Kali Spencer

Richard Simpson

ENGL 342

09/22/20

Nanook of the North

In one of our readings from last week, Embarrassing Evidence: The Detective Camera and the Documentary Impulse, Tom Gunning states “I believe that tracing the origin of the hand camera does more than simply route the documentary impulse in pure noisiness (although it may be useful to recall the curiositas that underlies the documentary). This curiosity shapes a particular conception of the camera, whose technical design allows a certain way of seeing and gathering evidence. It is not simply the supposed neutrality of the camera that must be interrogated, but the historically specific fantasies of knowledge and power that this apparatus embodies and produces” (Gunning 61). While in this instance he is referring strictly to the use of the so-called “detective camera” I think this passage helps raise important questions for documentaries as a whole such as: In what ways do the documentary maker's interests impact the film?, In what ways do historically specific fantasies of knowledge and power impact what is recorded and embody pre-existing ideas of power and knowledge?, and What are some of the ethical questions we should take into account when filming documentaries?

In Robert J. Flaherty’s How I Filmed 'Nanook of the North' this first question of the film maker’s intent is immediately raised for me. Flaherty admits that his initial intentions when making the film were to “secure films of the North and Eskimo life, which might prove to be of enough value to help in some way to defray some of the costs of the explorations”. While he states that upon returning to the north his intentions were “wholly for the purpose of making films” I feel that it’s hard to ignore the precedent set during the first filming that viewed this as a money-making venture rather than based in genuine curiosity. 

This idea plays into our next two questions surrounding the ideas of historically specific fantasies of knowledge and power and their impacts upon a film and the ethics of filmmaking. I think when we view other cultures as something that we can simply record in order to monetize and commodify, we do the viewer and the subject a great disservice because we aren’t interested in presenting things the way they are. Because we don’t have a genuine interest in them, we feel the need to stage scenes that portray the subject in a way that is interesting (though not always realistic).

I think this last idea ties largely into Fatimah Tobing Rony’s Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography. Just as Rony discussed in his writing, “in both cases, what is ignored is how Nanook emerges from the web of discourse which constructed the Inuit as Primitive man, and which considered cinema, and particularly Flaherty’s form of cinema, to be a mode of representation which could only be truthful” and focuses “not [on] whether or not Flaherty was an artist or a liar but [on] ethnography taxidermy, and how the discourse of authenticity has created the film”. These sentiments reflect my exact feelings surrounding the making of Nanook of the North. In the end, I feel the film stages interactions and presents the Inuit culture in a way that is easy to market but ultimately inauthentic. Just as one may pay to see a taxidermied lion in a museum that is posed in a way that reinforces our preexisting ideas of lions as fierce beasts, we are invited to view the Inuit people in a way that is very Westernized and paints them as simplistic and primitive.