The Great Movies III

The movie shows Nanook during a few weeks in the life of his family. Countless details fill in a way of life that was already dying. We see the hunters creeping inch by inch upon a herd of slumbering walruses, and then Nanook springing up and harpooning one, and then a fierce struggle in which the mate of the walrus joins the battle. Such scenes simplify Inuit life to its most basic reality: in this land the only food comes from other animals, which must be hunted and killed. Everything the family uses-its food, fuel, clothing, and tools-comes in some way from those animals, except for the knives and perhaps harpoon points, which they obtain at a trading post. They are a luxury; before there were trading posts, there were already Inuit.

One of the film's most fascinating scenes shows the construction of an igloo. Nanook and his friends carve big blocks of snow and stack them in a circle, carving new ones from the floor so that it sinks as the walls rise and curve inward to form a dome. Then he finds sheets of ice, cuts holes in the igloo walls, and inserts the ice to make windows. There is another igloo, a smaller one, for the dogs. And inside the big igloo, the tiniest igloo of all, for puppies, which the big dogs would quickly eat.

Nanook has a small son named Allee, and a baby, Rainbow, four months old; they travel inside the hoods of their mothers. There are scenes of unstudied grace and love as his wives, Nyla and Cunayou, care for the children, the children play with the puppies, and the whole family strips to crawl under their furs, which act as blankets for the night. There are also moments of hazard, as they are nearly lost in a sudden snowstorm, and times of great hunger and desperation. These are suggested in the film, but became real in the aftermath: Nanook, lost in a storm, died of starvation two years after Flaherty filmed him.

Flaherty (1884-1951), born in Michigan, traveled in northern Canada with his father as a young man, then returned as a scout looking for iron ore. He took along a camera and shot some footage of Eskimos, which was destroyed by fire. That inspired him to return and shoot a proper film, financed by a French fur-trading company. He took along a generator, developing equipment, and a projector; after filming the walrus hunt, he wrote:

I lost no time in developing and printing the film. That walrus fight was the first film these Eskimo had ever seen and, in the language of the trade, it was a "knock-out."The audience-they thronged the post kitchen to the point of suffocation-completely forgot the picture. To them the walrus was real and living. The women and children in their high shrill voices joined with the men in shouting admonitions, warnings and advice to Nanook and his crew as the picture unfolded on the screen. The fame of that picture spread through all the country.... After this it did not take my Eskimo long to see the practical side of films and ... from that time on, they were all with me.

The film is not technically sophisticated; how could it be, with one camera, no lights, freezing cold, and everyone equally at the mercy of nature? But it has an authenticity that prevails over any complaints that some of the sequences were staged. If you stage a walrus hunt, it still involves hunting a walrus, and the walrus hasn't seen the script. What shines through is the humanity and optimism of the Inuit. One of the film's titles describes them as "happy-go-lucky," and although this seems almost cruel, given the harsh terms of their survival, they do indeed seem absorbed by their lives and content in them, which is more than many of us can say.

Flaherty went on to make more sophisticated films, notably Tabu (1931), an uneasy collaboration with the great German filmmaker F. W. Murnau, who was more interested in story and style than documentation; Man ofAran (1934), about the hard lives of the Aran Islanders off the coast of Ireland; Elephant Boy (1937), starring Sabu in a fiction based on a Kipling story; and Louisiana Story (1948), in which a young bayou boy watches as an oil rig invades his unspoiled domain.' he later films are smoother and more conventionally beautiful, but Nanook stands alone in its stark regard for the courage and ingenuity of its heroes. Nanook is one of the most vital and unforgettable human beings ever recorded on film.