The son of an engineer tasked with extracting iron lodes, Robert J. Flaherty (1884–1951) spent his early years in mining camps, trekking through the wilderness of Michigan and Canada, and sleeping beneath the crackling din of northern lights. In his mid-twenties, he was hired by William Mackenzie, a Canadian railway tycoon, to follow in his father’s footsteps and prospect for ore. It was Mackenzie who first suggested that the young explorer record his travels. “You are going into interesting country—strange people—animals and all that—why don’t you include in your outfit a camera for making film?” Flaherty took his boss’s advice and acquired a Bell & Howell camera, the equipment needed to develop and print on the go, and even spent three weeks learning cinematography in Rochester, New York. Now trained and outfitted, he shot scenes of Inuit life across several expeditions in 1914 and 1915. Disaster visited his Toronto editing studio in 1916, when Flaherty dropped a lit cigarette on more than 30,000 feet of film. Years of work went up in smoke along with the director’s skin. After a spell in the hospital, camera hands debrided, he was forced to begin from scratch.

The end of World War I put Flaherty’s plans for Arctic documentation on ice. A rough print had survived the fire, which he showed to various potential funders, all of whom remained unmoved. Only in 1920 did the fur company Revillon Frères recognize the lucrative nature of this director’s proposals. Films were coming back to Europe and America from distant outposts, seemingly shot beyond the reaches of the known world. Inspired by Martin and Osa Johnson’s Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Seas (1918), Flaherty thought he could capture the North as it had never been shown before. He was given a stipend of $500 per month, $13,000 for equipment, and $3000 of funds for the “remuneration of natives”. He packed 75,000 feet of film, production equipment, and a projection screen, so that he could develop and play back rough cuts for his actors. Setting off by canoe with Indigenous guides in June 1920, he followed Moose River to Moose Factory on James Bay. Here, he boarded a schooner, and finally, in August, reached Inukjuak (formerly Port Harrison) in Nunavik. Holding auditions, he selected a man of the Itivimuit tribe named Allakariallak for his star, whom he would subsequently immortalize as Nanook of the North.

Nanook of the North: A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic opens with backstory: Flaherty’s past travels, the previous film’s incineration, his new ambition to “take a single character and make him typify the Eskimos as I had known them so long and well.” The film begins in motion, placing the viewer within the point of view of an explorer: an out-of-frame ship deck dandles the camera lens, as ice floes drift below a dark escarpment. The intertitles set the scene for Nanook’s introduction — a man untroubled by the corrupting influences of civilization. “The sterility of the soil and the rigor of the climate no other race could survive; yet here, utterly dependent upon animal life, which is their sole source of food, live the most cheerful people in all the world — the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo.” The scenes that follow are less narrative, more slice-of-life. Nanook makes a fire from moss, prepares his kayak for a hunt, harpoons a walrus, visits a trading post, builds an igloo, displays his husky pups, and travels across vast, featureless tundra. Modernity almost never intrudes. When a trader attempts to explain a gramophone to Nanook, how “the white man ‘cans’ his voice”, he joyously attempts to taste the record. Audiences at the time probably laughed. Today, the scene flickers with a kind of multimodal irony. Nanook tries to ingest the frozen voice of a gramophone record. Watching, we consume the likeness of an Inuk on screen. Both the viewer and viewed are dealing with media’s traces (emulsion layers, grooves), trying to reconstruct the absent whole from a partial inscription.

Authentic ethnographic field recording this was not. Fur prices were at an all-time high when Flaherty made his film. “The Inuit portrayed in Nanook were using guns, knew about gramophones, wore Western clothing, and although many had died from Western diseases”, writes Fatimah Toby Rony, “certainly were not vanishing.” But Flaherty found fantasies of authenticity to be more truthful than the messy contradictions of reality. He asked his actors to wear traditional garments that had long fallen out of style. Nanook’s wife, Nyla, and children were not related to Allakariallak, but were chosen for their appearances. Most scenes were scripted to some degree. “Do you know that you and your men may have to give up making a kill, if it interferes with my film?” Flaherty asked his soon-to-be star. “Will you remember that it is the picture of you hunting the iviuk [walrus] that I want, and not their meat?” Allakariallak assented: “Yes, yes, the aggie [film] will come first.” The igloo scene also had to be choreographed, for Flaherty’s camera rig could not fit within the building’s standard dimensions. First Allakariallak and companions built several iterations of a “big aggie igloo”, according to Flaherty, each of which quickly collapsed. And though they eventually succeeded, the light inside was not sufficient for adequate exposure. Finally, they arrived on an open, semicircular igloo — the sitcom’s “three-wall set” avant la lettre — which allowed Flaherty to capture the scene.

Other hurdles were more dangerous than matters of contrast. Flaherty and his assistant, an Inuk he calls “Henry Lauder”, joined Allakariallak and others on an eight-week, six-hundred-mile-long trip with the hopes of hunting a polar bear. They never found a bear, ran out of food, and nearly froze to death. Day’s horizon was flooded with sundogs, like “two faint balls of brass” flanking a weak, low-hanging sun. Nights could reach forty degrees below zero, the inhumane realm where Fahrenheit and Celsius converge. Flaherty’s diary from this time grows emaciated: “Friday, Saturday, Sunday.—Same—no seals. Monday.—Same, no seals.” In the end, they resorted to burning eight-hundred feet of film to make their tea. (Perhaps he thought back to his studio in Toronto or even longed for the warmth of that inferno.) The men survived, although Tooktoo the husky did not. When the documentary finally wrapped, Flaherty sailed south on the Annie while Allakariallak kayaked after him. The filmmaker looked on as “Nanook” finally turned back to that “low, melancholy waste of shore —all that he called home!” By the time audiences saw the film, Flaherty (always mythologizing toward self-perceived beneficence) was able to report via intertitle that, two years later, “Nanook had ventured into the interior hoping for deer and had starved to death” (scholars suspect he succumbed to an illness introduced by traders and explorers). In the end, the film’s subtitle also falters. This is a story of life and love. . . but the “actual arctic”? That was always a fantasy of the past. By eulogizing Allakariallak at the film’s close, it’s as if Flaherty cuts the line of communication between documentary and still-existing community. All that’s left is a canned face on screen.

Nanook of the North’s influence cannot be overstated, for better or worse. “It has been called the first documentary film, the first ethnographic film, as well as the first art film”, writes Fatimah Toby Rony. Beyond its cinematic and cultural influence, Nanook cemented Flaherty’s reputation as a filmmaker, allowing him to make Moana (1926), a work of Samoan docufiction, and Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), which he wrote for F. W. Murnau. It became a cultural phenomenon for a time — Flaherty recalls traveling to Berlin years later and purchasing an Eskimo pie: “it was called a ‘Nanuk’, and Nanook’s face smiled up at me from the wrapper”. This long-lasting legacy, however, has not lacked controversy. “Because of filmmakers like Flaherty, we’ve seen the damage wrought by policies built on visual misrepresentation, salvage ethnography, and the lines of ownership that become purposefully blurred by others extracting our own images”, writes Kiowa/Mohawk filmmaker Adam Piron. “For Indigenous artists, there’s an added weight to engaging with the moving image because we know the cost of carelessness.”