Nanook of the North celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. The movie, directed by Robert Flaherty, is the first recognized documentary in movie history, although critics didn't coin that term until later. While the movie is problematic, as the director staged parts of the movie, it still set the stage for documentaries that arrived in its footsteps.
In actuality, there were documentaries before Nanook of the North. The short movies by Thomas Edison were real-life events brought to life on the big screen. However, for telling the true stories of people in a narrative format, Flaherty was an innovator, directing Nanook of the North (1922), Moana (1926), and Man of Aran (1934). It all started with Nanook, where Flaherty told the story of a man and his family in the Canadian Arctic.
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Nanook of the North was a documentary-styled film released in 1922 about a man named Nanook and his wife and family as they survived in the Canadian Arctic. Viewers see Nanook involved in survival situations that fans of reality television shows like Naked and Afraid might recognize. However, these situations were not real. Nanook used hunting tools that were outdated because it was what his ancestors used. The ice was real, and the cold was real, but the hunts were all staged. It is not a real documentary by today's standards, but many consider it the grandfather of all documentaries. This is because the techniques and narrative devices used by Flaherty became commonplace for documentary filmmakers for the next 100 years.
Flaherty did not originally intend for Nanook of the North to be a documentary. On a special feature on the Criterion Collection DVD of the movie, Flaherty's widow said her husband wanted the movie to receive a commercial distribution, and he wanted to make it a narrative film to achieve this goal. Therefore, unlike many documentaries that came later, Flaherty is not a part of this story at all.
In his book, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, Erik Barnouw revealed Flaherty began filming his movie in 1914, focusing on Inuit life in Canada. He felt his movie looked like a travelogue and made changes. Instead, he told a story of a man and his family and showed how they lived their lives. However, he didn't set up his cameras and show them living their lives as they normally would. Instead, Flaherty sent the man, called Nanook, on staged adventures. He wanted to show him on a walrus hunt, even though the method they used ended when the explorers arrived. He even told him not to kill the walrus if it interfered with the making of the movie, and those are the sort of instructions he gave to make Nanook of the North more entertaining, even if it made it less realistic.
One of the most celebrated scenes from the movie was Nanook building the igloo. However, the igloo was not big enough, so Flaherty had a larger one built to make it look better on film. It took two decades of Flaherty exploring in Canada and almost 10 years of filming, but he finally finished the movie for a 1922 release. It wasn't an easy sell, though, as five production companies turned it down, saying no one would want to watch it. However, the Pathé organization agreed to distribute it, and Flaherty's movie launched the genre of documentary filmmaking.
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Nanook of the North was a critical success when it hit theaters. Thanks to the positive critical accolades, it was also a box office success. However, for its legacy, people still discount it for its lack of authenticity. The lead character's real name wasn't Nanook, it was Allakariallak. He wasn't really married to the woman portraying his wife, but it was instead Flaherty's wife in the role. Nanook also normally used a gun to hunt, but Flaherty insisted he used a spear, which would look better for the story he was telling.
Regardless, it set other documentary filmmakers off intending to replicate Nanook of the North's success. Flaherty made Moana four years later, but it was a box office failure. In 1926, Léon Porter released the French film The Black Cruise, which followed a car trip from the northern to the southern reaches of Africa. Like Nanook, this was another explorer as documentarist filmmaking endeavor, but by the 1930s, these movies went out of style.
While Nanook of the North is not a true documentary as fans know them today, it was still instrumental in how a documentarian makes a film. While expected to be true to life, and Nanook wasn't, movies today still set up situations and decide what to leave in and what to cut. People see what the directors want them to see and receive the lesson the filmmakers intend. That is what Robert Flaherty did with Nanook of the North, and that is the lesson filmmakers still take from his film 100 years later.