directed by Robert Flaherty

Criterion #33.

This is by far the best of the Nanook series, though Nanook Out West and Nanook Makes a Mistake are pretty good too. The plot is much as you’d imagine: Nanook gets up to his typical hijinks (walrus hunting, igloo building), with crotchety old Mr. Jenkins as the butt of most of the humor. This is the episode from which we get the expression “What a Nanook!”, nowadays used to describe anyone who spears a seal to death through a hole in the ice.

As usual, the songs are a bit corny.

There may or may not be a really stupid joke somewhere on this page. Sorry everybody, just trying to be like “Nyla — The Smiling One.”

My primary reaction during Nanook is a thought that will be hard for me to put into words. But here goes: The way things actually happened wasn’t necessarily the right way or the best way, but people want to believe it was. It probably sounds like I’m talking about the issue of documentary realism, but I’m talking about the status of this movie itself. This is the first documentary feature, very influential, fine. It is not unwatchable garbage. You get to see an Eskimo build an igloo, etc. It’s interesting for what it is. But in an alternate history, might the first documentary feature have been much, much better than this? Yes.

I guess I had this thought because with documentary material, the conflation of significance with distinction tends to be even more treacherous. How much of our boredom is appropriate to blame on Flaherty? After all, the only claim here is very basic: everything you’re seeing happened and was shot on film, in a faraway place you’re unlikely to visit. True, and valuable. (On the level on which this film works, the accusations that it was “staged” seem to me mostly irrelevant. We can see very well that the packaging is 20s newsreel exoticism, which as an authorial voice is a well-known huckster; we watch not for that voice of the intertitles but for the the voice of the film itself, which cannot tell a lie. This light actually reflected off these people and this snow, and passed into the camera.)

But the purity of “it happened and now you can watch it” is nothing new — it’s the foundation, the origin of the film medium. That’s what all the Edison films were. It’s still going strong. The thing Flaherty is getting credit for here is making film-as-reportage feature-length and giving it editorial heft and flair. Those are things this movie does only very clumsily. But the movie is celebrated because it’s the one, and because the essence of what we’re celebrating is basically beyond criticism. Well, I’m criticizing.

Nanook is interesting as such. The key words being AS SUCH. All things are as such but some things are more as such than others.

I had seen this movie once before, in fifth grade, when it was shown I guess as part of our school’s neverending “unit” on Native Americans. It turned out that I recognized a few images, but mostly my memory was that it seemed strange at the time that this obvious antique was being shown to us as though were still suitable classroom material — it still seems strange, in retrospect. And that the class had been utterly scandalized by the appearance of naked breasts — combined with the ancientness of the film, it seemed that something very obviously wrong had been inflicted on us; some kind of filter in the fabric of school had clearly broken. On this viewing I was surprised to find that the breasts in question are very hard to see and onscreen for less than two seconds. Not to a fifth grader!

Music here is original to this release (or to a recent prior Kino release), and is by Timothy Brock, performed by the Olympia Chamber Orchestra. I haven’t spent a lot of time in Olympia, but next time I’m there I know not to go hear the Chamber Orchestra. Brock’s composition itself is quite dull — I get that this movie is a thankless assignment but spinning out 75 minutes of obviousness to match is insufficiently bold, I think — but the real problem is the first violin, who simply cannot play in tune. (Not that the other players are that much better.) Since the entire score is effects-free, I could have chosen pretty much anything. I’m giving you the 30-second cue corresponding to the close-ups introducing Nanook and Nyla. This is the “Nanook theme.” For us, it’ll do. Track 33.

I went in search of the 1947 score by Rudolf Schramm, which is the one I must have heard in fifth grade, but I can’t find it online. However you can listen to an interesting 1976 score by Stanley Silverman here — in a Copland style, but not the one you’d think.