This week we watched a film that has been on my watchlist for years: Nanook of the North, one of the first feature-length documentaries (then called “actualities”), and an early example of the ethnographic film. I was already aware before watching it that the film had been reevaluated in light of the fact that Robert J. Flaherty, its director, was not merely following Nanook to observe him and in actual fact many of the scenes were contrived or wholly made-up for the purposes of filming (and Nanook was, in fact, a man named Allakariallak).

The worst of these is a scene in which Nanook is surprised and delighted by a gramophone record being played by a white trader (and which Nanook tries to bite), when in fact Allakariallak had seen gramophones before and was only acting. This scene is not only inaccurate, it actively encourages the stereotype that Inuit people were stupid and backwards. And there are, apparently, many other instances of scenes being concocted by Flaherty, like Nanook hunting with spears and knives when in fact by the 1910s and 20s his people were using guns for hunting.

My Criterion Collection DVD of the film has an extended 1960 interview with Flaherty’s wife and editor, Frances, who not only goes along with the fiction that they were accurately capturing the traditions and practices of Inuit peoples (whom she called “Eskimos”), she goes even further to “confirm” things that absolutely aren’t true (like that Nanook died of starvation soon after filming).

Strangely, I think if the film were made today no one would bat an eyelid that Nanook was portrayed by an actor and his demonstration of hunting methods was a re-creation. We live in a post-Errol Morris/Werner Herzog world where it’s relatively common knowledge that documentary is not, and can never be, a truly accurate representation of “the real”, and people are generally pretty forgiving of a filmmaker who deliberately instigates actions to appear in film (just ask Joshua Oppenheimer and The Act of Killing).

I see Flaherty’s actions in filming Nanook as similar to an ethnomusicologist recording the traditional folk songs of a culture at risk of being lost, or an anthropologist preserving the conversations of people using a dead language. Those people may be asked to “perform” those songs or their language in order for it to be recorded, and it wouldn’t be preserved through natural observation alone, but I don’t think that necessarily invalidates the resultant recording. I like the idea of “taxidermy” from this week’s reading¹ — a genuine dead animal looks deflated and gross, so to accurately show the way the animal looked in life one must “enhance” its appearance artificially.

Flaherty was just 60 or 70 years ahead of his time. The benefit that our society gets from being able to see Nanook of the North and its portrayal of Inuit culture overrides, in my opinion, the “dishonesty” Flaherty displayed in order to capture it, although I wish he hadn’t gone out of his way to portray Nanook/Allakariallak and his people as regressive.