Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Criticism
Flaherty has been criticized for deceptively portraying staged events as reality. Much of
the action was staged and gives an inaccurate view of real Inuit life during the early
20th century. "Nanook" was in fact named Allakariallak, for instance, while the "wife"
shown in the film was not really his wife. And although Allakariallak normally used a
gun when hunting, Flaherty encouraged him to hunt after the fashion of his ancestors in
order to capture what was believed to be the way the Inuit lived before European
influence. The ending, in which Nanook and his family are supposedly in peril of dying
if they can't find shelter quickly enough, was implausible, given the reality of nearby
French-Canadian and Inuit settlements during filming. Flaherty also exaggerated the
peril to Inuit hunters with his claim, often repeated, that Allakariallak had died of
starvation two years after the film was completed, whereas it is now known that he more
likely died of tuberculosis.[2] On the other hand, while Flaherty made his Inuit actors use
spears instead of guns during the walrus and seal hunts, the hunting actually involved
wild animals.
Flaherty defended his work by stating that a filmmaker must often distort a thing to
catch its true spirit. Later filmmakers have pointed out that the only cameras available to
Flaherty at the time were both large and immobile, making it impossible to effectively
capture most interior shots or unstructured exterior scenes without significantly
modifying the environment and subject action. For example, the Inuit crew had to build
a special three-walled igloo for Flaherty's bulky camera so that there would be enough
light for it to capture interior shots.
At the time, few documentaries had been filmed and there was little precedent to guide
Flaherty's work. Since Flaherty's time both staging action and attempting to steer
documentary action have come to be considered unethical amongst cinma vrit
purists, because they believe such reenactments deceive the audience.
Robert Joseph Flaherty (16 February 1884, Iron Mountain, Michigan - 23 July 1951,
Dummerston, Vermont) was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the
first commercially successful feature length documentary film in 1922. This film,
Nanook of the North, made his reputation, and nothing in his later life equalled its
success, although he continued the development of this new genre of docufiction, eg.
with Moana, set in the South Seas in 1926.
He is the father of ethnographic film, understood as a practice of non-scientific cinema
portraying ethnic characters. Jean Rouch would practice and theorise the genre as visual
anthropology, a subfield of anthropology, in the 60ies.
Flaherty was married to writer Frances H. Flaherty from 1914 until his death in 1951.
Frances worked on several of her husband's films, and received an Academy Award
nomination for Best Original Story for Louisiana Story (1948).
Early life
Flaherty was one of seven children born to prospector Robert Henry Flaherty (an Irish
Protestant) and Susan Klockner (a German Roman Catholic); he was sent to Upper
Canada College in Toronto for his education. Flaherty began his career as a prospector
in the Hudson Bay region of Canada, working for a railroad company.
For the new film, Flaherty staged almost everything, including the ending, where
Allakariallak (who acts the part of Nanook) and his screen family are supposedly at risk
of dying if they could not find or build shelter quickly enough. The half-igloo had been
built beforehand, with a side cut away for light so that Flaherty's camera could get a
good shot. Flaherty also insisted that the Inuit not use rifles to hunt, though they had
become common, and pretended at one point that he could not hear the hunters' pleas
for help, instead continuing filming their struggle and putting them in greater danger.
Filmography