NANOOK OF THE NORTH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 475, 30 July 1948, Page 16

NANOOK OF THE NORTH

(Flaherty) HEN I first saw Nanook (in the early ’twenties) I was too young to retain any detailed impression of it, and until.a few days ago all that I could recall of this earliest of all documentaries was a vague memory of unending vistas of ice and snow. The knowledge that I had seen one of the greatest one-man films ever made but could remember nothing worthwhile about it annoyed me for years, whenever the subject of Robert Flaherty or Eskimos came up, and though it never exactly reached the dimensions of a frustration complex I was more than glad when the Wellington Film Society invited me to renew acquaintance with Nanook the other evening. The print which the Society has acquired is a good one-but in almost every way the film ‘has worn well. Familiarity with the documentary approach may rob us of some of the excitement which Nanook must have aroused in the intelligent filmgoer of 25 years ago (I think in particular of the effect of this and other Flaherty films on John Grierson), but it is still impossible not to be impressed by what Flaherty ‘accomplished single-handed-under unusually trying conditions-and by the skill with which he selected and edited his material. For all its episodic structure, Nanook is a good story, and a meaningful one. ; But is it a true story? When the film was revived in London just about a year ago, one English writer resurrected a criticism of it made in 1927 by the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Writing in his book The Standardization of Error, Stefansson attacked the film as being untrue to fact in several respects. Since Hudson’s Bay Eskimos had been well supplied with firearms ever .since the days of the American Revolution, it was inaccurate, said Stefansson, to show Nanook and his friends using primitive harpoons to capture seal and walrus. Further, no real Eskimos ever huntéd seals through the ice, as Nanook is shown doing in one of the most exciting episodes of the film. Eskimos, Stefansson went on, were no more capable than other\human beings of eating vast quantities of oil and blubber, and the interior of an igloo is not cold enough to make the breath condense unless it has been cut in two to make a movie shot. Since Stefansson probably knows more, about the Eskimo than any other living white man, one would be something more than rash to try and answer him on his own ground, but Nanook is hardly intended to be a scientific document. In Grierson’s phrase, . it is an example of the creative treatment of reality. The theme ofthe film is man’s struggle against hunger in a particular environment and Nanook is, in a sense, a composite Eskimo. If the Hudson’s Bay Eskimos hunt with firearms, we have it on Stefansson’s own authority that the Coronation Gulf Eskimos two or three decades ago had

never heard of them. And if, as Stefansson has pointed out elsewhere, more than half the Eskimos in the world have never seen a stiow hotise, that fact would not of itself refute Paul Rotha’s statement that "the screen has probably no more simply treated yet brilliantly instructive sequence than that in which Nanook builds his igloo." $ Uninhibited by any considerations of scientific accuracy, I enjoyed every moment of the film, but I did notice that there was no!ground at all for the oil-and-blubber criticism. Neither Nanook nor any of his numerous dependants is seen eating blubber alone at any time and Flaherty explicitly states in one of his lengthy sub-titles that when it is used for food it is "used much as we use butter. The famous battle which Nanook has*with the harpooned seal may be a fake, but in that case both Flaherty and Nanook deserve some congratulation for making a thoroughly convincing performance Of it. If a sour note can be detected: in Stefansson’s criticisms, there is nothing sour in Flaherty’s picture. It is warm in its understanding of primitive humanity and has a quality of dignity which unfortunately is almost as rare in films to-day as it was when Nanook was made‘a quarter of a century ago.