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. (In a sadly appropriate footnote, Nanook, the subject of the film, died of starvation not long after the film's release.) ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Review
Before Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, filmmakers who had recorded the daily lives of people, starting with the Lumiere Brothers and their famed glimpses of workers leaving their factory, had been casual observers. Flaherty instinctively understood that film audiences loved a good story, and he set out to marry the conventions of narrative cinema with the reality of commonplace life. By choosing a setting of extreme conditions -- the death of Nanook shortly after the film's release only underscored the treacherous conditions of his life -- Flaherty started out with an inherently dramatic foundation. He built on that by asking his subjects, whose cooperation he wooed by screening footage of their work together, to stage scenes for him. The igloo which Nanook, his family, and friends built for Flaherty was larger than normal and contained only three sides, to allow the filmmaker's cameras access to the interior. Critics have charged that this technique compromised the film's authenticity, but, as in all of his major features (Moana, Man of Aran, Louisiana Story), Flaherty was more interested in the general rather than the specific. The truth of these films lies in their faithful rendering of man's relationship to the natural world, and in that regard, Flaherty had no peer. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Nanook of the North: A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic (1922) is a silent documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty. In the tradition of what would later be called salvage ethnography, Flaherty captured the struggles of the Inuk Nanook and his family in the Canadianarctic. The film is considered the first feature-length documentary, though Flaherty has been criticized for staging several sequences and thereby distorting the reality of his subjects' lives.[1]
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 Frères, 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 a foreign culture in a remote 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.
Assessment
Flaherty has been criticized for deceptively portraying staged events as reality, although staging events for the camera was the norm of documentary filmmakers of the time[2]. "Nanook" was in fact named Allakariallak, 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 recent ancestors in order to capture the way the Inuit lived before European influence. On the other hand, while Flaherty made his Inuit actors use spears instead of guns during the walrus and seal hunts, the hunting actually involved wild animals. 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 in fact he died at home, likely of tuberculosis.[3][4]
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.
At the time, few documentaries had been filmed and there was little precedent to guide Flaherty's work. Since Flaherty's time both staging action and attempting to steer documentary action have come to be considered unethical amongst cinéma vérité purists, because they believe such reenactments deceive the audience.
Other works
The story of the film and the people it was made among is told in The Long Exile: A True Story of Deception and Survival Amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic, by Melanie McGrath.[5][6][7] (See also High Arctic relocation.)
Kabloonak is a 1994 film about the making of Nanook of the North. Charles Dance plays Flaherty and Adamie Quasiak Inukpuk (a relative of Nanook) plays Nanook.
^ Pamela R. Stern, Historical Dictionary of the Inuit (Lanham, MD:Scarecrow Press, 2004), p. 23.
^ Robert J. Christopher, Robert and Frances Flaherty: A Documentary Life, 1883-1922 (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005), pp. 387-388
