I studied Nanook of the North in class last year too and in reviewing some of the texts thought others might find the information helpful in placing to film in context. Its making and reception are really an interesting and perplexing story in themselves. If interested, read on. All quotes are from Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film by Erik Barnouw.
Nanook of the North is considered the first feature-length documentary, and as such will always be an object of fascination.
The project began while Flaherty was was working as a prospector for a Canadian railroad company---a career which quickly brought him fame as an explorer. When it was suggested he bring a camera on his expeditions, he took a three-week cinematography course and began shooting Inuit life in 1914. "The film activity, begun casually, soon became an obsession that almost obliterated the search for minerals."
By 1916 Flaherty had edited a film---all 30,000 feet of which fell victim to a stray cigarette. Flaherty risked his life trying to salvage his work and was hospitalized for severe burns.
But with characteristic enthusiasm, as indicated in the opening sequence, Flaherty decided the accident must have been for the best and began planning to reshoot. He spent an additional four years fundraising before gaining adequate funds from the Revillon Frères fur company.
"The full collaboration of Eskimos had already become the key to his method … Some [of them] knew his camera better than he did: they could take it apart and put it together--and did so, when the camera fell into the sea and had to be cleaned piece by piece."
The main character was truly a famed hunter of the Itivimuit tribe, but his real name was Allakariallak. In addition to changing his name, Flaherty created a family for purposes of the film. Allakariallak (hereafter Nanook, for simplicity) had unbound zeal for the "aggie," or film. It was he who generated idea of staging a walrus hunt as had been done in earlier days of the tribe.
"Suppose we go," Flaherty said to him, "do you know that you and your men may have to give up making a kill, if it interferes with my film? Will you remember that is the picture of you hunting the ivuik that I want, and not their meat?"
"Yes, yes," Nannok replied. "The aggie will come first."
In this interesting way, the subjects became actors and collaborators in the staging of their own lives.
They worked in temperatures so cold at times the film shattered. One scene recommended by Nanook--a polar bear hunt--was unsuccessful and the journey home brought the group near starvation. They used film to kindle fire--an interesting symbol of their mutual struggle for survival, and for the film.
Filming inside an igloo proved too dark and so they built an enormous, oversized igloo to shoot. Still finding light inadequate, they sheared off one side---and so in the scenes Nanook and his family rise and go to sleep, they are doing this in freezing air, for the benefit of audiences.
Flaherty struggled to find a distributor (one said "the public was not interested in Eskimos; it preferred people in dress suits") but once the film was taken up by Pathé it was an instant success. The film even became a Broadway song, with a chorus of:
Ever-loving Nanook,
Though you don't read a book,
But, oh, how you can love,
And thrill me like the twinkling northern lights above…
When traveling in Berlin years later the Flahertys found a smiling image of Nanook on the wrapper of an ice-cream sandwich.
Even as late as 1964, at the Mannheim film festival, when asked to select the greatest documentaries of all time, filmmakers from across the world chose Nanook of the North more than any other.
Flaherty is said to have captured the grammar of fiction film for documentary.
Interesting in context of the discussion last week is a certain guilt and romantic motivation on the part of Flaherty.
Early in his life he saw the American Indians who "sometimes came to his mother's kitchen for food and warmth, were a pitiful lot, bearing the marks of civilized disease, including alcoholism."
"When Flaherty first met Eskimos, he saw the same deterioration at work. But as he went further north, where contacts with explorers, prospectors, and entrepreneurs had been less extensive, he had glimpses of what seemed an earlier nobility. On this he riveted his attention. He had reasons for doing so.
One was a growing sense that he himself represented the cultural destruction that troubled him. … Flaherty did not come to grips with this inner conflict; he relentlessly avoided it, in Nanook as in most other films, by banishing the intruder from the world he portrayed. Flaherty wrote:
I am not going to make films about what the white has made of primate peoples …
What I want to show is the former majesty and character of the people, while it is still possible--before the white man has destroyed not only their character, but the people as well.
The urge that I had to make Nanook came from the way I felt about these people, my admiration for them; I wanted to tell others about them."
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