by Kimberly Ashanna Kadian Francis
POUGHKEEPSIE- This May, Professor Dana Weidman is traveling to Helsinki, Finland. She will be presenting her paper, “Rethinking Rethinking Nanook of the North”. This paper asserts that “Nanook of the North” is a documentary film and that the controversy over reenacted scenes in the film is outdated and meaningless based on how documentary films are defined today.
Nanook of the North is a silent film made before the first sound film in 1927. It was produced and directed by filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty, an American Film Maker Pioneer who successfully made the first commercial feature-length documentary film in 1922. Flaherty traveled to the Hudson Bay alone and hired locals to film with him, edit the film and develop the film. He also hired locals to act as Inuit hunters, one of which he hired to play Nanook “The Polar Bear”. They had never seen film technology before they began working with him to create this film artifact for American audiences. This film is the first amongst 25 American films to be preserved by the Library of Congress in the nation’s archive making it a historical artifact.
In 1926, John Grierson developed the word “documentary”. He argued that Nanook wasn’t a real documentary because it “ignored the contemporary reality of the Depression and the economic exploitation of the islanders”. Before 1910 the Inuit people made tools with the resources around them and didn’t trade with the outside world. Towards the ending of the film the Inuit people started to integrate in trade which provided guns and stools that the modern world had. Weidman explained that one of the important scenes in the film is observing how Nanook responded to seeing a record player and biting on the record disk (which was metal at that time), for its hardness and thinking of how to use it as a tool due to the lack of abundance of metal in his world at that time.
The film shows how the Inuit people surviving before trading animal pelts with Europeans for metals, is surreal. In the documentary, Flaherty re-enacted moments that shows how the Inuit people ate their food due to little wood for fires or no fire at all which he uses to show viewers the real ways the Inuit people survived during winters. To illustrate this, Flaherty filmed Nanook’s family gathering food for the upcoming winter storm and hunting a walrus for meat, then harvesting the “Blubber” which is needed to make fire or heat to melt water for drinking. Weidman stated that she “truly believed Flaherty was trying to document or portray how the first human beings lived similarly to the Inuit people since the beginning of human beings”.
Professor Weidman states, “Flaherty has Allakariallak reconstruct traditional hunting and fishing methods accurately on camera to show how the Inuit lived for centuries. The Inuit had only been exposed to guns, bullets, knives and the metal tools for a decade. These tools were not used for their traditional methods of hunting and fishing. When Nanook harpooned a walrus or caught a fish – he was doing it on camera. IT’S REAL!!”
Therefore, each semester at the beginning of her class she presents “Nanook of the North” due to the controversies justifying if it is a real “documentary film” because of arguments of dramatized scenes in the film. Professor Weidman argues that “being a filmmaker and a screenwriter, she
