Nanook of the North
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"All that’s wondrous and contradictory about cinema was there from the start, with its spotty record of truthfulness and ability to show us sights we’ve never seen before. Explorer-filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s classic is essential—inauthentic, yes, but a breathtaking, pioneering record of “reality.”"
— MUBI's take
Nanook of the North
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1989.
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Nanook of the North (also known as Nanook of the North: A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic) is a 1922 American silent documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty, with elements of docudrama, at a time when the concept of separating films into documentary and drama did not yet exist.
Why It Rocks
- This film not only defined what could be called a "documentary" but at the same, it broke each of the rules that would be established about the genre.
- Flaherty spent two years shooting and editing in Hudson Bay but approached this film differently than his previous 17 hours worth of film related to Inuit living which was lost to a fire. In this case, he brought along the apparatus to both develop and project the film, enabling him to see on the spot what worked and what didn't. This allowed him to reshoot scenes if he felt they merited better framing and exposures, and he could return to locations if he needed more footage to edit a scene. He even showed the Inuits what he was shooting, making them active participants in shaping the structure and meaning of the film.
- The most significant detail about how it differed from his last film was in Flaherty’s philosophy about the content. He focused on individuals rather than incidents, so he told the story of the Inuits through the people themselves. Since he had lived with them for years, he understood the essential elements of their lives and could zero in on situations that would best explain them to moviegoers. He also had an eye for composition and editing.
- The director actively sought out Inuit to play parts in the film when casting the documentary, although it should be noted that the two women who portrayed his wives and the “children”, weren’t actually related to him. Flaherty was also willing to direct his actors and use the techniques of Hollywood features to introduce the film's characters and was confident enough to stage and restage incidents to get what he wanted on film.
- In the film’s most significant achievement, it showed filmgoers how Inuits were like any other humans, with children and pets and stomach aches.
- Considering Flaherty said he wasn’t interested in a scene’s external truth as much as uncovering what he felt was an essential truth about his subject, he altered the reality he was filming to a shocking degree. And yet, despite a lot of the events being manipulated for the camera, the film still retains a charm and innocence.
- For scenes shot in the interiors of igloos, Flaherty had the roofs removed to provide more light. And there’s a sequence where Nanook hunts a polar bear through a hole in the ice, struggling to hold on to the rope attached to the hook. A harpoon appears and disappears in the sequence, showing that the director was shooting at different times.
- Flaherty left an enormous influence on filmmakers and filmmaking, with following generations of documentarians using his theories as the basis of their own films.
Bad Qualities
- Attracted a lot of controversy during its time. Especially for staging some of the events, which are supposedly based on actual events; not to mention breaking various rules of the future genre of documentaries.
Trivia
- Nanook of the North is the first popular American feature-length documentary.