Film
February 3rd 2010
Nanook worth another look
Nanook of the North
Directed by Robert Flaherty, 1922
79 minutes
Plays at the Cinematheque Friday, Feb. 5 at 8:30 p.m., featuring a live score with Nathan Reimer and Inuit throat singer Nikki Komaksiutiksak
Nanook paddles to shore in a kayak stuffed like a clown car. A kid rides on top, the hull houses two adults, a baby, Nanook and even a husky puppy.
Considered to be the first feature length documentary, Robert J. Flaherty’s 1922 silent film Nanook of the North is entertaining and informative, even though the action is staged and exaggerated.
A great hunter and patriarch of his Inuit family, Nanook is constantly on the verge of starvation as they travel around the eastern side of Hudson Bay in search of food.
Funded by French fur company Revillion Freres, watch amazed as Nanook kills fish with his teeth, harpoons a walrus when he would regularly use a gun and supposedly kills seven polar bears all by himself.
Traveling many miles every day checking traps and hunting by dogsled, Nanook builds a igloo nightly. With swift cuts from his walrus tusk knife and the film slightly sped up, the abode is done within the hour.
These great feats sensationalized the “Eskimo” and must have impressed audiences of the day with images of a foreign culture inaccessible to them before.
As part of the arctic film festival In The Shadow Of The Company, the screening at the Cinematheque will be accompanied by live instrumentation and a live score by Nathan Reimer (Moses Mayes, LeBeato) and Inuit throat singer Nikki Komaksiutiksak.
This review appeared in Volume 64, Number 18 of The Uniter, published February 4th 2010.
