Film Review
Nanook of the North has the
distinction of being the world's first feature-length, commercially
successful documentary, although, at the time it was first seen, the
word 'documentary' had yet to be coined. There had of course been
previous attempts to capture life 'as it is' on film, rather than stage
a story for entertainment, and this dates right back to the
Lumière brothers whose output was mostly in a documentary vein,
recording for posterity the mundanities of everyday life. By the
early 1920s, cinema had become a medium of mass entertainment and the
vast majority of films were fictional narratives rather than factually
based. The staggering popularity of
Nanook of the North around the
world established the documentary as a legitimate form of cinema, one
that audiences would pay to watch and enjoy every bit as much as a
filmed play.
The film was made by Robert J. Flaherty, a career cartographer and
mineralogist who had been working for the Canadian Pacific Railway
since 1910. In the course of his professional duties he made
various expeditions between 1913 and 1915 into the icy wastes of the
Canadian Arctic circle to get to know the native population. As
he did so, he accumulated hours of film footage of Eskimo life, but his
hopes of assembling this into a watchable piece of cinema went up in
smoke when he accidentally set fire to the camera negative with a
cigarette. The film that survived was not, in his opinion, of any
great interest to the public and so he decided to mount a further
expedition, specifically to film the everyday experiences of one Eskimo
family. That film world earn him fame and put the documentary on
the cinematic map -
Nanook of the
North.
Having finally secured the 53 thousand dollars he needed to make the
film, (mostly from Revillon Frères, a French fur company
gambling on a massive publicity coup), Flaherty began his arduous
expedition in August 1920 and spent the next twelve months working in
the most challenging of environments to make the film that would become
a landmark in cinema. He hired several Esimos to appear in the
film and work as his technical team, offering money to compensate for
the disruption to their normal lives. This is doubtless something
which today's documentary filmmakers would consider downright
unethical, but what is more controversial is Flaherty's decision to
stage most of the set-pieces in his film, rather than merely film what
happens as a matter of course.
Nanook of the North blurs the
distinction between documentary and fiction with gay abandon, and its
authenticity and value have been challenged ever since it was first
seen.
To begin with, the main protagonist in the film - the titular Nanook -
is a fictional character, albeit one played by a revered hunter of the
Itivimuit tribe of Eskimos, a man named Allakariallak. To
underscore the precariousness of the lives of the people in his film,
Flaherty includes a caption that states Nanook died from starvation
during an unsuccessful deer hunt. In reality, Allakariallak died
at home, most likely from an illness such as tuberculosis. The
Eskimo women who appear in the film were not known to Allakariallak but
were two of Flaherty's partners who were hired to play Nanook's
wives. Although it was common practice for Eskimos to hunt with
rifles, throughout the film they employ the more traditional knife and
harpoon, heightening the drama but giving a somewhat distorted view of
Eskimo life as it was at the time.
Whilst most of the film has a genuine documentary feel to it, there are
sequences which are obviously staged and included primarily for comedic
effect. At the start of the film, Nanook's family are seen
emerging one-by-one from a kayak - it's the old circus gag of clowns
clambering out of an implausibly small car. Later on, Nanook
appears bewildered when he comes across a gramophone and does all the
things we expect the ignorant savage to do, including making repeated
attempts to eat the record. In one dramatic hunt, the prey (a
seal) is already dead before the cameras start rolling - not that you
would ever notice or care.
The most visible directorial sleight of hand comes when Nanook
constructs an igloo for his family, apparently within one hour,
complete with block of ice for a window. As the film cuts from
the exterior of the igloo to its interior, Nanook and his entire family
are comfortably settled in a space that is
obviously too big to fit inside the
igloo that the head of the household has just built. Our respect
for the resourceful Eskimo increases a hundred-fold when we realise
that he hasn't just knocked up an igloo, but rather something akin to
a
Tardis.
The reason for this excursion into dimension-expanding fantasy?
Well, the camera (a Bell and Howell hand-cranked affair) was so large
that the only way it could fit inside an igloo was by making one that
was three times the standard size and dispense with the 'fourth
wall'. Part of the roof also had to removed to allow enough light
to enter the igloo for it to show up on film.
It was certainly not Flaherty's intention to deceive his audience by
'bending reality' to suit his purpose. Such was the technology
available to him at the time that without doing so he would have been
prevented from capturing on film as much as he did of Eskimo life circa
1920.
Nanook of the North
may not be one hundred per cent (or even fifty per cent) authentic but
it is the nearest thing we have to a documentary of this kind, one that
offers a permanent record of a way of life that is alien to almost
everyone who watches it and which has now all but disappeared, thanks
to civilising western influences.
What is perhaps most striking about the film, given the primitive
nature of the equipment with which it was made, and the unimaginably
difficult circumstances under which it was shot, is how utterly
engaging it remains to this day. The raw landscapes that Flaherty
captures on film have an intoxicating lyrical quality about them, and
how can we fail to be to impressed by the warmth and humanity of its
protagonists? Their life may be hard, at times nightmarishly
perilous, but Nanook and his entourage are a lively and happy bunch,
and there's not a grim or self-pitying expression to be seen
anywhere. The film may not be as truthful as might like it to be
but there is still an abundance of truth to be found within it.
Flaherty made a number of noteworthy films after this -
Moana (1926) and
Man of Aran (1934) are also worth
seeing - but never again would his cinema have the resonance and poetry
that imbue every frame of
Nanook of
the North, and which have inspired generations of documentary
filmmaker ever since. More than just a film, this is a magnificent
ode to the resilience of the human spirit - humbling, informative and
immensely satisfying.
© James Travers 2014
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