14. Nanook of the North (1922)

The first documentary on the 1001 list, Nanook of the North is a groundbreaking film that depicts the rigors of subsistence living in northern Quebec. It follows the eponymous Nanook as he hunts, builds igloos, and engages in other survival-related activities to keep his family from starving or freezing to death. Also depicted in the film are Nanook's wife, Nyla, and their children.

Nanook of the North was the first documentary in history to be commercially successful and is still praised as one of the greatest achievements in the genre. In fact, this film almost singlehandedly established documentary as a new genre, though a name didn't exist for it yet. Very early one-reel films had depicted people going about their daily lives, but this was the first feature-length film to depict "real life" and focus on one subject. The only problem is, almost everything in Nanook of the North is staged. The family in the movie wasn't really a family, they were members of an Inuit community that director Robert Flaherty cast in the roles. The main character's name wasn't even Nanook. And he didn't die of starvation shortly after filming as the film claims.

Robert Flaherty was a young prospector and explorer sent to the Arctic by a railroad company in the early 20th century. Somewhere around 1913-14 he started filming the Inuit he encountered on his travels. For the next couple of years, he filmed them going about their daily lives until he had enough footage for a feature-length film. Then tragedy struck: he dropped a cigarette butt on the negative of his film (it's flammable stuff) and 30,000 feet of it burned up in an instant. He wasn't satisfied with the scenes left in tact, so he decided to raise money and return to the Arctic to shoot new footage.

Upon his return north in 1920, Flaherty set about making his film with a more focused plan than what he had before. He cast a few Inuit as the main characters of his film and hired other members of the Inuit community to be his crew. By this time, the Inuit in the area had started wearing Western-style clothing and hunting with guns, but Flaherty wanted to depict their traditional way of life, so in the film they only wear animal skins and hunt with weapons carved from animal bones. The hunting scenes in the movie are real--the actor playing Nanook actually kills live animals on camera (I don't recommend watching this if you're a vegetarian).

One of the most interesting scenes shows the family building an igloo from start to finish. In reality, more than one igloo was built for this sequence: the "family" built one to be shot from the outside, and another 3-sided igloo was built with the 4th side open so Flaherty could shoot some inside shots.

Even if the activities were staged, it's still interesting to see the traditional Inuit way of life and the movie is a good example of salvage ethnography. Even if the Inuit had been exposed to Western influences by 1922, they weren't so far removed from their traditional habits that they didn't know how to hunt with just a knife or a spear. I suspect there are plenty of scenes in modern documentaries that are staged for effect.

Unlike Flaherty, the Inuit involved in the film did receive any concrete benefits from the film. The woman who played Nyla reportedly bore a son fathered by Flaherty, but Flaherty never acknowledged him, despite the difficult circumstances of the boy's life--he was part of a group of Inuit relocated by the Canadian government to the High Arctic in the 1950s. The actor who played Nanook died of tuberculosis a few short years after the film was released.

The success of this film brought Flaherty worldwide acclaim and allowed him to continue directing films. His second film would inspire a fellow film-maker to coin the term "documentary." There are two other films by Flaherty on the 1001 list, Tabu and The Louisiana Story, both of which are hybrid documentary/narrative films with ethnographic themes.