-Devdutt Trivedi
Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of The North (1922) is perhaps the most important documentary every made. Its critical and commercial success made in a cult of sorts, including several re-issues as late as 1952, which were unmatched by any following documentary, whether by Flaherty or anyone else. The film replaced the explanatory aspects of Griffithian parallel montage and replaced it with an observational approach which created a unique quality of attention across its duration.
Flaherty took up an expedition to the East Coast of Hudson Bay in August 1910, under the instructions of Sir William MacKenzie to examine certain islands and their deposition of Iron ore. Having made four expeditions in six years for MacKenzie, Flaherty discovered the Belcher Island archipelago on Hudson Bay. As part of Flaherty’s exploration was included a motion picture outfit, which was all in all about 30,000 feet. When a fire destroyed the film, Flaherty looked forward to replacing the ‘amateurish’ attempt in a journey which he began on 18th June, 1920. With an equipment consisting of 75,000 feet of film, a Haulberg electric light plant and projector, two Akeley cameras and a printing machine, Flaherty began filming the life of the Eskimo around Nanook, who Flaherty described as a ‘character famous in his country’ around particularly the ‘Walrus Island.’
In his remarkable essay on Flaherty’s masterpiece Dean W. Duncan correctly emphasizes the two contributions of Flaherty to the founding approach of the documentary film: the process of filming as a mechanics of space, and duration which relates to time. The observational approach taken by Flaherty for the first time waits for action instead of dictating, as in Griffith, the denotation of action. Flaherty opposes Eisenstein’s construction of montage of using a succession of shots to create meaning, but instead creating a succession of sequences that create anticipation, in the viewer, of what may follow so that the motion picture camera, in the Hollywood film maker King Vidor’s words, ‘approximates the consciousness that everyone has.’
The film is thought to be the first among the ethnographic approach to film that would find its successors in the likes of Grierson, Margaret Mead, Jean Rouch and Robert Gardner. Flaherty’s film succeeded the experiments by the Lumiere Brothers and then by the Johnson Brothers who traveled across Melanasia to create several documents on the people of the region. These included Cannibals of the South Seas and Head Hunters of the South Seas. Flaherty who lived in Inuit for eleven years used 1 out of eleven years in the production of his film. The film was sponsored by Revlon Frères, a fur company, and one scene shows Nanook and his family at the company’s trading post, exchanging furs for goods.
The film is full of false tricks which fetishize and exoticize Inuit culture. In The Ethnographic Film Reader, Heider finds Nanook’s distorted igloo as the ‘classic case of a filmmaker altering material culture.’ When Flaherty found that the igloo was too small to be filmed in, he replaced it by one that was double its size and that too only using the
structure of the shell. Flaherty provides a false sense of interior temperature (as being much warmer than it actually was) when the family strips off their clothes. In another sequence Nanook is shown killing the seal with a harpoon. According to Duncan, the seal on camera was already dead and being pulled back and forth by a friend to give the effect of struggle. Duncan states that during the production of the film, the hunters urged Flaherty to film the rifle. Flaherty’s ignorance of the modernized lifestyle of the Inuits made his detractors including Grierson accused Flaherty of ignoring reality for a romantic vision filmed through documentary technique.
In spite of these shortcomings Nanook remains a masterful film. In an interview Flaherty’s widow claimed that the master documenteur did no want to make an information piece that was ‘explanatory’ but instead wanted to capture the ‘spirit of the people.’ Mrs. Robert Flaherty believes the greatness of the film lies in the character of Nanook who is ‘being’ and not ‘acting.’ In a telling incident she mentions that name of an Eskimo pie she had in Europe many years later which was called Nanook.
References
How I Filmed Nanook of the North, Robert J. Flaherty from Film Makers on Film Making, Indiana University Press, 1967
Dean Duncan
Flaherty and Film, National Educational Television
Ethnographic Film Reader, Karl G.Heider, University of Texas Press, 1976