BOYHOOD FASCINATION with backhoes and dumptrucks is one way to ...

INATION with backhoes and dumptrucks is one way to approach Louisiana Story. The legendary Robert J. Flaherty was an explorer and anthropologist before becoming a documentary filmmaker, but in the 1948 Louisiana Story, he reveals a simpler passion. Flaherty expresses a deep, basic affinity with the Cajun youth Joe who emerges into the bayou to be transfixed by the camaraderie and hard work of local oil-drillers.

Flaherty was captivated by real-life experience, just as Joe is entranced by nature and technology. This pure curiosity led to Flaherty creating art without the taint of exoticism. He continued to explore different cultures with his camera yet avoided being condescending by a rare combination of scientific scrutiny and humanist passion. Joe's dark eyes and tense, mask-like face could be a portrait of illiteracy, but Flaherty shows the boy's thoughtful and intuitive activity: navigating the bayou in his canoe, teaching his pet raccoon to swim, hunting for catfish, venturing to observe the oil workers. In most of these moments, Joe's face lights up; Flaherty captures native intelligence as a sign of life.

This dignified approach to filmmaking is all but lost in our mockumentary era. The snide ridicule of a Chistopher Guest satire (such as the nearly awful A Mighty Wind) presupposes that we know everything about the world. Flaherty preserved the buoyancy of learning. To rediscover his movies (including the famous Nanook of the North and Man of Aran) means a confrontation with the essential facts of filmmaking artifice and storytelling integrity (they're not contradictory). Louisiana Story is as obviously staged as Flaherty's other more famous works. Joe Boudreaux plays himself, and the dialogue of Joe, his parents and the workmen is a little halting. Later filmmakers have resolved this awkwardness, but none has exceeded Flaherty's essential truthfulness or the phenomenological fidelity that comes through in scenes of silent observation. Louisiana Story creates an almost exalting contrast between the natural wonders of the bayou and the man-made wonder of nuts-and-bolts oil-rigging.

Richard Leacock's photography of the marshes is silvery, inky and gorgeous. Helen van Dongen edited the patterns of rippling water and slithering crocodiles, towering derricks and exploding pipes with a feel for the internal engine of habit and labor. With Flaherty, these artists understood the glory of seeing. Like Walker Evans, it's the eye, not the subject, that makes meaning. Today's crude video documentaries discourage audiences from being enraptured with the world and human behavior. The Fast Runner and Capturing the Friedmans were visually repellant and spiritually ugly. Louisiana Story is an anthropological boyhood document but as rapturous as the great childhood films of Clarence Brown.