It portrays characters living in premodern conditions, documenting their daily routines such as fishing off high cliffs, farming potatoes where there is little soil, and hunting for huge basking sharks to get liver oil for lamps.

Man of Aran is Flaherty's recreation of culture on the edges of modern society, even though much of the primitive life depicted had been left behind by the 1930s.

Three men, among them "A Man of Aran", land a flimsy currach in the midst of high winds and huge waves with help from "His Wife" and "Their Son".

There is a storm, and the Wife and Son can only watch from shore while the Man and his two shipmates struggle to get their boat to land safely against the elements.

[7] Paul Rotha in Documentary Film says, "Man of Aran avoided all important issues raised by sound".

[11] When it opened in Dublin on 6 May 1934, Man of Aran was a major political and cultural event to the nascent Irish Free State and was attended by the President of the Executive Council, Éamon de Valera.

Man of Aran suited Fianna Fáil, as it encouraged an image of Ireland that was fiercely traditional, definitively rural, and resilient in the face of hardship.

[16] Grierson argues that Flaherty's 'NeoRousseauism', the glorification of a simpler and more primitive way of life, meant he could not develop a form adequate to the more immediate material in the modern world.

[19] It is claimed that Flaherty ignored the effects of such worldwide events as the depression of the 1930s, suggesting to the audience that the Aran Islands were isolated economically as they were geographically.

"Flaherty...created new customs, such as shark fishing, and seriously distorted numerous indigenous ones in order to make the Man of Aran fit his preconceptions and titillate the camera".

[28] However, the claim is not correct as whale and shark fishing were both known to occur and commercially viable operations up until a few years prior to the filming.

What appears to be a traditional activity carried out by Aran women is a fabrication.The seaweed is collected for fertilization and is gathered from the low-lying shores twice per month, and only when the tides are absolutely calm.

[33] As Flaherty says, "looking back I should have been shot for what I asked these superb people to do for the film...for the enormous risks...and all for the sake of a keg of porter and five pound a piece".

[35] The conference had gathered, in part, to praise direct cinema which, in contrast to the classic tradition, promised a new level of realistic interpretation.

[39] At the time, Stoney’s revelatory documentary had left many at the conference incensed at what they now saw as Flaherty’s blatant falsification of the life he had been purported to be documenting.

[40] According to Barsam, "Flaherty’s subjective view of reality – his making it all up – has a romantic basis, idealizing the simple, natural even non-existent life".

[46] How much a documentarian can manipulate and still credibly claim their film to be a truthful portrayal of real life "is a never-ending discussion with many answers".

[49] Flaherty had immersed himself in the culture to tell the essence of the truth about the Islanders, "[and] for this reason ethnographic accuracy is an unimportant consideration when the larger goal is some fundamental aspect of mankind".

[61] Corliss says Man of Aran was very different from his earlier work, “…the chiaroscuro compositions, charcoal rock, black-clad figures against a gray sky, are light-years removed from the natural grandeur of Nanook of the North or the easy elegance of Moana.

[62] Corliss suggests there are enough similarities between Flaherty and John Ford, Chaplin, Borzage, even Disney that place him firmly in a tradition of the romantic visionary American.

[63] Winston sees the influence of Flaherty in Leni Riefenstahl films, arguing that her aesthetics of manipulation owed much to his pioneering work.

[66] Flaherty's legacy is the subject of the 2010 British Universities Film & Video Council award-winning and FOCAL International award-nominated documentary A Boatload of Wild Irishmen (so named because, after the staged climactic sequence of Man of Aran, Flaherty said he'd been accused of "trying to drown a boatload of wild Irishmen"), written by Professor Brian Winston of University of Lincoln, UK, and directed by Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín.