Filming Nanook of the North
 he seldom
let truth get in the way of a good story -Richard Barsam |
The Staging of Reality
in Nanook of the North
| Filming Nanook of the North |
Making Nanook of the North Flaherty shot hundreds of thousands of feet of
film. Technically innovative, his emphasis was on cinematography rather than editing,
preferring long focus lenses over short focus to preserve the illusion of actual spatial
arrangements. However for the film to conform to Flaherty's vision he employed more than
creative camera work, planning shots, asking Nanook and Myla to repeat their actions
several times to cover the activity from several angles and generally organising the
action around the camera rather than film a 'found story'. As one critic summarised,
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The best example of this tendancy in Nanook of the North is the lengths to which Flaherty went to film two scenes with Nanook and his family apparently in their igloo. Flaherty tells the story himself in his diary:
| The
average Eskimo igloo, about 12 feet in diameter, was much too small. On the dimensions I
laid out for him, a diameter of 25 feet, Nanook and his companions started to build the
biggest igloo of their lives…The light from the windows proved inadequate, however,
and when the interiors were finally filmed the dome's half over the camera had to be cut
away, so Nanook and his family went to sleep and awakened with all the cold out-of-doors
pouring in. |
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| This fakery is compounded the by intertitle that precedes the scene which states that 'the temperature within the igloo must be kept below freezing to prevent the dome and walls from melting'. The families breath is clearly visible on screen (although the quality of the digitised clip makes it hard to see here) and so Flaherty must justify this incongruity with another lie - in fact the inside of igloos remain comfortably warm even when the temperature outside is far below freezing. | |
Like the constructed igloo, the seal hunt in Nanook of the North is an event staged for the camera. It is, in the first place, a misrepresentation of the reality of Innuit life that Flaherty knew not only because more sophisticated weapons than the spear Nanook is shown using had been the norm for several generetions amongst the Innuit, but also because, according to an accepted authority on the Arctic
| No real
Eskimo ... ever hunted seals through the ice in the manner shown in the picture. - Professor Stefansson |
Furthermore what seal hunting did take place would only be done in dark
winter not,as in the film, when sun is at its zenith. Finally the structure of the
sequence of shots, showing Nanook as he struggles for a long time before he succeds in
pulling the creature to the surface and the audince can see it is seal, is another example
of the dramatisation of events, the creation of suspense to
engage the audience, in which Flaherty is constantly engaged. 