“A Tribute to George C. Stoney” concludes Doc Month at the Museum of Modern Art with four by that “father of public access television,” accompanied by works of others including “father of the documentary” Robert Flaherty. Known for All My Babies and minority-social-problem films for Canada’s Challenge for Change, teacher-mentor-lecturer Stoney introduced the final work as “made for my class at NYU -- I think you’ll see why”: How the Myth Was Made asks, “must the filmmaker always leave his mark?” at the same time that it depicts Flaherty’s making Man of Aran set against reminiscences of surviving locals and crew and their reflections on that film’s repercussions over the four intervening decades.

Thus, throughout his sixty-minute 1978 film and in a following Q&A, Stoney pondered the relationship between so-called real life and the subjective filtered version of those who record it. There is no definite demarcation, he remarked, separating reality from creativity, the “out there” from the inner vision of it; the observer translates, “tasting the wine [as distinct from] the mere security camera in a liquor store.” Though careful not to open the can of worms that is the Uncertainty Principle -- the act of observation changes what is observed -- he insisted that Flaherty was first a “film poet” and second a “factual documentarian.”

Flaherty’s shifting moods emerge from comments of peers and coworkers. Genial and generous away from the camera, he was driven and exacting while at work and a showman in promoting it. The Aran venture had assumed more pressing importance in the wake of poor box office for “another Nanook” in the South Seas, waffling by distributors and, at three years and counting, his running way over time and budget.

The “myth” which informs his filmography is the urban romanticization of the struggle of “primitives” against nature, highlighted through editing and, in the case of the bleak rocky island off Ireland’s northwest, brought to a wider audience. What was not conducive to the vision of ennoblement was ignored, like the longstanding religious divide or the ownership of large tracts by a wealthy few whose lawyers collect rent past due, or panicked cattle forced to swim to ships which dared not beach (a scene recreated for 1978). The visual beauty of the original was enhanced by long-focus lenses angled from below, thus compressing churning waves and boats in reality more distant than they seemed; by artful lighting and shadows, by music which was initially the only aural effect in this his first use of sound, and by his usual emphasis on the nuclear family of three (the child actor granted permission only after the town’s Father Egan urged the recalcitrant mother).

With family roots on the island -- his grandfather -- and other, non-professional visits there, Stoney has entrée that his subject did not have or cultivate. In 1978 he and some of the crew who had worked with that subject, are welcomed warmly, though of course those embraces, those songs in Gaelic and dances, the conversations over pints of Guinness, are filmed and cannot be one hundred percent unselfconscious or impromptu.

Part of this welcome contains the islanders’ reminiscences about the 1931-34 experience, and part of it overflows into differences of opinion about the total truth of both past and filmed record, as for example whether women really trudged heavy seaweed to fertilize potatoes or burros were or were not common. Especially the older folk are hard to understand through their accents, but there is nowhere any problem catching the universal recognition of the double-edged effect of Flaherty’s film. His equipment may have been shelved and forgotten for years and then shipped to Britain and unforgivably thrown out, but the allure of the legend grew into a fame that some could not take and thus emigrated, while undeniably tourism and some money have been brought in.

Flaherty’s filmed harpooning of a basking shark reenacts an art disappeared long before -- an Inuit hunter came to instruct the actors -- and did not succeed in reviving that fish’s oil as a viable source of income, and the modest influx of tourists is not universally hailed as salutary. Ferry boatmen, guides and B&B owners have benefited a little, but, while thatched stone cottages are being supplanted by modern cookie-cutter dwellings, there are those who are thankful for winter’s absence of outsiders.

A much better print is advertised for an upcoming showing at Lincoln Center in conjunction with the New York Public Library, but tonight’s rust-tinted color has a warmth that may be lost in the polishing. What is incontrovertible is that Man of Aran brought change to the isolated island, a progress this is appreciated or lamented or just accepted. As a two-dimensional distortion of a three-dimensional world, according to Stoney, it not only subjectively interpreted a reality but in itself gave birth to the evolution of another reality. Film, he said, matters as Homer matters, as eyeball-to-eyeball contact matters compared to e-mail forwardings.