Unlike Grierson, Flaherty did not leave behind him a comprehensive body of theoretical writing. Instead, for an understanding of his ideas about the nature and purpose of documentary film, we must rely upon a few remarks recorded by his wife, and those who knew him. This comparative lack of primary sources, combined with the almost mythical status that has been accorded to Flaherty as a pioneer of the documentary form, has unfortunately led to a certain amount of distortion. At the centre of the Flaherty mythology is the idea of the 'found story', most frequently described by Flaherty as the tenet of 'non-preconception'. According to Francis Flaherty her husband approached his art as he approached his life: as an explorer.

She quotes him saying:		Flaherty in 1928
	All art is a kind of exploring ... To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.
From the position of artist as explorer the idea of non-preconception is seen to be central:
	Non-preconception is the pre-condition to discovery, because it is a state of mind. When you do not preconcieve, then you go about finding out. There is nothing else you can do. You begin to explore.

Thus, so the myth goes, Flaherty's film-making is primarily about observation, finding the story that already exists in the life of the people and simply recording it. According to Paul Rotha and Basil Wright, contemporaries of Flaherty and Grierson in the development of documentary film, Flaherty's approach to filmmaking is to be compared to that of the Eskimo sculptors in its qualities of acute observation and the practice of allowing of material to shape its own meaning

The carver never attempts to force the ivory into uncharacteristic forms, but responds to the material as it tries to be itself , and thus the carving is continually modified as the ivory has its say

The notion of the raw material of art (the ivory or the Innuit people) 'having a say' in the process of transforamtion into a work of art is indeed relevant to Flaherty's work since it was his practice to make use of suggestions from Nanook and others about the content of the film and to show the daily rushes to the community. However the romantic idea, perpetuated by Grierson among others that Flaherty was gripped by

a near mystical belief in the camera’s power of sight

believing the camera to be free from the subjectivity of the director to record things for what they were, is much more contentious. For Grierson

No eye was clearer, nor, for that matter, more innocent

and his close association with Flaherty means that his words must be given due weight but two points belie this image of Flaherty as a cinematic Wordsworth finding sermons in the snow.

Firstly, as an examination of his idealism reveals, Flaherty was no 'innocent eye'. Though Nanook of the North was not conceived of as a tool for social change in the same way Grierson saw Drifters, Flaherty's preconceptions about humanity and culture led him to alter in his film the physical and temporal reality: changing what he found to produce a cinematic confirmation of his own values.

Secondly Flaherty's experience with the Harvard print had taught him the importance of imposing a structure upon the chaotic flow of reality - it was simply not good enough to let the story develop from the people

It was utterly inept, simply a scene of this and scene of that, no relation, no thread of story of continuity whatever, and it must have bored the audience to distraction. Certainly it bored me.

The fallacy of the found story is that the presence of the film maker alters the culture being observed but more than that, Flaherty himself was conscious of the need for narrative, for a dramatisation of reality to involve the audience in the film. His second attempt at filmmaking which produced Nanook of the North marked a transistion from the picturesque to the dramatic.

Rather than revolting against the idea of planning a shot or manipulating the scene Flaherty's philosophy might be best summed up be his comment that

Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing in order to catch its true spirit.