Documentary Movie Reviews
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Nanook of the North (1922)
Rate:
2
Viewed:
12/16
12/16:
I had been wary of seeing Nanook of the North for many years because of its notorious reputation as a
fake documentary.
Finally, I mustered enough strength to see it, although I knew the running time would be short, and my fears were pretty much
confirmed. Yep, the whole thing is a fraudulent. Hence, it's safe to say Robert Flaherty was truly the father of mockumentary.
What came to my mind the most every time some action would happen is that there's never a follow-through to ensure
continuity. It's just skilled editing to give the viewers a false feeling of seeing it for real.
One good example of what I'm talking about is the family members climbing out of the kayak. I have to call
bullshit on that because I'm sure the scene was done in a piecemeal with one person being inside the kayak and
then getting out of it before stopping the film to let the next one in and repeat the same procedure instead of doing it all at once.
I wonder if the audience was easily impressed or came away believing the mockumentary at the time. Here are
some of the fake elements that were also incorporated. The male protagonist's name wasn't
Nanook but Allakariallak. The females who played his wives were actually Robert Flaherty's common law wives, and their
names weren't Nyla and Cunayou. One was Alice, and the other's true name remains unknown to this day.
The characters depicted didn't live north of Canada. Allakariallak definitely knew what a gramophone was.
The Inuits stopped the practice of seal- and walrus-hunting long before then. In fact, they did so for good by
going modern with guns and motor-powered boats instead of harpoons and rowing with oars.
When Nanook was shown struggling with the rope, tugging it as hard as possible, from the ice hole to capture the seal, there was
a person on the other end of the line doing the work. The walrus that's being hunted wasn't alive at the point of
kill; it was already dead. The Inuits lived in houses, not igloos, and they wore regular clothes, not furs. During the igloo
scene, it was too dark to film inside the igloo, so a fake igloo had to be constructed in order for the family to pretend to go to
bed during daylight.
None of the shots was produced on first try; everything was repeated until it looked perfect on film. Many of the locals
didn't know how to do the stuff as shown, so Flaherty had an expert brought over to teach them how. Nanook didn't die of
starvation two years after the film was completed. Tuberculosis is probably what did him in.
All in all, Nanook of the North is a classic textbook example of Hollywood Bullshit 101.