Flaherty and Nanook

A word about P.C. - political corentness: The word Eskimo (now taken by some as perjorative) refers to two rather simlar groups of people the Inupiat or Inuit and the Yupik. The current use of the term Inuit as a substitute for Eskimo, is in a sense incorrect since it actually excludes the Yupik. Similar problems occur with the shift from American Indian to Native American (anyone born here?). Native Americans would also include some Inuit/Eskimo (some live in Siberia and some in Greenland) as well as Hawaiians and many Samoans (American Samoa).

Flaherty is seen as the "father" of the documentary, although as we have seen, there were many very short films made by people like Edison and the Lumiere brothers. Nanook of the North is also seen as am "ethnographic film".. There are purists who feel that the film has serious problems for a number of reasons: As a result he is also seen as the father of what has been termed docufiction and ethnofiction. (see later entries like the mini series Roots.

(a) The characters are not playing themselves. Non of the people in the film are using their own names, nor are they in the social relationships they are in the film. Neither of the women was married to Nanook for example but one may have been the common-law Flaherty's common law wife. Some reports indicate he had a daughter by here. Another question has been raised about the openning statement that Nonook died 2 years later of starvation. There is some evidence that he died at home from tuberculosis..

(b) The way of life descibed in the film was not the way of life of the people at that time. Nanook knew about phonographs and hunted with a rifle. The scenes were "concocted" by Flaherty to show a way of life no longer practiced by the people in the film

(c) The shots in the igloo are faked to the degree that the camera could not be brought into the actual igloo nor was there enough light for photographing. A three walled igloo was built for the scenes in the igloo.

Flaherty had a penchant for claiming that the people were often in far worse danger than they were. Some of these problems are discussed in a fairly recent (2010) film about Flaherty called A Boatload of Wild Irishmen.

Problems of reconstructing things. What level os accuracy is there? How well are things remembered?

Like any director of fiction films, Flaherty has a specific interest - largely the way in which the environment impacts the people who live in it. In all of his films (Nanook, Moana, Man of Aran and the Cajuns in Louisiana Story), there is a tendency to look at this problem and the theme prevails.

Flaherty had found that in his inital filming of Nanook, where he had documented the things people did, that the lack of story structure made the film uninteresting. Remember, that the only venue for films at the time were commercial movie houses, so the films would have to play in the same houses where fiction films played

The question that arises (and was raised by cinema verite film makers and others) was just how much deception is there in the film? How can we distinguish a film with a constructed plot, characters who are acted by people from that background, who are doing things people from those cultures no longer do? Flaherty is no doubt something of a romantic in terms of the natuves (something which will upset John Grierson with whom he was friends), but he made compelling films which did a kind of salvage anthropology - getting the people to reenact a way of life that they remebered but no longer practice. In some actual cases natives have revitalized pieces of their own culture in similar ways - but for themselves not for the camera.

While Flaherty always consdidered himself an explorer firs and a film maker last, he did make film which were poetic, interesting, and do capture something of the fell of the people and their culture which was rapidly sluipping away and becoming something else.(compare Nanook with Atanarjuat:The Fast Runner a fiction film made by an Inuit.

While Flaherty was an explorer, there was another - a photographer named Edwin S. Curtis who had been traveling around the US photographing Indians. In 1914 he made a film, also on a Native American topic with a people known as the Kwakiutl (now called Kwakwaka'wakw)., The language is Wakashan (assigned by some to Mosan and ultimately Alginkin although somepostulate a relation with Eskimo. American Indian language familes are complicated and assignment of many languages to specific groups is often contested)

Curtis' film In the Land of the Headhunters (now known as In the Land of the War Canoes, like Nanook, uses actual members of the group - the cast as in NanookNanook depicts a large number of tradition behaviors although more ritual than subsistance levels.

We may ask whether or not In the Land of the Headhunters is in fact as much a documentary as Nanook .