NANOOK OF THE NORTH

(1922) Director: Robert J. Flaherty

DVD
NETFLIX

SUMMARY:

Nanook of the North is regarded as the first significant nonfiction feature, made in the days before the term "documentary" had even been coined. Filmmaker Robert Flaherty had lived among the Eskimos in Canada for many years as a prospector and explorer, and he had shot some footage of them on an informal basis before he decided to make a more formal record of their daily lives. Financing was provided by Revillion Freres, a French fur company with an outpost on the shores of Hudson Bay. Filming took place between August 1920, and August 1921, mostly on the Ungava Peninsula of Hudson Bay. Flaherty employed two recently developed Akeley gyroscope cameras which required minimum lubrication; this allowed him to tilt and pan for certain shots even in cold weather. He also set up equipment to develop and print his footage on location and show it in a makeshift theater to his subjects. Rather than simply record events as they happened, Flaherty staged scenes -- fishing, hunting, building an igloo -- to carry along his narrative. The film's tremendous success confirmed Flaherty's status as a first-rate storyteller and keen observer of man's fragile relationship with the harshest environmental conditions. - Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

VIDEO: 8 MINUTE EXCERPT



REVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, CREDITS:

• How I Filmed Nanook of the North (Essay by director Robert J. Flaherty)
• A New Look at Robert J. Flaherty's Documentary Art (Essay by Gerhard Lampe)
• Roger Ebert's Great Movies Essay
• The Criterion Contraption’s review

NOTES:

• In 1989, this film was one of the first 25 films to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
• The film was shot near Inukjuak, on Hudson Bay in Arctic Quebec, Canada. Having worked as a prospector and explorer in Arctic Canada among the Inuit, Flaherty was familiar with his subjects and set out to document their lifestyle. Flaherty had shot film in the region prior to this period, but that footage was destroyed in a fire started when Flaherty dropped a cigarette onto the original camera negative (which was highly flammable nitrate stock). Flaherty therefore made Nanook of the North in its place. Funded by French fur company Revillon Freres, the film was shot from August 1920 to August 1921.
• As the first nonfiction work of its scale, Nanook of the North was ground-breaking cinema. It captured an exotic culture in a distant location, rather than a facsimile of reality using actors and props on a studio set. Traditional Inuit methods of hunting, fishing, igloo-building, and other customs were shown with accuracy, and the compelling story of a man and his family struggling against nature met with great success in North America and abroad.
• Flaherty has been criticized for deceptively portraying staged events as reality. Much of the action was staged and gives an inaccurate view of real Inuit life during the early 20th century. "Nanook" was in fact named Allakariallak, for instance, while the "wife" shown in the film was not really his wife. And although Allakariallak normally used a gun when hunting, Flaherty encouraged him to hunt after the fashion of his ancestors in order to capture what was believed to be the way the Inuit lived before European influence. The ending, in which Nanook and his family are supposedly in peril of dying if they can't find shelter quickly enough, was implausible, given the reality of nearby French-Canadian and Inuit settlements during filming. Flaherty also exaggerated the peril to Inuit hunters with his claim, often repeated, that Allakariallak had died of starvation two years after the film was completed, whereas it is now known that he more likely died of tuberculosis. On the other hand, while Flaherty made his Inuit actors use spears instead of guns during the walrus and seal hunts, the hunting itself did involve actual wild animals.
• Flaherty defended his work by stating that a filmmaker must often distort a thing to catch its true spirit. Later filmmakers have pointed out that the only cameras available to Flaherty at the time were both large and immobile, making it impossible to effectively capture most interior shots or unstructured exterior scenes without significantly modifying the environment and subject action. For example, the Inuit crew had to build a special three-walled igloo for Flaherty's bulky camera so that there would be enough light for it to capture interior shots.
• Kabloonak is a 1995 film about the making of Nanook of the North. Charles Dance plays Flaherty and Adamie Quasiak Inukpuk (a relative of Nanook) plays Nanook. - Wikipedia
• Flaherty went on to make more sophisticated films, notably "Tabu" (1931), an uneasy collaboration with the great German filmmaker F.W. Murnau, who was more interested in story and style than documentation; "Man of Aran" (1934), about the hard lives of the Aran Islanders off the coast of Ireland; "Elephant Boy" (1937), starring Sabu in a fiction based on a Kipling story, and "Louisiana Story" (1948)
• Upon Flaherty's death in 1951, poet e.e. cummings called him "a god among man," and Orson Welles compared him to Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, describing him as "one of the two or three greatest people who ever worked in the medium."
• Rated #6 in 2002 by International Documentary Assn. on its list of Top 20 Documentaries of all time.