Nanook of the North

In the state of nature, apparently, there is much tugging and pulling. Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” features extended sequences of an Eskimo family struggling to haul a 2000 pound walrus harpooned in the icy surf from an undertow that threatens to suck the carcass back into the sea. Later, the Eskimos drag their sled over a purgatorial landscape of jagged ice turrets and trenches. Again and again, the sled gets stuck in the white badlands, dogs and men tugging as hard as they can to little or no avail. Then, Nanook spears an invisible seal through the animal’s funnel-shaped breathing hole -- as other family members rush to assist him, the hidden seal repeatedly drags Nanook down onto the ice, tossing him this way and that at the end of a tether the drops through the ice to the enraged animal. The effect is at once dire, and vaguely comical -- like a Buster Keaton routine endlessly protracted in a vast, indifferent wasteland of ice. For a long time, we can’t see the seal and so the Eskimo hunter seems engaged in a weird combat with some force threatening to drag him under the ice. Later, when the huge turd-shaped seal is extracted f through the tiny cavity hacked through the ice, we see that the animal is as big as an oxen -- again, there is much tugging, yanking, and pulling to get the carcass up into the light of day. Flaherty’s film features a repeated motif of things coming through improbably small holes -- at times, the picture seems a fantasia on constriction and birth motifs, most notably in the opening sequence, a sort of clown-car gag in which one Eskimo after another emerges from a small orifice in the tiny kayak that Nanook has just paddled across the bay up to the boulder-strewn shore where the camera is located. (This gag is improbable and, certainly, presents a spatial impossibility -- there is no way that the entire family of Eskimos with a couple of their dogs could be concealed within the little seal-skin bladder of the kayak; accordingly, this famous documentary starts off with an image that seems overtly false, faked, and, even, some kind of surrealist joke -- but the sense of constriction and confinement, the notion of hiding from brutal weather in a womblike cavity is integral to the movie and very disturbing.) When Nanook and his wife aren’t trying to haul huge corpses from the sea, they are butchering things and eating walrus or salmon or seal sashimi. Nanook and his wife clearly enjoy being photographed and they grin with delight at the camera even when their circumstances suggest that they should be desperate with panic. The Criterion disk supplements the famous silent (1922 ) documentary with an austere early TV era interview with Flaherty’s widow -- she is fantastically articulate, a Victorian figure in a long, archaic dress and she argues that “Nanook” is important because it was the first time that the cinema depicted real people, not acting, but simply “being themselves.” This commentary doesn’t ring true. The scenes showing the Eskimos bedding down in their small, improvised igloo are clearly staged. Obviously, the light in the igloo -- even with the pane of pack-ice Nanook excavates from the sea for a window -- would be completely insufficient for photography. Accordingly, it is evident that Flaherty has bisected an igloo, slicing it in half, like a museum diorama, to show the family huddled together, women bare-breasted with infants clinging to them and, at the center, the mighty hunter, Nanook, in the middle of a gamy-looking sandwich of animal furs. It’s remarkable to see Nanook fashion the igloo, sculpting it nonchalantly from snow, and, then, pausing to carve a couple of snow-drift effigies of wolves and caribou for his small son to practice hunting with a tiny bow and arrow. Nanook wields his walrus-tusk knife like a conductor’s baton, periodically polishing his bone tools with a glittering edge of saliva frozen to ice. Everything looks impeccably real, but the final scene, contrasting Nanook’s little family cozily ensconced in their igloo while a blizzard buries their long-suffering sled dogs in snow gives away the game -- the dogs and the Eskimos are contrasted, but the two packs (one human and one half-wolf) occupy a similarly straitened and brutish plane of existence. Flaherty’s Eskimos have no culture, no mythology, no social structure nor religion -- they are wandering nomads, staggering across the improbably desolate wasteland, a wholly isolated family surviving by its wits in the terrifying environment. Surely, real Eskimo are nothing like this and, indeed, we now know this to be true as a result of the great Inuit film, “The Fast Runner,” a movie that uses the same diorama-style bisected igloos (although for the purpose of showing incestuous sex scenes) and that depicts a complex mythology involving elaborate rituals and curses and a doom that pursues clan members through the generations something like a Aeschylus’ house of Atreus or Euripides’ Medea. Flaherty’s Eskimos are without culture, only a step or so above the animals that they hunt. They are scarcely more differentiated than their sled dogs, animals that seem to be forever slavering and viciously attacking one another. This impoverished view of life in the state of nature is genuinely nightmarish in some scenes -- in particular, there is one episode where the half-feral sled dogs fighting one another have tangled the reins of the family’s sled and Nanook has to untie the knot of seal-gut cords from the squirming animals while a blizzard approaches from the north. This is the stuff of bad dreams.