Analysis Of Nanook Of The North By Robert J. Flaherty

Robert J. Flaherty from Nanook of the North and Christopher Oscar and Doug Hecker from Project Censored: The Movie are all aware of the fact that there is a difference between reality and the story and each worked hard to depict what life was really like.. Flaherty is known as the father of the documentary film who has had a profound influence on our society and how films were made and viewed. Flaherty’s first film was “Nanook of the North”, which was one of the films we viewed for class. Robert Flaherty spent many months in Canada being with and filming the eskimos. (Brittanica) He wanted to make a film that was in collaboration with the people of the local Eskimo communities and they obeyed to everything he said and his requests were consistently …show more content…
This included ethnography, exploration, landscape, reenactment, staging, and the incorporation of nature and adventure films. In terms of ethnography, Flaherty depicts their lives *********He was very old school and was set in many of his ways in terms of being very specific and never changing his camera angles or positioning and also Flaherty did not change his ways for narrative effect which included using suspense as one of his prime techniques. Flaherty would also often use “cut ins”. "All of Flaherty's films are variations on one ideal: happiness exists when man is free and lives simply and harmoniously with nature" (Barsam 7) Another pattern in his films is that there is no true ending, nothing is solved, which is where the “reality”” factor comes into play because in real life, not everything is solved or has a real answer as to why things happen the way they do. Flaherty’s films leave many people guessing what could’ve been after the movie …show more content…
He wanted this story to be portrayed in a way that was true to the inuit people to grasp their culture and to not be offensive about it at the same time. During filming he had many makeshift items in which Flaherty and his team had to carry it across the brutal temperatures including the snow and ice. To make the footage as real as possible Flaherty did many reenactments to get the feel across. Flaherty asked his cast to participate in things that they had never done in an attempt to make the film more appealing and to stand out more because at this point their culture had evolved. Instead of using spears, they had evolved into using rifles which Flaherty did not include their evolvement. For example, in the part of the film where he was fighting a seal and having so much difficulty, the seal was actually dead in real