Nanook of the North

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If the novel is fiction’s most direct form, documentary film and video are the primary forms for the scripting of reality. Released in 1924, Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North was the first feature length documentary film. Flaherty spent months living among the Inuit in an attempt to better understand his subject. In making the film, however, Flaherty fictionalized many aspects of the life that Nanook and his family led to make them seem quainter and more backwards than they really were as a way to make the story more interesting to viewers. Critics accused Flaherty of taking liberties with the truth by asking Nanook to hunt using spears as his ancestors did instead of the gun he was accustomed to. Flaherty responded by saying that the filmmaker has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit. By the time the film was released, Allariallak, the Inuit who portrayed Nanook the Eskimo, had died of starvation.

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