Robert J. Flaherty’s *Nanook of the North* (1922) — The Public Domain Review

Nanook of the North: A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic opens with backstory: Flaherty’s past travels, the previous film’s incineration, his new ambition to “take a single character and make him typify the Eskimos as I had known them so long and well.” The film begins in motion, placing the viewer within the point of view of an explorer: an out-of-frame ship deck dandles the camera lens, as ice floes drift below a dark escarpment. The intertitles set the scene for Nanook’s introduction — a man untroubled by the corrupting influences of civilization. “The sterility of the soil and the rigor of the climate no other race could survive; yet here, utterly dependent upon animal life, which is their sole source of food, live the most cheerful people in all the world — the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo.” The scenes that follow are less narrative, more slice-of-life. Nanook makes a fire from moss, prepares his kayak for a hunt, harpoons a walrus, visits a trading post, builds an igloo, displays his husky pups, and travels across vast, featureless tundra. Modernity almost never intrudes. When a trader attempts to explain a gramophone to Nanook, how “the white man ‘cans’ his voice”, he joyously attempts to taste the record. Audiences at the time probably laughed. Today, the scene flickers with a kind of multimodal irony. Nanook tries to ingest the frozen voice of a gramophone record. Watching, we consume the likeness of an Inuk on screen. Both the viewer and viewed are dealing with media’s traces (emulsion layers, grooves), trying to reconstruct the absent whole from a partial inscription.