Nanook of the North

Director: Robert Flaherty

Overview

Nanook of the North is regarded as the first significant nonfiction feature, made in the days before the term "documentary" had even been coined. Filmmaker Robert Flaherty had lived among the Eskimos in Canada for many years as a prospector and explorer, and he had shot some footage of them on an informal basis before he decided to make a more formal record of their daily lives. Financing was provided by Revillion Freres, a French fur company with an outpost on the shores of Hudson Bay. Filming took place between August 1920, and August 1921, mostly on the Ungava Peninsula of Hudson Bay. Flaherty employed two recently developed Akeley gyroscope cameras which required minimum lubrication; this allowed him to tilt and pan for certain shots even in cold weather. He also set up equipment to develop and print his footage on location and show it in a makeshift theater to his subjects. Rather than simply record events as they happened, Flaherty staged scenes -- fishing, hunting, building an igloo -- to carry along his narrative. The film's tremendous success confirmed Flaherty's status as a first-rate storyteller and keen observer of man's fragile relationship with the harshest environmental conditions. (In a sadly appropriate footnote, Nanook, the subject of the film, died of starvation not long after the film's release.)

Product Details

Release Date:	03/22/2016
UPC:	0825452519432
Original Release:	1922
Source:	Team Marketing
Language:	English
Time:	1:19:00
Sales rank:	39,853

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Berry Kroeger	Narrator,spoken by
Nyla	Actor
Stanley Silverman	Composer

Technical Credits

Robert Flaherty

Robert Flaherty

Director,Producer,Screenwriter

Editorial Reviews

When Robert Flaherty began shooting this groundbreaking work near Canada's Hudson Bay in 1920, the term "documentary" didn't exist. With NANOOK OF THE NORTH, Flaherty established techniques still employed by documentarians today: He explored a foreign culture by living among its people, then organized the resulting footage into an emotionally involving film. Nanook, whose ever-present smile makes him a natural onscreen, is the father of an Inuit -- or as Flaherty called them, Eskimo -- family, and the film chronicles their day-to-day struggle to find food and shelter in a barren landscape. NANOOK has been criticized because it is not a documentary in the purest sense. Flaherty occasionally manipulated reality for the camera; the building of an igloo, for instance, was partially staged. But as a work of art that captures unforgettably the daily drama of the Inuit fight for survival and the stark beauty of the snow-driven landscape, NANOOK OF THE NORTH cannot be faulted. It remains one of the world's great documentaries.

Barnes & Noble - Ben Wolf

Before Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, filmmakers who had recorded the daily lives of people, starting with the Lumiere Brothers and their famed glimpses of workers leaving their factory, had been casual observers. Flaherty instinctively understood that film audiences loved a good story, and he set out to marry the conventions of narrative cinema with the reality of commonplace life. By choosing a setting of extreme conditions -- the death of Nanook shortly after the film's release only underscored the treacherous conditions of his life -- Flaherty started out with an inherently dramatic foundation. He built on that by asking his subjects, whose cooperation he wooed by screening footage of their work together, to stage scenes for him. The igloo which Nanook, his family, and friends built for Flaherty was larger than normal and contained only three sides, to allow the filmmaker's cameras access to the interior. Critics have charged that this technique compromised the film's authenticity, but, as in all of his major features (Moana, Man of Aran, Louisiana Story), Flaherty was more interested in the general rather than the specific. The truth of these films lies in their faithful rendering of man's relationship to the natural world, and in that regard, Flaherty had no peer.

All Movie Guide - Tom Wiener