Silent Film Sources - Reviews

Opening title:  The mysterious Barren Lands- desolate, boulder-strewn, wind-swept- illimitable spaces which top the world. 

Flaherty was an explorer, a prospector and a surveyor when he made Nanook in 1920 at the age of thirty-six. Earlier, he had undertaken several explorations to sub-Arctic regions around Hudson Bay between 1910 and 1916. Flaherty had an intimate knowledge of Eskimo society and had even made an earlier film on Eskimo life (now lost). Filmmaking, however, was long a sideline to his other research interests. 

After unsatisfactory results from the earlier film, Flaherty returned to the eastern Hudson Bay with backing from the Revillion Freres fur company. He brought along sophisticated cameras and his own printing, developing and projection equipment. Watching the dailies as he went along, Flaherty honed his luminous visual style until it approximated his perfectionist's standards. And, crucially, this time he concentrated on a single individual who could stand in for all of Eskimo society. 

The resulting film is not a true ethnographic record. Flaherty's subjects improvised events from their daily lives or from customs of their culture's recent past. (Because he knew Eskimo society so well, Nanook is considered to be ethnographically correct.) Flaherty deliberately chose appealing, rather idealized, people -- even to the point of creating bogus families. The Inuit leader, Nanook, his wife, Naya and their children, Allegoo and Cunayon, are all tremendously appealing. 

Nanook of the North is a documentary milestone because it reveals the filmmaker as much as it does his subjects. Flaherty captured aesthetically what he felt was the essence of Eskimo life --the unrelenting struggle to secure food and shelter. The elemental nature of this struggle was enobling and gave their lives a purity and transcendance. We see this through the prism of Flaherty's romantic sensibility that finds the same timeless beauty in the desolate, unforgiving landscape and in the worn, happy face of Nanook. 

Nanook is composed of vignettes from the lives of a band of Itivimuit people, Nanook, his family and followers. We are introduced to Nanook and family as they humorously pull each other, one by one, from of the interior of a kayak. Flaherty gives us a strong sense of identification with them and participation in their routines. We visit a trading post, get trapped in blocked ice and hunt for walrus, fox and seal. As a child, my favorite episode was the speedy and precise construction of the igloo, complete with window, within an hour; as an adult it is the prolonged struggle with a large seal that is spotted, snared and pulled out of its breathing hole onto the ice plain. 

There seems to be no barrier between Flaherty and the Eskimos. His tenderness to them was obviously returned -- and extends to an audience seventy-five years later. If anyone else has rendered simple, open humanity (in this form) as well as Flaherty, they don't come to mind. The sight of Allegoo smiling into the camera as he savors castor oil -- of all things -- is incredibly touching. He seems to stand in for all children -- the most universal moment of an already cosmic film experience. 

Nanook, himself, is a screen "natural" -- warm, worn, tough and triumphant. He and Flaherty make it possible to put yourself in his shoes. You feel how close we are to our antecedents who either scrapped for sustenance or starved (as Nanook did two years after the films' premiere). Flaherty simultaneously developed a new genre -- the popular documentary -- and created a potent archetype of the "noble savage"that still haunts us. 

Also impressive is the films's ominous lyricism, its precisely-wrought imagery and the rhythm of its storytelling. Nanook's accessibility and timelessness make it worth considering as an introduction for children to either documentary or silent film. 

Flaherty's vision is preserved by Kino on Video's video edition which was restored and produced for them by David Shepard. The tinting is quite subtle, except in a brief shot of ice melting in a pan. Timothy Brock supplied the lovely score. (Review © 1998 Christopher Clotworthy)