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 f