Film: Nanook of the North
Director: Robert J. Flaherty
Country: USA
Released: June 1922
Runtime: 79 minutes
Genre: Documentary
Studio: Pathé
Influenced: John Grierson, Albert and David Maysles, Barbara Kopple, D.A. Pennebaker
In 1913, Robert Flaherty, a geologist, ethnographer, explorer and photographer, made a return visit to the Arctic, specifically the northern coast of Hudson Bay, Canada. He had made friends among the local Inuit community several years before and this time carried a movie camera with him that he used to film aspects of life in the indigenous community. Unhappy with the results, he secured funding and returned seven years later to shoot the first ever feature-length documentary film, Nanook of the North. Released in 1922, it was an immediate hit and created a new genre.
Flaherty’s understanding of Inuit culture allowed him to dramatise lives lived in a harsh and unforgiving environment, an eternal story of human endurance. Despite a lack of villains in the film, it still has moments of real drama and comedy. Flaherty recorded the life of people with a camera and then distilled the meaning in the editing, finding the heroic beauty in simple everyday experience.
He faced some criticism for staging some of the key moments in the film, such as asking his cooperative indigenous cast to use traditional harpoons for a walrus hunt instead of the shotguns they preferred, no doubt to convey a sense of noble savages at work. But it's important to remember that, just like modern documentaries, Flaherty's film aims to portray more than just the bare reality; in addition, its key narrative is how ancestral modes of living are under increasing pressure from the modern world. The film also performed a service of awareness, exposing western audiences to a whole new world.
As one of the film's intertitles explains, the film's main character Nanook (he of the poignant smiling face) sadly died in 1923, while out searching for food for his family in the frozen wastes. For the next decade, Flaherty produced documentary films about New York and the South Seas, and then left Hollywood for the British Isles (at the invitation of filmmaker John Grierson) in the 1930s, where he directed his second masterpiece, Man of Aran, a film depicting the harsh seafaring lives of the men who fished off the west coast of Ireland (again largely staged).
Grierson is believed to be the first filmmaker to use the word “documentary” to describe this new form of moviemaking in a review of one of Flaherty’s South Seas Island films. In a time of financial collapse and rising inequality, Grierson was a pioneer of a new style of documentary film (“the creative treatment of actuality”) and his sister, Ruby Grierson, was also a pioneer in this genre. She had an uncredited role in the groundbreaking film Housing Problems (1935) and a director credit for the wonderful They Also Serve (1940), about the vital role of housewives in wartime Britain.
Comments