A Film Canon

Nanook Of The North aspires to natural history rather than anthropology, minimising narrative complication as much as is possible to simply elaborate an Inuit family's negotiation with their environment and, more generally, a heritage of such ingenious negotiations, since several of the practices depicted were outmoded by the time the film was shot. Roughly speaking, this elaboration touches on three basic factors - transportation, catching and preparing food, and shelter. The latter is undoubtedly the most awe-inspiring, as 'Nanook' constructs an igloo replete with an ice-window and snow-screen to reflect light through it, a seal-oil fire set up in such a way as to ensure the temperature inside remains below zero, and a miniature igloo for the husky pups. However, the catching and preparation of food provides a nice pretext for an arctic bestiary, encompassing walruses, white foxes, huskies, seals and wolves, while the issue of transportation elaborates a series of poetic landscapes ("snow smoking field of sea and plain...the melancholy spirit of the north") that find their beautiful register in the field of tiny ice floes that Nanook so deftly navigates, and their sublime register at the point at which this field collides with the icy land, producing a buckling that slows sled movement to a couple of miles a day. The result is a pervasive, deeply respectful wonder, which makes the one conspicuously paternalistic moment - Nanook's delighted confusion at the hands of a gramophone - entirely reciprocated; or, alternatively, makes it clear that any control Flaherty possesses over the arrangment of his images and scenarios is offset by the Inuits' exponentially greater management of an environment that would otherwise annihilate him.