Flaherty's Idealism
|
 Robert
Flaherty loved primitive peoples, he loved their simplicity and their dignity, and the way
they were free to be themselves. He loved the courage and generosity he found absolute in
Eskimo life - Francis Flaherty |
| Flaherty's life exploring the Canadian wilderness instilled in him a respect for the indigenous peoples of the land and, more than that, he came to see the life that the indigenous peoples had traditionally led - the patterns of survival and existance in the conflict between man and nature - as reflecting timeless and universal truths about humanity. He saw in the Innuits the embodiment of a pure, transcendental human nature , an innate essential dignity that the 'civilised' world was in danger of neglecting: |
| The urge
that I had to make Nanook came from the way I felt about these people, my
admiration for them; I wanted to tell others about them |
| Flaherty's idealisation of the Innuit way of life, his emphasis on the 'simplicity' of the image of man as master of nature, sustained by family, has led many critics to label Flaherty a Romantic. A substantial amount of evidence to support such an argument can be found in Nanook of the North such as this intertitle from early in the film. Moreover the temptation to see Flaherty as celebrating the figure of the 'noble savage' is compunded by a Rousseau-like neglect of human evil in the film where the conflicts established are between man and nature alone, the only obstacles Nanook encounters being snow, storms, sea, and wild animals. There is no indication of the threat posed to Innuit culture by the encroaching expansion of Anglo-Saxon influence. |  |
However Francis Flaherty, who was perhaps more involved in the creation of the documentary than most critical histories give her credit for, provides a different perspective on her husband's attitudes and intentions:
| ...because
he made his films of primitive cultures and cultures that are dying, and because he was
not interested in their dying but only in them when they were most alive, he has been
called a romantic and an escapist. Actually what he was deeply concerned within these
pictures of machineless people was the emergence of the machine. What he is saying in Nanook
... is that the spirit by which these people came to terms with Nature is the same spirit
by which we shall come to terms with our machines - that the continuity of history
throughout its changes is written in the human spirit, and we lose sight of that
continuity at our peril. - Francis Flaherty |
| It is clear therefore that Flaherty's attempt to capture this 'spirit' on film derived from more complicated motives than a yearning for a past golden age.Although without an overt desire to influence society Flaherty was promoting a consistent ideal. Some critics looking at Flaherty's relationship with the Innuit community have bypassed questions of intent and read Nanook of the North in terms of the ideological biases it reveals, both imperialist and economic. For Brian Winston for example the film enacts |
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| the universalisation of capitalist relations to other cultures |
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| Perhaps the crucial point about Flaherty's idealisation of the Innuit
life is that he clearly approached the filming of Nanook of the North with certain
preconcieved ideas about the 'spirit' of the people he wanted to communicate to the world.
This led him to eliminate certain elements of reality from the film so that it conformed
to his vision, filming a reconstruction of a traditional way of
life that had largely ceased to exist. While Flaherty's philosophy of film provides the theoretical justification for this treatment of reality, his idealism provides the motivation. |
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