A Film Canon

At its strongest, this early documentary is effectively a series of photographic portraits, whose white backdrop is variously construed as blinding sky, river, steam or mist, all of which exude a shimmering, transcendent hue that characterises the American Indian in heroic, Romantic and, ultimately, anachronistic terms - as the original pioneer, or frontiersman, a position embodied in Curtis' continual return to an escarpment above the river around which the film is structured. Unfortunately, this is couched in a cliched, poorly explained narrative that, despite providing an adequate pretext for elaborating spectacular ceremonial and artistic practices, precludes the focus on logistical and mechanical ingenuity that will become the hallmark of Flaherty's documentaries; or, alternatively, fails to recognise that this ingenuity is itself the most compelling narrative device, as evinced in a sequence that depicts the gradual approach to a rocky seal colony, only to elide chase, capture and preparation. That said, Curtis' unprecedented preoccupation with shooting from the canoes that constitute the central spectacle is itself a logistical achievement suggestive of a certain, indirect appreciation for a culture that manages to spend so time afloat, culminating with several haunting, poetic point-of-view shots; ethnographic phantom rides.