2 REALISM
Nanook of the North Robert J. Flaherty (1922) Canada
Flaherty, Robert J. Nanook of the North. Pathé Exchange, 1922.
Realism in film indicates the attempt to capture or present real events. The process of filmmaking requires framing, reconstruction, and often reenactment. This is the story of the making of Nanook of the North. This book begins with this story because it illustrates the tension of filmmaking and the difficulty of attempting to capture the historical moment.
Nanook of the North introduces concepts addressing the depiction of Indigenous People, Documentary Filmmaking, Colonialism, a filmmaker with a Colonialist Perspective, and Neo-Realism.
In 1910, Robert J. Flaherty set off to the Canadian North to become a miner and prospector, like his father. The Canadian Railroad was being built at that time to transport wheat to the Hudson Bay. On his third expedition, Flaherty took a film camera with a portable printing and developing machine and some lighting equipment. Before he left, he traveled to the Eastman company in Rochester, New York to take a three-week photography course. Over the next three years he filmed the Inuit people in the Hudson Bay and their vanishing lifestyle.
In 1916, he was editing his film in Toronto, when he dropped a cigarette on the celluloid, and 30,000 feet of footage burst into flames. Flaherty was badly burned. In the hospital, he told his wife, Frances, that his film was a travelogue: people, sleds, dogs, and igloos. It wasn’t a story.
He was determined to return to Northern Canada to make a film that would present the perspective of an Inuit person and bring American viewers into this world.
A Filmmaker’s Perspective
Documentary filmmakers sometimes need to reorganize reality for greater truth. Even the most austere Cinema Verité documentarians need to move the camera and sometimes ask their subject to re-enact action so that it can be captured on film. Barbara Koppel may not have told strikers to stop so she could get a better shot, but one can assume that there were moments where D.A Pennebaker asked Bob Dylan to wait before getting out of the car, so that he could set up his camera.
The camera was a mechanical device in Flaherty’s time. Today, it’s an electronic device that needs to be turned on and set up to capture reality. In Nanook of the North, a partial igloo was built to show the inside of what would be a dark space when it was completed. Scenes of the igloo construction were edited to show the construction of the exterior and the ice window before the cozy interior is presented on screen. In fact, the scenes were not filmed in this sequence and are edited to present the experience of the Inuit home. This is the process of filmmaking and editing. The use of reconstruction and re-enactment in Nanook of the North raised questions about the authenticity of this film.
Nanook of the North debuted more than one hundred and years ago. It was the first feature length non-fiction or documentary film. The filmmaker, Robert J. Flaherty, used dramatization techniques including the creation of a main character and some staged scenes to present the challenges of life in the Arctic Circle to audiences in the modern world of the 1920s. This decision to structure a non-fiction story with Inuit actors created a controversy that has come to eclipse and distort how contemporary students understand the accomplishment of this early filmmaker.
Flaherty began filming Inuit people in Northern Canada a decade earlier. After his first attempt to tell the story of the Inuit of Northern Canada was destroyed, he reconsidered his process of filming the people he encountered. He determined that if he was able to raise the funds to return to the Hudson Bay region, he would find an Inuit man and follow this individual through a series of obstacles to tell a story that would bring contemporary audiences into the perspective of an Inuit hunter trying to survive. As Flaherty made plans to return to the Hudson Bay region, European traders were bringing guns and knives into the area to trade for animal pelts. Inuit hunters who had survived for generations, perhaps even thousands of years using only hand-made tools, were able to access metal tools and particularly firearms.
The world that Flaherty would document in his film was disappearing as he was making plans to return. Then World War I began. This made his search for funding more difficult. In 1920, the French Fur company Revillon Freres bankrolled his expedition with $500 per month, $13,000 for equipment, and $3,000 for expenses.
Excerpt from: “How I Filmed Nanook of the North” by Robert J. Flaherty
My equipment included 75,000 feet of film, a Haulberg electric light plant and projector and two Akeley cameras and a printing machine so that I could make prints of film as it was exposed and project the pictures on the screen so that thereby the Eskimo would be able to see and understand wherever mistakes were made.
Nanook, a character famous in the country, was my chief man. Besides him and much to his approval, I selected three younger men as helpers. This also meant their wives and families, dogs to the number of about twenty-five, their sledges, kayacks, and hunting impedimenta.[1]
In his memoir, Flaherty explains that the Inuit people he selected to work on his film, were not simply players but collaborators. He trained them to use the cameras and developing and editing equipment. He returned to Northern Canada to film through the perspective of an Inuit man and gained an Inuit crew to help him more accurately tell this story.
An accident changed the direction of this filmmaker and introduced innovation in storytelling. The term documentary would be termed a few years later by Scottish filmmaker, John Grierson, referring to Flaherty’s film, Moana. Grierson wasn’t sure that the term could be applied to Nanook of the North because Flaherty had to recreate scenes of traditional Inuit hunting. This indecision began the great controversy.
Allakariallak, portrayed Nanook, and worked with Flaherty and the crew to present traditional Inuit hunting and fishing techniques in the film. Even though, the Inuit were no longer limited to tools made solely from stone, bone, and tusk.
Nanook of the North presents the traditional life of Inuit people filmed during the historical moment when they were shifting away from handmade tools to guns and knives imported from Europe.
In Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, Jeffrey Geiger presents John Grierson’s challenge to the authenticity of Flaherty’s film, in his article, “Fiction, Truth and The Documentary Contract.”[2]
One hundred and one years after the release of this film, concerns about authenticity detract from the simple fact that this film artifact presents the world and culture of Indigenous people at the turn of the Twentieth Century, as they wanted to present their lives and culture. Flaherty describes the walrus hunt and how the Inuit responded to seeing film for the first time in “How I Filmed Nanook of the North.”
Excerpt from: “How I Filmed Nanook of the North” by Robert J. Flaherty
As luck would have it, the first film to be made was the walrus hunt. From Nanook, I first heard of the “Walrus Island,” which is a small island far out at sea and inaccessible to the Eskimo during the open water season since it is far out enough so as not to be seen from land.
On the island’s south end, a surf-bound beach, there were, in summer, Nanook said, many walrus, judging from signs that had been seen by a winter sealing crowd of Eskimo who, caught by a breakup of the ice, had been forced to live there until late spring, when, by building an umiak of driftwood and sealskins and by digging out the open water lands of ice which had not yet cleared from the coast, they succeeded in getting on to the mainland. Nanook was very keen about my going, for, as he said, “It is many moons since I have hunted the summer walrus.”
When I had decided upon taking the trip the whole countryside was interested. There was no lack of applicants for the trip. Everyone gave me some particular reason why he should be included in the expedition.
With an open-seas boat twenty-five feet long rigged with a leg-o’-mutton sail we started, a throng of Eskimo, their wives, children and dogs assembled on the beach to see us off.
A few miles from the Post we reached the open sea when for three days we waited on the coast for easy weather in order to undertake the crossing. We finally reached the island one day at nightfall, and landed on what was nothing but a low waste of bed rock and boulders a mile and a half long and the whole of its shoreland ringed with booming surf. Around the luxury of a driftwood fire (driftwood is rare on the mainland) we lounged far into the night, speculating mainly on what chances there might be for walrus.
As luck would have it just as we were turning in, from Nanook suddenly came an exclamation “Iviuk! Iviuk!” and the bark of a school of walrus resounded through the air. When early the next morning we went over, we found much to our disappointment that the walrus herd had gone into the sea again but presently one after another and near the shore the heads of a big school of walrus shot up above the sea, their wicked tusks gleaming in the sun.[3]
Contemporary students are familiar with films that create alternative worlds populated by imaginary characters using computer generated imagery that looks very real. This documentary filmmaker traveled in an open boat across the North Atlantic to film a walrus hunt in 1920. To suggest that this film is a fake, misrepresents how the action was captured on film over a hundred years ago. This was a real hunt, an animal dies. It’s exciting and heartbreaking to watch as the walruses fight to survive, just as the Inuit hunters kill to survive.
The Roots of Neorealism
Film students are taught that Italian Neorealist filmmakers began creating narrative films using non-professional actors in realist settings, telling socially conscious stories after World War II. The neorealist style was celebrated by film scholars and film societies. Satyajit Ray screened Bicycle Thieves at the Calcutta Film Society and began considering how he could use similar techniques to make a film in rural India. Ousmane Sembène used similar ideas to make Le Noire de… (Black Girl) about a Senegalese woman working as a domestic servant in Antilles. Neorealist films tell fictional stories, with characters, scripted dialogue, and directed action, but they are viewed as an accurate and truthful portrayal of the struggle of working people living in poverty.
Nanook of the North can be viewed in this context. A case can be made that Flaherty’s documentary is the first use of neorealist techniques in film storytelling. Flaherty’s innovation in Nanook of the North brought viewers into the point of view of one character to empathize with him rather than ogle at his foreign culture.
Flaherty explains his process of filming the walrus hunt in “How I Filmed Nanook of the North” :
I mounted the camera and Nanook, stringing his harpoon, began slowly snaking over the crest. From the crest to where they lay was less than fifty feet and until Nanook crawled to within half that distance toward them none took any alarm. For the rest of the way, whenever the sentinel of the herd slowly raised his head to look around, Nanook lay motionless on the ground. Then when his head drooped in sleep, once more Nanook wormed his way slowly on.
Nanook picked out the biggest bull, rose quickly and with all his strength landed his harpoon. The wounded bull, bellowing in rage, his enormous bulk diving and thrashing the sea (he weighed more than 2,000 pounds), the yells of the men straining for their lives in their attempt to hold him, the battle cry of the herd that hovered near, the wounded bull’s mate which swam in, locked tusks, in an attempt to rescue—was the greatest fight I have ever seen. For a long time it was nip and tuck—repeatedly the crew called to me to use the gun—but the camera crank was my only interest then and I pretended not to understand. Finally Nanook worked the quarry toward the surf where he was pounded by the heavy seas and unable to get a purchase in the water. For at least twenty minutes that tug-o’-war kept on. I say twenty minutes advisedly for I ground out 1,200 feet of film.[4]
Flaherty admits that there is a gun. He chooses not to use it, even though the men are yelling and begging. Instead, he continues filming and requiring the Inuit hunters to kill the walrus with traditional methods, the harpoon. This is realism; a document of a historic walrus hunt. Hunters, at that precise moment in history, had guns. Many would have used guns. But, just as men hunt deer with bow and arrows today, these men at that moment used traditional methods to hunt that walrus. To suggest that this was a fake because it presented the use of traditional Inuit hunting methods from the previous decade is misleading to contemporary film students.
When he returned to the camp, he developed the film of the hunt and presented it to the Inuit hunters. It was the first film they ever saw. They were shocked by the reality of the walrus on screen. Word spread through the community and members of adjacent villagers came to view the hunt.
Excerpt from: “How I Filmed Nanook of the North” by Robert J. Flaherty
They snow-walled my little hut up to the eaves with thick blocks of snow. It was as thick-walled as a fortress. My kitchen was their rendezvous—there was always a five-gallon pail of tea steeping on the stove and sea biscuit in the barrel. My little gramophone, too, was common property.
The difficulties of film development and printing during the winter were many. That convenience of civilization which I most missed was running water. For instance, in the film washing, three barrels of water for every hundred feet was required. The water hole, then eight feet of ice, had to be kept open all winter long and water clotted with particles of ice had to be taken, a barrel at a time, from a distance of more than a quarter of a mile away.
My food outfit comprised one hundred pounds of pork and beans which had been cooked in huge kettles at my post and then put into a canvas bag and frozen. These beans chopped out with an axe from the frozen mass along with dried fruit, sea biscuit, and tea comprised my food supply. Nanook and his companions’ diet was seal and walrus augmented by tea and sugar from my supply and, most important of all, tobacco, that most valued of the white man’s treasure.
We departed on a bitterly cold day—the 17th day of January—every profile of the landscape blurred with drifting snow. For two days we made good progress, for the traveling ground was hard and well packed by the wind. After that time, however, a heavy gale with falling snow wrecked our good going. Day after day we slowly made our way along. Ten miles or less was an average day’s travel.
The great land mass of the Cape rising a sheer 1,800 feet stood out boldly before us. By nightfall we reached our treasure land of bear and seals and plenty. We halted before the rise of an old campground of Nanook’s, and, abandoning sledge and dogs, climbed eagerly to a vantage for the welcome sight of the seal grounds. We gazed there a moment or so before we realized that the seal ground we looked out upon was like all the barren ground we had traveled—a solid white field and not a seal-hunting lane of open water anywhere.
For four days, at one time, we had no seal oil and our igloo was in darkness. The dogs were utterly weak and slept in the igloo tunnel. Whenever I had to crawl out of doors, I would have to lift them to one side like sacks of flour, for they were too weak and indifferent to move away. The irony of it all was that bears there were everywhere; four of them had passed within a thousand feet of our igloo one night, but the dogs were too weak to bay them or bring them to a stand. My own food supply was nearing its fag ends. For days past I had been sharing it with the men.
I will never forget one bitter morning when Nanook and his men were starting off for a hunting day on the ice fields at sea. I suddenly discovered that none of them had touched my food at breakfast time. When I remonstrated with Nanook he answered that he was afraid I might be short!
Our luck turned that day at nightfall, however, when Nanook crawled into the igloo wearing a smile from ear to ear, and shouting the welcomed words “Ojuk! Ojuk!” (the big seal). He had killed a big seal that was “very, very large” and enough for us and dogs for all the long trail south to home again.
What a feast those men had through that memorable night! When it was over, said Nanook in deep content, “Now we are strong again and warm. The white man’s food has made us much too weak and cold.” The flesh of seal is certainly warmth-giving to the greatest degree. When I awakened the next morning, all of them were still asleep, their bodies were covered with hoar frost and vapor lay floating over them in the cold igloo air.
Though the problem of our food supply was now solved, we were still not able to travel, for the dogs needed feeding up. During this interval we hunted along the gigantic flanks of the cape for signs of bear dens. Tracks there were everywhere, but of dens only one and that one had been abandoned. Had we had the time to spare, it would have been only a matter of days before we would have found one, but I had a great amount of filming to do at my winter post and more time could not be spared, so reluctantly enough we left the Cape and started off on the down trail for home.
We arrived there on the tenth day of March, and so ended the six hundred miles and fifty-five days of our Nanook’s “big picture” journey.[5]
It would be difficult to call a project that required six hundred miles of travel over ice, with starving dogs and nothing to eat but frozen pork and beans for fifty-five days a fake. John Grierson’s query of 1926 should be laid to rest. A film that included early neorealist dramatizations stands today as an accurate portrayal of a lost culture. It is an attempt by a non-native filmmaker working with Indigenous people to accurately tell their story before their culture is erased.
The film was released by the French distributor, Pathé. It opened on June 11th, 1922 in New York and was a huge success.[6]
In his time, Flaherty was criticized for being too sentimental and for using reenactment and dramatization. This film lasted because Flaherty brought viewers into the point of view of the Inuit hunter and presented Allakariallak and his family with empathy.
Nanook of the North is a documentary film that uses reenactment and dramatization to show the experiences of Inuit people surviving in the arctic climate. Train to Busan is a fictional film about how a little girl survives a zombie apocalypse in Korea. Both fictional and non-fictional films convey cultural values through their depictions of characters and how those characters overcome obstacles.
Robert Flaherty begins the film with text on title cards. These cards tell the story of how the film was made and how he collaborated with Allakariallak, the Inuit man who portrays Nanook. Nanook of the North was released before the electronic technology to add sound to film was developed. It was made before the development of color film.
Robert Flaherty used a mechanical camera and chemicals that made the celluloid film react to sunlight to create a negative image. Then using the negative film, which was edited to tell the story, a positive film was created and distributed to theatres.
Lighting for Nanook of the North was provided by the sun. Sound recording technology would require electricity to transduce acoustical energy into electronic energy which could be transported, altered and eventually stored. The transduction device is a microphone. Microphones had been developed and recordings made and played back using a Victrola. In Nanook of the North, Nanook listens to a record on a wind-up Victrola. Electricity was not available in the Arctic. Sound had not been successfully used in film production when Robert Flaherty began and even completed this project. The first talkie, a film with sound was The Jazz Singer, released in 1927.
The music in Nanook of the North would have been performed live in the theatre by a pianist or organist to convey the emotion in the film.
Robert Flaherty’s Text on Screen
This film grew out of a long series of explorations in the north which I carried out on behalf of Sir William McKenzie from 1910 to 1916. Much of the exploration was done in journeys lasting months at a time with only two or three Eskimos as my companions. This experience gave me an insight into their lives and a deep regard for them.
In 1913 I went north with a large outfit. We wintered on Baffin Island, and when I was not seriously engaged in exploratory work, a film was compiled of some Eskimos who lived with us. I had no motion picture experience, and naturally the results were indifferent. But as I was undertaking another expedition. I secured more negative with the idea of building up this first film.
Again, between explorations. I continued with the picture work. After a lot of hardship, which involved the loss of a launch and the wrecking of our cruising boat, we secured a remarkable film. finally after wintering a year on Belcher Islands, the skipper, a Moose Factory half-breed, and myself got out to civilization along with my notes, maps and the films.
I had just completed editing the film in Toronto when the negative caught fire and I was minus all. The editing print, however, was not burned and was shown several times – – just long enough to make me realize it was no good. But I did see that if I were to take a single character and make him typify the Eskimos as I had known them so long and well, the results would be well worth while.
I went north again, this time solely to make a film. I took with me not only cameras, but apparatus to print and project my results as they were being made, so my character and his family could understand and appreciate what I was doing. As soon as I showed them some of the first results, Nanook and his crowd were completely won over.
At last, in 1920, I thought I had shot enough scenes to make the film and prepared to go home. Poor old Nanook hung around my cabin, talking over films we still could make if I would only stay on for another year. He never understood why I should have gone to all the fuss and bother of making the “big aggie” of him.[7]
Nanook of the North begins with actual text on the screen to tell the story of how the film was made. Other films in this course will be used as texts, examined and understood, using the film, images, dialogue, and music.
- “How I Filmed Nanook of the North” by Robert J. Flaherty, Geduld, Harry M. Film Makers on Film Making. Indiana University Press, 1967. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/93942. From The World’s Work, XLIV (September, 1922), pp. 553-60 ↵
- Geiger, Jeffrey. Fiction, Truth and The Documentary Contract. Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. W.W. Norton & Company. London. 2005, pp. 125-127. ↵
- “How I Filmed Nanook of the North” by Robert J. Flaherty, Geduld, Harry M. Film Makers on Film Making. Indiana University Press, 1967. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/93942. From The World’s Work, XLIV (September, 1922), pp. 553-6Enter your footnote content here. ↵
- “How I Filmed Nanook of the North” by Robert J. Flaherty, Geduld, Harry M. Film Makers on Film Making. Indiana University Press, 1967. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/93942. From The World’s Work, XLIV (September, 1922), pp. 553-60 ↵
- Geduld, Harry M. Film Makers on Film Making. Indiana University Press, 1967. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/93942. From The World’s Work, XLIV (September, 1922), pp. 553-60 ↵
- 2. Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. 2nd Revised Edition. Oxford University Film, Oxford, 1974, pp. 33-41. ↵
- Flaherty, Robert J. Nanook of the North. Pathé Exchange, 1922. ↵