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| Allakariallak in Nanook of the North |
Today, Nanook of the North would have to be called a "docudrama," or a re-creation of a faded actuality. The real Inuit of 1922 were a lot more conscious of technological advances than Nanook's biting of the phonograph record would suggest. In fact, they regularly viewed the footage that Robert J. Flaherty was filming of them. They had already begun to integrate modern clothing with their traditional garb of skins and furs, and they carried rifles along with knives and harpoons. A cutaway igloo was constructed because Flaherty couldn't film inside a traditionally closed structure, ice window notwithstanding. The tug-of-war with the seal under the ice was faked: The seal was already dead and Nanook's struggle with it was staged by men off-camera pulling on the rope. Nanook himself is a fiction: An actual Inuit hunter named Allakariallak played him, and the wife and family who accompanied him were not really his own. And despite the title card announcing that Nanook starved to death, Allakariallak seems to have died of tuberculosis. Still, is there a more fascinating portrait of a vanishing culture than Flaherty's film? Not only does it give a credible account of what life must have been at one time for the Inuit, it also gives us insight into the nature of documentary filmmaking in its formative years. Its great popularity at the time of its initial release tells us something about the hunger of audiences for knowledge of a world they had never been able to see before except through lantern slides and the narratives of intrepid travelers -- most of whom had their own imperialist designs. Flaherty had the taste and sense not to see the Inuit as exploitable resources -- something he would be guilty of later in his career when he made Louisiana Story (1948), a paean to the petroleum industry funded by Standard Oil -- but rather as a culture to be valued for its own strengths.
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