Nanook of the North

Robert Flaherty

When Robert Flaherty arrived at Inoucdjouac (on the east coast of Hudson Bay) in 1920 to begin making Nanook of the North, he had already com­pleted a doc­u­men­tary of the Inuit five years ear­lier in the Belcher Islands. But the neg­a­tive of the first movie exploded in 1915 when Flaherty let his cig­a­rette get too near it. It is a mark of his per­sis­tence and his char­ac­ter that not only was he pre­pared to do the whole thing over again but that he actu­ally did do it over again, after find­ing the money and the equip?ment and a ship to get him back north. Nanook is now in video, and any­one inter­ested in early pho­tog­ra­phy and moviemak­ing, or in the won­der­ful ambi­gu­i­ties that sur­round the attempts of pho­tog­ra­phers, artists and anthro­pol­o­gists to record the “van­ish­ing ways” of indige­nous peo­ple, should get a copy. It’s still a won­der­ful movie (it takes a minute or two to adjust to the antique titles) and it’s hard to believe that it could ever have been made, given the place and the tech­nol­ogy with which he was work­ing. A com­ple­men­tary film-text appeared this fall on the fes­ti­val cir­cuit in the form of Kabloona, with Charles Dance as Flaherty and Adamie Inukpuk as Nanook. Kabloona is the (some­what trun­cated) story of the mak­ing of Nanook, and is equally as impres­sive in its mak­ing as is Nanook in its. Kabloona offers us an over-the-shoulder look at Flaherty in his cho­sen milieu and answers not too heav­ily some of the ques­tions that we feel watch­ing Nanook: how did they get the cam­era in the igloo, for instance, or: are those peo­ple really one fam­ily? The cen­tre­piece of Kabloona is the futile and absurd 600-mile jour­ney by dog sled that Flaherty insisted on mak­ing in search of a suit­able polar bear. Flaherty processed his film on site, and made a point of show­ing the rushes to the Inuit as the work pro­gressed, so that he might involve them more closely in the mak­ing of a story that they could read­ily see was not “true.” And this prob­lem of truth is pre­cisely what con­fronts us as we watch Kabloona, a movie about a movie that made an implicit claim on real­ity, but which itself, in this self-conscious age, can claim only to be “based on” reality.