Nanook Of the North - Robert Flaherty

 Nanook of the North

On the 11th of June 1922, American filmmaker Robert Flaherty released the first documentary, Nanook of the North. This was unlike anything seen before simply due to the fact that it was not just filming a specific event in everyday life but more a case of filming someone else everyday life who lives a completely different lifestyle to the target audience.

These days, Flaherty's work gets a certain amount of scrutiny because it is believed that some of the scenes in the production were staged, There are various examples those being, In one scene Nanook is taken to a trading market where he is shown a grammar phone, Nanook then proceeds to lean in and take a bite implying that he has never seen one before when in actual fact he knew exactly what they were and was asked to do that. Another example of this is when Nanook goes fishing with a spear. Nanook had already gone past the need to use a spear because he already been using guns and had been doing so for a considerable amount of time. 

There are various ways of looking at this production and lots of people have labelled the production as racist and being very stereotypical about how inuits. However, on the otherhand people argue that he was trying to show the target audience what the true culture of the inuints was really like. Some could argue racism, some could argue fighting trying to bring authenticity to the audience.