Nanook of the North
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Nanook of the North is a silent documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty, released in 1922. In the tradition of what would later be called salvage ethnography, Flaherty captured the struggles of the Inuit Nanook and his family in the Canadian arctic. The film is considered the first feature-length documentary, though Flaherty has been criticized for staging several sequences and thereby distorting the reality of his subjects' lives.
Romanticism
With Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North in 1922, documentary film embraced romanticism; Flaherty went on to film a number of heavily staged romantic films, usually showing how his subjects would have lived 100 years earlier and not how they lived right then (for instance, in Nanook of the North Flaherty does not allow his subjects to shoot a walrus with a nearby shotgun, but has them use a harpoon instead, putting themselves in considerable danger).
Staging
Some of Flaherty's staging, such as building a roofless igloo for interior shots, was done to accommodate the filming technology of the time. In later years, attempts to steer the action in this way, without informing the audience, have come to be considered both unethical and contradictory to the nature of documentary film. On the other hand, both the story line and content of any documentary are imposed by the filmmaker.
