Nanook of the North (1922)

As Robert J. Flaherty was writing the rules of what we today know as the documentary, he was also breaking them.

In his 1922 film “Nanook of the North,” Flaherty set out to document the lives of a family of Eskimos in northern Canada and returned with a remarkable, artful and emotionally charged film rivaling anything in Hollywood.

And yet modern studies of the film have questioned its authenticity. When Nanook is seen kayaking through a lake with layers of broken ice, where is the cameraman standing? When he hunts a seal but we never actually see it being killed with a spear, did the production crew just shoot it behind the gauze of editing? How much else of the film is orchestrated if Flaherty achieves breathtaking horizon shots that look like they belong at the end of “The Seventh Seal?”

These questions matter little when watching “Nanook of the North,” because the film’s central story has a touching narrative of character and survival. If he bends reality a bit through editing and staging, that’s an understandable casualty of making a good film.

He starts with such a simple conceit, and yet someone had to first come up with it. Flaherty explains in intertitles at the start of “Nanook of the North” that a fire destroyed all his footage after one voyage north, and on his second pass he would now focus in on just one character, not all 300 Eskimos living in an area the size of England. It sounds like such an obvious tactic, but imagine how different documentary films would be if someone hadn’t put that idea down on paper. This is pivotal, revolutionary filmmaking at the dawn of cinema.

In the process of narrowing his focus, Flaherty’s film is at times riveting, informative and plain adorable. The camera lingers on young toddlers playing with puppies for no reason other than it is humane and precious. This is not even Nanook’s actual child, but these kids are not actors, they are not being given instruction, but they are real and they are cute as a button.

Flaherty’s next challenge is in determining just how much to tell the audience. How much can the camera speak for itself when providing educational background? At one point along Nanook’s journey across the frozen tundra, his family stops for the night and proceeds to build an igloo for shelter. Without explanation after the structure is complete, Nanook cuts a square sheet of ice from a lake and places it on the sidewall of the igloo. Flaherty trusts his camera to help us complete the legwork to figure out why he’s doing this, and before long we realize he intends to use the ice as a window, removing a same size block from the igloo to provide space for it. Both Nanook’s procedure and Flaherty’s are brilliant in their own ways.

Today when something stretches reality, we know better. Unless Tom Cruise is really up on that building in Dubai, most movie stunts are precisely that. Flaherty may have greased Nanook’s sleigh a little, but he really is hunting a pack of walruses, he is biting the head off a freshly caught fish, and he really is being dragged along the ice by a seal just underneath the water (for what it’s worth, some animal loving audiences may find “Nanook of the North” hard to watch at times).

This film was a documentary when the term had not yet been coined (it would be around 1926), and it feels more real than most movies then or today.