Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922)
https://www.youtube.com/embed/lkW14Lu1IBo
Comment: 'Nanook of the North' (1922) might be best categorised as a 'docudrama' rather than a documentary because of its use of staged elements. The film is criticised for being a case (example) of what is known as 'salvage ethnography' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_ethnography, which involves the exploitation of Indigenous culture and artefacts in the service of perspectives and agendas of colonisation. Scene: staged 'awaking/morning' scene, which was filmed in an igloo with the roof removed (to compensate for low light conditions and the limitations of available film stock): https://www.youtube.com/embed/lkW14Lu1IBo?start=2944&end=3170 Scene: this scene (of a family of 5 fitting into a single-person kayak) is perhaps more a curiosity than anything else (and perhaps, is more a 'construction/fabrication' than an example of authentic Inuit travelling/transport practices): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkW14Lu1IBo&t=299s Criticism: "The seminal 1922 silent documentary presented itself as a seemingly observational portrait of an Inuk man, Nanook [whose real name was Allakariallak], and his family and their way of life in the frozen north of Canada as they hunt and survive on the tundra. ... Despite being a work widely acknowledged to be actively built on lies sold as authenticity, the achievements and legacies of its enduring aesthetic make it impossible to ignore, despite the disgusting implications of its content. It's that very conflict that renders the film all the more reprehensible, together with the acknowledgment that Flaherty himself, in defense of his own work, stated, '... one often has to distort a thing in order to catch its true spirit'" (Piron, A., 2022). Discussion: "Fatimah Tobing Rony's The Third Eye and Catherine Russell's Experimental Ethnography are critical explorations of the history of ethnographic cinema. The Third Eye hones in on the 1920s and 1930s, a time when salvage anthropology was the norm and the visual depiction of 'vanishing' cultures typically sought to erase any sign of the modem world. For Rony, the term Ethnographic (she often capitalizes the word) signals a mode of filmic representation evident in documentary travel films, educational films, colonial propaganda films, and commercial films. She is aware that many visual anthropologists, such as Jean Rouch and David and Judith MacDougall, have written critical accounts about the relationship between histories of colonialism and imperialism and the institutional practice of visual anthropology. Rony is for the most part uninterested in engaging in these debates. She does not address the politics of participatory cinema, the question of how film and video supplement written texts, or how a fuller use of visual media might require new conceptualizations of just what constitutes anthropological knowledge. Rather, her aim is to explore how marginalized peoples, the very subjects of Ethnographic modes of representation, have engaged and spoken back to the pervasive 'racialization' of indigenous peoples in popular, scientific, and commercial films" (Litzinger, R., 2008). Further: "Goldie,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._F._Goldie New Zealand’s old master (or Norman Rockwell,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Rockwell depending on your perspective), was a very popular painter of Māori subjects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During the latter part of the twentieth century, Pākehā (non-indigenous) New Zealanders became ashamed of Goldie and what they had come to see as his sentimental and stereotypical paintings of the Māori as noble savage on the brink of disappearance. He actually titled one of the paintings, 'The Last of a Dying Breed.' During the 1990s, curators discovered that Māori, particularly those who identified their ancestors in the paintings, did not view them as shameful, but rather as taonga, as sacred treasures--indeed, as their ancestors." (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B., 2005, pp.6,7). Bibliography: Ballengee, C. (2025). 'Framing the Arctic: Nanook of the North (1922) in the Digital Borderlands'. New Horizons in English Studies, 10. https://journals.umcs.pl/nh/article/view/19566 https://journals.umcs.pl/nh/article/download/19566/pdf Litzinger, R. (2008). 'The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle; Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video'. American Anthropologist, 102, 608-610. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2000.102.3.608 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (2005, 28 April 2004). 'From Ethnology to Heritage: The Role of the Museum Among Others', Encounters and Conflicts in European and Mediterranean Societies, Marseilles. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238714489_From_Ethnology_to_Heritage_The_Role_of_the_Museum Piron, A. (2022, 20 October 2022). "The 100-Year Stain of 'Nanook of the North'". International Documentary Association. https://www.documentary.org/feature/100-year-stain-nanook-north
