Nanook of the North (1922)
A year with an Inuit hunter and his family on the shore of Hudson Bay: building an igloo, spearing seal through the ice, trading fox pelts at the post, waiting out a blizzard. Flaherty staged and re-shot much of it, and the result launched the feature documentary while arguing about its own honesty ever since.
The first documentary anyone lined up to see — and the first argument about where reporting ends and staging begins.
Background
Robert Flaherty filmed Nanook in 1920 and 1921 at Port Harrison on the shores of Hudson Bay, with funding from the fur company Revillon Frères. Nanook, whose real name was Allakariallak, was an Inuk hunter, and the family shown on screen was assembled for the film. It was among the first films to be a commercial success as a feature-length documentary, and it was added to the National Film Registry in its first year, 1989.
What to watch for
Watch it for the sequences that made it famous, including the building of the igloo, the seal hunt and the trading post scene, and remember that Flaherty staged much of it: he asked his subjects to hunt with older tools such as harpoons instead of rifles, and the igloo was built with an open side so the camera could film inside. The term “documentary” was first applied to a Flaherty film, Moana, by John Grierson in 1926. That debate about how much a documentary may stage what it shows is still going on.
