Python Hyena Nanook of the North (1922): Dir: Robert Flaherty / Cast: Nanook, Nyla, Allee, Allegoo: Early documentary about one factor surviving in a difficult climate with full details given to the audience viewing this film. It highlights the lifestyle of an Eskimo family headed by the friendly Nanook. We witness him hunt and fish as well as slay a walrus, and preserve his findings whether food or clothing. There is also an interesting scene involving the construction of an igloo. Done in great detail with ice inserted as windows. This gave a major break through for documentary films and early methods to which to shoot them. Director Robert Flaherty places viewers in a position of observation like when we're home watching one of those cooking shows. This proves greatly effective especially since Nanook is the only character of any depth. His family is seen but never examined. We see them shuffle about single file before they all bunk together in what has to be crowded living space but we are never really given much of a glimpse of who they are outside being related to our smiling Eskimo hero. Unfortunately Nanook died of starvation (of all things) a year after the completion of the film. Perhaps if those tykes chipped in with the Arctic chores then this would not have happened, but as we soon learn, Nanook has to do everything. One can guess that being the film's star had its disadvantages. Score: 8 ½ / 10

MartinHafer "Nanook of the North" is a film that shows the life of Nanook and his family back in 1920 in the frozen North of Canada. Most of the film shows Nanook hunting and fishing--most other activities are not seen.I'll be honest about this one--"Nanook of the North" is NOT a film for everyone. It's a semi-documentary with very limited appeal. I am not surprised that it was released as part of the ultra-artsy Criterion Collection. After all, how many people want to see a film about the life of the Inuit in Northern Canada?! However, for fans of documentaries, it's well worth seeing, as it's one of the very early ones. But you might have noticed that I called it a 'semi-documentary'--a term that should be used more often. That's because a true documentary shows what is--not a fictional account of what is. And, while what you see is typical in some ways about the Inuit, it was NOT typical of the Inuit in 1920. These folks no longer hunted and lived like they did in this film due to their contact with the outside world. And so, what you see is more like the Inuit BEFORE they made contact with the modern world. Apparently, in 1920, these folks were using guns and other modern bits of technology that are not shown in the film. Additionally, the filmmaker staged much of the film. For example, Nannok's wife in the film really isn't his wife! But with all these problems, is the film worthless? Certainly not!! It's fascinating from start to finish and is more like a recreation of ancient Inuit life--and in this sense, it's an invaluable record--but one most people probably don't care much about today--mostly it's a film for academicians and film historians.

tnrcooper I found this film electrifying until, in reading more about it, I learned that some of the scenes were staged for dramatic effect - that Nanook, in the scene in which he bites on the record as though he hasn't seen one is really mocking us, that the Inuk use spears when in fact they hunted with guns, and that the race to construct an igloo at the end of the film were all staged. I found this sad. I don't think it completely devalues the movie though. Director Robert Flaherty still spent a great length of time with the people with whom he worked and we see a culture and a way of life that we would otherwise know nothing of. The shots of the family, the revelation about how to fit multiple people in a canoe, the disclosure of how to make an igloo, and the use of furs are all fascinating. I was sad to learn that Flaherty staged scenes for dramatic effect but this doesn't completely devalue this film. We see a lot of unvarnished glimpses of the spartan life which the Inuk undoubtedly lived. For that, I am profoundly grateful. I found this terrible and thought that it was a terrible manipulation of circumstances for dramatic ends. It's enough for me to rate this movie a significant amount lower. That said, it is very interesting.

carvalheiro "Nanook of the North" (1922) directed by Robert Flaherty, as adventurous story about the construction of an igloo on the North Pole, between magnetic and geographic points, it is still a symbol of human life concerning glacial winds and strengths to cope with such an unfortunate chance and its environment, in this specific instinct of surviving way of life. Before industrialization and the technology advantage from there, that came into this almost lost ground, getting it as a place for living, like inside a hole of ice. Like a fish out of water but protected by a ceiling, in its natural outfit made with tools from nearby, as adapted to the ground of such an adversity, smiling from local human beings in a clear way of loving a foreigner : it is well known the picture of the scene when the strong fisherman, clothed with local animals skins like a displaced Indian or Inuit people seemingly, eating the disc record of the gramophone, still in a silent movie at the brink to learn talking a new language of evidence and by this way surviving from his primitive mind of simplicity. What is important underlining in this story also, it is the manner and the way how building a roof against extreme weather and making a fire for any meals to the Esquimo family or the like : for surviving in severe conditions and without any help from outside, in the surrounding neighbors much more far away ; making also clothes for their own consumption in the clan - maybe with the skin of white bears or black seals, previously hunted with such a parsimony from an adapted inhabitant - as their campaigners did with the ice itself. So that, like boxes done at cutting measure with round shapes, like holding it as a tool from the apparently inhospitality of the glacial ground, as at the time once about the supposedly myth of reversing commodities for a new experiment of comfort. But nearby primitive peoples not so savage - as the common sense, elsewhere outside wrongly -, before perhaps was thinking about ; and all that, at the time while Flaherty put the known Nanook abroad, for the universal mind of happy few, that now are much more than from then. Nowadays, this great movie is either a subject for the study and object of knowledge, whose such an impact caught us also enough a bit as entertainment, that too it should be searching by the present viewer, curious of the strength of some of the inner aspects, from the cinema itself as a possible and necessary kind of conservationist meditation for the present, aside of its torments and permanent turmoil as educational task. It was said that the first rushes were accidentally burned and it was for a second time returning again for shooting Nanook, fishing again with the glacial wind near the ice hole with a hook, that Flaherty has finally - after an enormous effort against adverse circumstances - obtained the definitive metric duration for his movie, financed partly by the Hudson Company at the time. All this means that it was not easy documenting the first trail, by a second returning to the places already filmed before and by random in the recent old past.