary about Fla­hertyana, the annu­al fes­ti­val ded­i­cat­ed to pro­mot­ing the lega­cy of Fla­her­ty and pre­serv­ing the integri­ty of doc­u­men­tary film in the coun­try. Through his con­ver­sa­tions with var­i­ous direc­tors and fes­ti­val-goers, Rom­bout works to uncov­er what exact­ly in Flaherty’s approach has influ­enced so many peo­ple over decades and across nation­al bor­ders. We see Rom­bout toil­ing along­side the sub­jects of his own doc­u­men­tary as togeth­er they exam­ine every­thing from dif­fer­ent tech­niques in cin­e­matog­ra­phy to choic­es in edit­ing and gen­er­al sto­ry­telling, in hopes of arriv­ing at a bet­ter under­stand­ing of why Flaherty’s films still stand today among the best in the genre and how they as film­mak­ers can learn from his tal­ent. A pos­si­ble answer to these ques­tions can per­haps be found in one Russ­ian filmmaker’s attempt to explain the mag­ic of doc­u­men­tary: “The sto­ry must serve as a begin­ning and car­ry along with it the desire to share, the desire to share a bond of reci­procity so that there might be a mutu­al exchange between the author, his vision of things, and the spec­ta­tor [3].” Here Rom­bout and his sub­ject touch at the very core of doc­u­men­tary film, espe­cial­ly the kind under­tak­en by Fla­her­ty. While estab­lish­ing rela­tion with the mem­bers of Fla­hertyana and the films of Fla­her­ty him­self, Rom­bout also presents to the audi­ence his own per­son­al rela­tion­ship with the doc­u­men­tary, allow­ing us as he did in Revis­it­ing Louisiana Sto­ry to wit­ness the steps tak­en to arrive on the big screen.

While it is clear that both Fla­her­ty and Rom­bout attempt to make known this rela­tion­ship between the sto­ry, the author, and the audi­ence in all of their films, many have accused Fla­her­ty of falling under the influ­ence of sub­ver­sive pow­ers dur­ing the mak­ing of Lousisiana Sto­ry, most notably that of the Stan­dard Oil Com­pa­ny of New Jer­sey. Stan­dard Oil com­mis­sioned the film as part of an elab­o­rate pub­lic rela­tions ploy to boost the company’s image. Flaherty’s crit­ics claim that the film’s some­what tidy res­o­lu­tion of the con­flict between the oil­ers and the inhab­i­tants of the area was influ­enced by the sup­port he received from Stan­dard Oil. Often in cin­e­ma the line between doc­u­men­tary and pro­pa­gan­da becomes blurred once a benefactor’s inter­ests clash with those of the direc­tor. How­ev­er, it would be dif­fi­cult to claim that Fla­her­ty allowed Stan­dard Oil to alter the direc­tion of his film, con­sid­er­ing that their name and logo did not appear in the cred­its or else­where. Some are nonethe­less trou­bled by what they see as an over-sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of the sor­did rela­tion­ship south Louisiana has had with the oil indus­try. While the film does appear to car­ry a rather sig­nif­i­cant polit­i­cal in sup­port of the oil indus­try, we should not for­get that Louisiana Sto­ry is essen­tial­ly a com­ing-of-age sto­ry about a boy as he begins his jour­ney to man­hood and strug­gles with the chang­ing world around him as well as with the changes in him­self. From his choice of shots down to his mag­nif­i­cent treat­ment of the Louisiana land­scape, we can say with some degree of cer­tain­ty that Fla­her­ty him­self was more con­cerned with telling lit­tle Joseph Boudreaux’s tale than that of the drillers.

What impact then did Stan­dard Oil have on the way Fla­her­ty told his Louisiana Sto­ry? Like in all artis­tic medi­ums, an audience’s attempt to under­stand a creator’s deci­sion often ends in futile spec­u­la­tion. How­ev­er if this ques­tion­ing leads to hands-on cin­e­mat­ic inves­ti­ga­tion, as it did for Rom­bout and the stu­dent film­mak­ers, then it can also be a use­ful tool. Revis­it­ing Louisiana Sto­ry was con­sid­ered by many of the stu­dent film­mak­ers as their oppor­tu­ni­ty to address the issues raised by the spon­sor­ship of Stan­dard Oil, as well as oth­er con­cerns involv­ing Flaherty’s treat­ment of Cajun cul­ture. Many mod­ern-day Cajuns see Flaherty’s por­tray­al of their not-so-dis­tant rela­tions as an over-sim­pli­ca­tion of a rich and col­or­ful peo­ple, reduced on the screen to an uncul­ti­vat­ed, shoe­less race of trap­pers and hunters. As men­tioned by one of the stu­dent film­mak­ers, many Cajuns at the time of Louisiana Sto­ry had left the bay­ou in search of jobs in the city and were far removed from the some­what prim­i­tive lifestyle depict­ed in Flaherty’s film. Where can their sto­ry be found in Fla­her­ty? With Revis­it­ing Louisiana Sto­ry, the stu­dent film­mak­ers were able to present their own col­lec­tive found sto­ry through the telling of their unique and indi­vid­ual sto­ries, reflect­ing both inside and out­side per­spec­tives and ques­tion­ing the “objec­tive” nature of doc­u­men­tary film. And far from deny­ing the valid­i­ty of Flaherty’s tire­less strug­gle to under­stand the cul­tur­al and nat­ur­al land­scape that he found in Louisiana, Revis­it­ing Louisiana Sto­ry serves to actu­al­ize documentary’s insis­tence on the rela­tion­ship between the sto­ry, the direc­tor, and the audi­ence by adding their own tale to the mix.