D.I.Y Filmmaker Broke The Ice

Nanook Of The North by Robert Flaherty was the first feature length documentary film. Nanook ran 79 minutes and was released in 1922. It purported to be a historical record of Inuit from the Frobisher Bay area of larger Hudson Bay, yet ultimately deceived in that role only to achieve cinematic recognition as an intimate portrait of indelible human drama with widespread appeal.Nanook was aesthetically significant and was ground breaking in showing foreign culture in a remote location. What was factual and true was fudged by Flaherty  to produce a visual representation that nonetheless was real and authentic in an artistic sense. Ultimately, the artistic values of Nanook outweigh the historical and anthropological inaccuracies.

Nanook of the North ( 1922)

Nanook of the North ( 1922)

 

 

Robert Flaherty was by profession a cartographer and mineralogist. He was an amateur filmmaker whose first footage of the far North was destroyed by fire in 1914 from an errant cigarette. Nanook was funded by a fur and pelt trading company called Revillon Freres in 1919. The intervening years between 1914 and the new expedition permitted  Flaherty to improve his filmmaking techniques. It is claimed that Nanook influenced Orson Welles to experiment with the documentary form of filmmaking in South America.

Nanook was docu-drama where tangible  elements of the truth were interspersed with a ”story”  that resulted in a high  level of credibility and plausibility. Nanook proved that the documentary format could be equally as manipulative as fiction, where the lines between the two  idioms became blurred.  Soon after filming began, Flaherty understood that the exoticness of the scenario and the  free-spirited nature of his subjects lent themselves to an editing bias that would create a narrative with all the melodramatic trappings of a studio production.There is a parallel in Nanook to later political documentaries such as ”Manufacturing Consent” or the contextual liberties of Michael Moore.

Flaherty’s simple camerawork of basic panning and tilting was underscored and enhanced by the richness of the movement and the surpising degree of action and adventure that arose near  the Arctic Circle. The luminosity of the arctic terrain, basically variations of monocolor, had their luminary qualities enhanced by the black and white footage.The result was captivating and haunting. The Inuit claim 1000 different words to describe the variations of snow and ice and the vitality and indestructability of this environment and its inhabitants served as backdrop to the Nanook adventure. Flaherty was liberated by the restrictions of manufactured sets which made the contrived scenes more realistic and natural than would merit.

Flaherty himself coaxed good performances and won over his ”cast” by avoiding the trap of civilized condescension. He was somewhat of an adventurer himself, with a deep appreciation of the North and as restless and nomadic as the Nanook clan. To appropriate Carson McCullers book title, he exemplified ”the heart is a lonely hunter”. He introduced Jazz music, swing and European opera to the Inuit. The staged scenes could be regarded as innocuous and the deceptive portrayals were distortions but nonetheless captured the spirit. He lacked state of the art cameras and the developping process and editing were carried out under primitive  conditions( done in an igloo), so the falsifications were his only opportunity to modify the environment.

Nanook of The Northght="254" />

Nanook of The North

 

 

Being the first film of this nature, Flaherty had little precedent to guide him and he improvised and instigated his own rules as the shooting advanced. He was originally inspired by new forms of travel films such as the Johnson South Sea Island film but his vision was more poetic and romantic. He eventually lived with one of the Inuit women ,Nyla, and fathered a child with her. Klaboonak, a Canada/France production appeared in 1995, which documented the story of the making of Nanook.

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2 Responses to D.I.Y Filmmaker Broke The Ice

  1. Benjamin says:

    Realy good research, and realy funny to…..

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