Nanook of the North

Nanook of the North
Directed by	Robert J. Flaherty
Written by	Robert J. Flaherty
Produced by	Robert J. Flaherty
Starring	Allakariallak (Nanook) Nyla Cunayou
Cinematography	Robert J. Flaherty
Music by	Stanley Silverman
Release dates	June 11, 1922
Running time	79 min.
Country	United States
Languages	Silent film English intertitles

Nanook of the North (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 Inuit Nanook and his family in the Canadian arctic. 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.

Film

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.

Criticism

Flaherty has been criticised 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 (although Allakariallak himself died of starvation two years after the film was made). 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.

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.

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.

See also

• Nanook
• Docudrama

External links

• Nanook of the North at IMDb
• Great Movies: Nanook of the North (1922) by Roger Ebert
• How I Filmed Nanook of the North by Robert J. Flaherty
• Media Worlds essay by Faye D. Ginsburg
• Swiss Jazz band Q3 composes a new Nanook of the North soundtrack
• June 12, 1922 review of Nanook of the North in the New York Times