To be honest, it was difficult for me to finish or let alone watch the ethnographic documentary based on the indigenous Inuit people of Canada’s northern Quebec region, Nanook of the North (1922). Yes, the kids were super cute and the dog as well, but the obvious staging, and silence turned me off from the first 10 minutes.

This week’s reading by Fatimah Tobing Rony uses the metaphor of a taxidermy to describe ethnographic documentary as what is dead is made to looks alive. Indeed, director Robert J. Flaherty manufactured this world as if the indigenous Inuit people and culture were becoming extinct and as if positions us – the privileged audience – to sympathise to these characters.

Flaherty defends his film in saying that “one often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit”, so what extent can a documentary film be considered truth if the truth itself is distorted or misrepresented? In fact, Cunayou and Nyla aren’t actually Nanook/Allakariallak’s wives but were Flaherty’s romantic and sexual partners in real life, and Nanook actually uses a gun to hunt but was directed by Flaherty to use a spear instead.

Sure, it’s considered a film beyond its time, but the Inuit culture and people are misrepresented and are used for those who are are being used by people such as Flaherty to gain a huge profit and disregard the truth. They are humans too who live their own lives accordingly and shouldn’t be treated as if they were animals at a zoo – or in this case some taxidermy.    

References

Tobing Rony, F. 1996, “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North”, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, pp. 99–126.

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