Nanook of the North (1922)

Director:

Robert J. Flaherty

Writers:

Frances H. Flaherty (idea)
Robert J. Flaherty (writer)

Release Date:

11 June 1922 (USA)

Genre:

Documentary

Tagline:

A story of life and love in the actual Arctic.

Plot:

Documents one year in the life of Nanook, an Eskimo (Inuit) and his family. Describes the trading, hunting...

Plot Keywords:

Inuit | Eskimo | Kayak | Snow | Igloo

Awards:

1 win

Cast

Allakariallak	...	Nanook (as Nanook)
Nyla	...	Herself (Nanook's wife, the smiling one)
Cunayou	...	Herself (Nanook's wife)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Allee	...	Himself (Nanook's son)
Allegoo	...	Himself (Nanook's son)

Also Known As:

Nanouk l'Esquimau (France)
Nanook do Norte (Brazil) [pt]
Nanook, o Esquimó (Brazil) [pt]
Nanook, pakkasen poika (Finland) [fi]
Nanuk l'esquimese (Italy) [it]
Nanuk, der Eskimo (Germany) [de]
Nanuk, el esquimal (Spain) [es]
Nanuk, o Esquimó (Portugal) [pt]

Runtime:

79 min

Country:

USA | France

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Silent

Certification:

Portugal:17 (original rating) | Portugal:M/6 (DVD rating) | Canada:G (Manitoba/Nova Scotia/Québec) | Canada:PG (Ontario) | Germany:6 | Spain:T | UK:U (re-release) (1947)

Filming Locations:

Hudson Bay, Québec, Canada

Company:

Les Frères Revillon

Trivia:

All of the scenes are staged. The woman who plays Nanook's wife was not his actual wife.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)

Powerful and memorable even after 80 years!

Years ago, in high school, I had to sit through a creaky, dim and dirty, silent black and white documentary about some Eskimo. I remember nothing of the film except that I didn't like it. Today, I had the opportunity to see a recently restored and nicely scored re-release of that film: Nanook of the North. After all the National Geographic, Nova, PBS and Discovery Channel documentaries I have seen over the years chronicling the lives of aboriginal bands of people, (aboriginal people often wearing Coca-Cola T-shirts and baseball caps), this classic 1922 epic is the best I've ever seen showing a happy people working desperately to survive in an incomprehensibly harsh environment. It is quite a compliment to the film and its subject that it retains so much power almost 80 years after it was created. The film simply documents a small group of Inuit and their children in northeast Canada as they struggle to live from day to day. That these people survive at all, let alone remain a seemingly happy, life-loving team in such a place is mind-boggling. So many of the brutally realistic scenes in this wonderful film remind me of how sterilized many contemporary documentaries have become. We see the necessary brutality of finding, stalking and killing your food. Then slicing up your kill right there on the ice and eating it where it died. We witness Nanook harpooning and then `reeling in' a walrus, catching fish with no hook and no real bait and somehow knowing where to dig a tiny hole in the ice. Then, through that tiny hole, he spears and battles to bring in a seal. And he succeeds. But more than the environment and more than the struggle, what keeps us watching this film is character. Nanook is the chief of the small tribe and the father in the main family that is followed. He is smart, curious, inventive, determined and, at the core, a happy, gregarious character that we learn to laugh with, root for and celebrate with as he keeps his family fed. His children are an absolute delight, playful and endearing, seemingly oblivious to the awful world in which they live. The film seems to have no artifice at all and everything seems to be a regular part of their life with little attention paid to the camera. If you are a lover of the documentary form, you cannot miss this re-release. It appears to have been struck from a near pristine negative and restored to its original length of somewhere over 65 minutes. The pleasant score is not too obtrusive and sounds as though it may be a reconstruction of the score composed for the theatrical re-release of the film in 1939, but the credits aren't completely clear on that. See this film.