OneWorld Magazine: Nanook of the North

The omiak or women's boat coming down to the trading post

Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North"
(Continues from Previous Page)

Written by Alain Silver
Original photos from "Nanook of the North"
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IN HER BOOK, The Odyssey of a Film-maker, Flaherty's collaborator and widow France Hubbard Flaherty reasserts the frequently applied epithet of "Father of the Documentary." She also claims that "his films themselves do not give evidence of a method, that is the apparatus of film-making and its devices." Certainly in Nanook Flaherty had few apparati at his disposal: two hand-cranked Akeley cameras and a minimum of supporting equipment. Perhaps the most remarkable technical accomplishment of filming in arctic conditions in 1919 and 1920 was not that Flaherty's cameras withstood the cold, but that he and his Eskimo aides successfully disassembled them at the end of every shooting day to wipe the condensed moisture from their inner workings and put them back together to face the cold again. Even more extraordinary was that Flaherty turned his Hudson Bay cabin into a film lab, where he not only heated vats of chemicals with enough precision to process his negative but also printed dailies with sunlight by running the negative and positive film past a frame-sized hole.

Drawing of Flaherty filming by an unidentified Inuit

Flaherty has sometimes been criticized by subsequent generations of documentarians for his "reconstruction" of scenes, most notably inside the igloo. Since the real thing was much too small and dark for filming, Flaherty's actors built an oversized model. This igloo mansion collapsed in early attempts and, even when finally built with numerous ice windows, was still too dark. Flaherty ultimately removed portions of the ceiling to let in enough sunlight. Remarkably no contemporary viewers seemed to notice in the film's final sequence that Nanook and his family were taller than the deserted igloo into which they crawled for shelter, but that once inside they stood unencumbered beneath a vaulted dome. In fact, while it may be a far cry from cinema verité, the attempt to make a large-scale ice house was consistent with the ethnographic principal of recording the people of any culture in the environment as it is. How much simpler would it have been to shoot the Inuit family's snow-bed in full daylight against a wall of ice blocks, and who would have noticed?

For those who believe that documentary and ethnographic filmmaking has evolved into a convention in which the filmmaker tries to remove as much of his or her cultural bias as possible, Flaherty did just that in his depiction of the events inside the igloos. While the Inuit drawing of Flaherty the kabloonak or Westerner directing his two native cameraman affirms the director's control, he chose to keep his mediating influences in check.

Flaherty at Moose Factory (southern Hudson Bay) during his early explorations Today's "reality based" filmmakers have made televised reconstruction an operative method. Still it could be argued that Flaherty's most serious manipulation of the subject was to pay both his technical assistants and his performers. For Flaherty this was essential to control Nanook's nomadic life-style. "Do you know that you and your men may have to give up making a kill," Flaherty recounted telling Nanook, "if it interferes with my film? Will you remember that it is the picture of you hunting the iviuk [walrus] that I want, and not their meat?" Years before terms like documentary or ethnographic film were being debated, Flaherty had an instinctive understanding of the phenomenology of his art. Perhaps it was clear from the reactions of his performers when he projected the film of the iviuk hunt for them. The Inuit--not unlike the Parisians who watched scenes filmed by the Lumière brothers 100 years ago and fled the grainy image of an approaching train--were slightly confused between the depiction and the actual event. For them, the walrus hunt meant food and life. Through the film they relived the excitement without the "meat." For Flaherty, it had to be the record of the event and not the event itself that mattered. The title might read, "The desert interior, if deer hunting fails, is the country of death;" but the only the images could silently evoke that grim reality. And long after Nanook had indeed starved to death, people looking at that record, people who, Flaherty noted ironically, "must be told that white means snow" could see the record of those events and understand something of the arduous existence which Nanook led. (Photo above: Flaherty at Moose Factory (southern Hudson Bay) during his early explorations)

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