A chronicle of Inuit life on the northern Hudson Bay, Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” earned distinction not only as one of the best reviewed and financially successful films of 1922, but also as cinema’s first feature-length documentary. At the time, most nonfiction films, or “actualities,” were simple, short travelogues, and as noted in Current, Flaherty’s original intent was to make a dramatic film that happened to be set in the Arctic. Eventually, however, the film morphed into a hybrid of travelogue and stylized ethnographic study.
In its review, the New York Times lauded Flaherty’s vision and the film’s revolutionary realism, noting that when the audience views Nanook in a “real life-and-death struggle,” the effect is “much more thrilling” than a battle between “two well-paid actors firing blank cartridges at each other!” Life reflected that while the daily life of Eskimos might at first seem dull, the film presents the “terrific struggle” of the hardy Inuits in “absorbingly dramatic fashion.”
Although Flaherty spent 16 months shooting among the Inuits, according to Britannica, the authenticity of some aspects of the film later came under scrutiny. The featured locals were revealed to have been carefully selected by Flaherty for their photogenic looks and were paid for their appearances, and in one hunting scene, the seal prey was already dead, among other fakeries. Despite these revelations, Flaherty is still regarded as the father of the documentary, and “Nanook of the North” still retains its place in film history.
