In the early 1920s, just as the age of “heroic” polar exploration was ending, a landmark chronicle of natives on Quebec’s Ungava Peninsula brought the Far North back to “civilization”. But this self-glorifying act of anthropological salvage, much like a self-important nature-study, exalted its maker’s pioneering spirit and technological prowess while making its subjects, from a predominantly oral culture, seem all the more animalistic.

More docudrama than documentary, Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North (A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic) begins, in his intertitled “Preface”, with the movie’s brave I: “This film grew out of a long series of explorations . . . I carried out . . . with only two or three Eskimos as my companions.” But it is also keenly self-aware of the camera’s brave new eye on the world. “After a lot of hardship,” the director declares, and “wintering a year . . . [three of us] got out to civilization along with my notes, maps, and the films.” Then, after the negative burned, he saw “that if I were to take a single character and make him typify the Eskimos . . . the results would be well worth while.” Flaherty even showed “my character and his family” some of these “results” so that they “could understand and appreciate what I was doing.” And yet his main man did not get it: “Poor old Nanook hung around my cabin, talking over films we still could make . . . He never understood why I should have gone to all the fuss and bother of making the ‘big aggie’ [referring to the Akeley cameras, i.e., the film] of him.” Nanook “starved to death” but Flaherty’s picture “has gone into most of the odd corners of the world” and so many have “looked upon Nanook, the kindly, brave, simple Eskimo.”

In this prelude’s romantic, imposing, white narrative of bravery and discovery, there is the contrast between the bold, intrepid Flaherty behind the camera and the humble, addled “Eskimo” captured by it. There is the slip from “my character” to the pitiable yet somehow now-real “Nanook” (posthumously preserved, as if in ice—it is Flaherty’s made-up character, Nanook, not the real man playing him, who never lived and so cannot truly die). There are the contradictions of having the star-subject see himself on-screen to appreciate the project only for him to then plan more films even as he still does not comprehend, apparently, why he has been filmed (though he seems to have referred to the cameras with casual, insider lingo). And film-exploration itself, a marker of “civilization”, is opposed to pre-modern Northern natives often masked, not revealed, by Flaherty—the Eskimo Nanook was played by an Inuk, Allakariallak. In this Self (Flaherty the observer, objectifying) vs. Other (Nanook and family, the observed racial subjects) ethnographic set-up, Nanook and his people are set apart and cut off by the film, left behind as oral-fixated semi-humans in the wild. And by prefacing the film with Nanook’s death, Flaherty casts his hero in a tragic light, enhancing the viewer’s pity, only to then suggest his film is more important than its protagonist or the Inuk actor playing him . . . and, sure enough, the picture sparked, as scholar Asen Balikci later coined it, “Nanook mania” in many countries (“Eskimo pies”—soon called “Nanooks” in some places, as Georges Sadoul notes—were trademarked that year).

Flaherty’s work seems to merge travelogue and industrial-life study, two popular genres in film’s first two decades. But in what instead becomes a(n Arctic) nature-(pseudo)documentary—critic Fatimah Tobing Rony dubs it “ethnographic taxidermy”—Nanook is drawn closer to man’s best friend than to us humans watching. Over and over, he and his fur-swaddled family, associated with biting and chewing, are dog-like. One intertitle notes “the wolf—his forebear”, as if fierceness and animalism were bred into Nanook; Flaherty then cross-cuts between close-ups of a snarling wolf and Nanook, with friends and family, killing and biting into seal meat. Nanook’s little son Allegoo and a friend are shown tearing away into a seal flipper, tug-of-warring the meat between their mouths, right before some of it is fed to Nanook’s dogs. And in the story’s dramatic climax, the huskies delay the Eskimo family as it grows dark, imperilling them on the chill barrens. At

film’s end, just before “the little family” is safely ensconced in an igloo and falling asleep, lying together under animal skins while their dogs are huddled outside, amid moaning, ominous music, we are told that “[t]he shrill piping of the wind, the rasp and hiss of driving snow, the mournful wolf howls of Nanook’s master dog typify . . . the melancholy spirit of the North”.

Much of the film’s presiding spirit is actually corporate: Flaherty got backing from Revillon Frères, a French fur company (noted on the film’s title card), and a trading post is shown benefiting the natives, with the furs it sells protecting Nanook and his family. (The critic—and, later, groundbreaking documentary-filmmaker—John Grierson remarked that Flaherty’s work “was in the first place an advertisement for furs, though it appeared in theatres all over the world as a straightforward epic of Eskimo life”.) At the post, where the trader personifies European superiority—he is in control of technology, commerce, and medicine—soon after Nanook “proudly displays his young ‘huskies’”, Nanook’s wife Nyla, “not to be outdone, displays her young husky, too – – one Rainbow, less than four months old”. The baby’s shown sitting naked on fur pelts, petting husky pups. Soon, his father Nanook is puzzling over a gramophone before he bites a record (not once but thrice), even though many Inuit knew of gramophones already and the actor, Allakariallak, apparently knew how to fix gramophones. Next, the children eat lard given to them by the trader but

son Allegoo apparently indulges himself and gets sick (he is fed castor oil by the trader and promptly licks his lips before and even while smiling at the camera). Over and over, we behold utterly ignorant (but meant to be cute?)

and noble savages who, husky pup-like, know through touch and taste. Or perhaps they are less than canine-like—would a dog ever bite a record? Nanook is marked out as clearly uncivilized and uncomprehending of the audio-visual. And these native people’s mouths are not even associated with story-telling (such as, say, the legend of Atanarjuat, passed down through the generations and re-told on film in 2001 by Zacharias Kunuk).

Nor is this Northern people’s orality linked to physical affection—Nanook’s polygamy is skirted around (second wife Cunayou is rarely shown). According to Rony, though, an Inuit whose father was Allakariallak’s friend said the two women playing Nyla and Cunayou were “common-law wives of Flaherty”; another story has it that the director had an affair with lead actress Alice Nuvalinga (Nyla), whose son he never acknowledged. So this absent yet presiding-over-all white man’s paternalistic tone (“the most cheerful people in all the world—the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo”) seems bitterly ironic, especially since, when Nanook and his comrades requested Flaherty’s help during the walrus hunt, asking him to use a gun to shoot the creature, not the camera, he pretended not to hear, hiding behind the pretense of objective detachment, and kept filming to get them to kill the old way. The godlike, removed outsider-director looked on while his dressed-up native subject re-enacted passé ways of hunting for his image-capturing technology, all for a faraway, truly civilized and appreciative audience.

When most of the cold-weather cast is introduced—Nanook, son “Allee”, wives Nyla (and her baby) and Cunayou, and the dog Comock—they keep emerging from one kayak, one by one by one by one (anticipating the clown-car routine by three decades). Nanook paddles up to a rocky shore and keeps the craft fairly steady so that it stays in shot for the tripod-camera to capture this comic moment, with Cunayou smiling away for the lens after she disembarks and Nanook seeming to smile as he puts the husky pup onto the ground (Nyla, “The Smiling One”, has already been shown embodying her name in a close-up). The audio-visual, framing all, is progressively, supremely modern and human; its docudrama subjects’ orality is always animal: “Nanook,” we are told, means “The Bear”, while

“Eskimo” was an outsider’s term, meaning “flesh-eater”, with its implication of cannibalism. When we first witness him hunting, “Nanook, overjoyed at the sight of food once more, kills the big [fish] with his teeth”; he and others eat some walrus right after the kill and later, wolfishly, that seal meat. He is shown licking a knife, over and over, to better cut blocks of snow for an igloo; later, “Nyla chews Nanook’s boots to soften them”. When mother rubs

her child’s nose—“the Eskimo’s kiss”, it is explained—the act now seems little different from a dog nuzzling her young. And when fur-swaddled Nanook and family, half-baby- and half-canine-like, emerge from the kayak or from the igloo (adding to the childish man-dog similarities is the fact that Nanook makes an igloo for the husky pups, too), it is as if they are emerging from a mouth—being spit up for our on-screen amusement. Allakariallak

never talks for his other self, both because Flaherty’s film is silent and its intertitles speak only about, not on behalf of, Flaherty’s Eskimo protagonist. Thus Nanook of the North ventriloquizes for a figment of noble-savage Other-ness. Only 90 years later was Flaherty’s film justly redubbed, when Inuk throat-singer Tanya Tagaq—as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s retrospective “First Peoples Cinema: 1500 Nations, One Tradition”—sang live over the film, remaking it in the sound of her people, the land’s true pioneers. Such vocal reclamation, as Tagaq noted, means not only revising but re-envisioning: “I remember being really, really embarrassed and annoyed when [I saw Nanook] biting on the record. And there were a couple of scenes like that where I’m embarrassed and annoyed . . . that’s why it’s great to sing over it.”

Works Cited

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Directed by Zacharias Kunuk, Odeon, 2001.

Balikci, Asen. “Anthropology, Film, and the Arctic Peoples.” Anthropology Today, vol. 5, no. 2, April 1989, pp. 4-10.

Gordon, Holly. “Inuk Throat Singer Tanya Tagaq on Reclaiming Nanook of the North [sic]”. CBC.ca, 25 January 2014. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/inuk-throat-singer-tanya-tagaq-on-reclaiming-nanook-of-the-north-1.2508581.

Grierson, John. “Propaganda Film Technique.” Kinematograph Weekly, 18 December 1930, p. 35.

Nanook of the North (A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic). Directed by Robert Flaherty, Pathé Exchange, 1922.

Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Duke UP, 1996.

Sadoul, Georges. Dictionary of Films. 1965. Translated, edited, and updated by Peter Morris, U of California P, 1972.

The author, a professor of film studies, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All film stills are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.