An Igloo With One Wall Missing

Robert Flaherty was a prospector and explorer before he was a filmmaker. He spent years travelling in the Canadian north for a mining interest, and on later expeditions he took a camera. That first footage was lost in a fire, and he later judged it no great loss: scenes of this and that, with nobody to follow.

What he wanted the second time was a person. With money from Revillon Frères, a French fur company that traded in the region, he went back to the east coast of Hudson Bay in 1920 and spent more than a year filming a hunter named Allakariallak, whom the film calls Nanook. Nanook of the North opened in 1922, did well, and is still the film most often named as the first feature-length documentary.

Much of it was arranged.

By then the Inuit around the trading post hunted with rifles. Flaherty had Allakariallak hunt with a harpoon, the older way. The women presented on screen as Nanook's wives were not his wives. The scene in which he puzzles over a gramophone and bites a record is staged, and plays a supposed innocence of the modern world for laughs. And the famous igloo is not one anybody lived in. A real one was too small to get a camera into and too dark to expose film in, so a larger one was built and cut in half, open on one side, and the scenes of the family waking and dressing inside it were performed in daylight for the lens.

Set out as a list, this sounds like a fraud, and the film has often been called one. That verdict misses two things.

The first is what the staging was for. Flaherty was not trying to show the trading post. He was trying to show the way of life the trading post was replacing, and the only way to film a practice people no longer relied on was to ask them to perform it. It was reconstruction, and the people in front of the camera took part in it. In Flaherty's own account he developed his film in a hut on location and screened it for the people in it, who took to the project and proposed scenes of their own. Staging with your subjects is a different thing from staging behind their backs.

The second is the word itself. In 1926 John Grierson, reviewing Flaherty's next film, Moana, in the New York Sun, wrote that it had documentary value, and the form took its English name from his usage. Grierson later defined documentary as the creative treatment of actuality. The man who named the form never pretended it was a recording. Treatment was in the definition from the start.

So what is wrong with Nanook, if anything?

Not that a hunt was performed. The problem is that nothing on screen tells you so, and that a reconstruction of the recent past is presented as a timeless present. The audience is shown people outside history, untouched and eternal, rather than hunters with rifles who traded furs at the post of the company that, as it happens, paid for the film. A single title card would have made the arrangement honest. Without one, the film makes a claim it could not support.

That distinction is the one this book keeps using. Every film in it was arranged somewhere. The useful question is never whether staging happened. It is what the film claims, and whether the audience could have known.