Customer Reviews

Nanook of the North [VHS]

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Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North" is a true classic of ethnographic film. The principle behind anthropological film in the early days of its existence was to capture traditional societies in time, a sort of "salvage ethnography." In doing so, filmmakers like Flaherty and others particularly focused on Amerindian cultures, which were seen as a dying remnant of early America. In creating his silent masterpiece, Flaherty used actors of Inuit extraction, who still knew the traditional ways, and who could reproduce their culture for posterity through film. Though his methods have been criticized as contrived and retrogressive, post-modernist rhetoric has not succeeded in ruining this film in the popular or anthropological circles. "Nanook" remains a warm account of traditional Inuit/Eskimo life, despite their frigid setting. The DVD collectable edition contains some photo galleries and useful material about Flaherty and his subjects.

This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.

This film is credited with being one of the first documentary films. When first released it became known worldwide. Although the film was staged it is partially accurate. At the time of the film was being made, Inuit society was beginning to modernize and the film was made to portray traditional life for the Inuits.

To this day the film remains one of the most famous documentaries ever made.

The film is well photographed and is the first silent film the Criterion Collection has released on DVD. The new musical score is excellent and often appropriate for the particular scenes. This film is generally appropriate for all ages but near the end of the film there is a scene of brief female nudity.

The Criterion Collection has resotred the film to its original frame rate and the special features include photographs of the region where the movie was filmed and also inclused a rare interview with the director's widow.

Most of what I could say has already been said. It is an important historical document of a vanished way of life. It is a unique tribute to one man & his stand agianst the elements. Flaherty invented documentary as we now know it in this film. The filmmaker displays almost as much tenacity & courage in recording the material as Nanook does in his everyday life. A measure of the film's greatness is the profound effect it had on Orson Welles. After seeing the film Welles is said to have abandoned the editing of his 'Magnificent Ambersons' & taken on a journey to South America to shoot in documentary style.

The small band of people have to struggle to survive. The threat of starvation is always present. The land is harsh. And yet there is much joy in this film. There are several children who laugh and play with the puppies and play sliding games on the snow. There's a chubby baby of 4 months old who travels in the hood of his mother's coat. There's Nanook's wife who is always smiling. And dogs who work hard to pull the sleds.

The viewer sees the small troop hunt for walrus and seal. There is struggle and then there is joy as they eat pieces of the raw meat. We also see them construct an igloo within one hour, the whole family working together with their flat bone knives as their only tool. I understand that this film has been criticized because this scene was staged and that a special igloo had to be created in order to film the interior, but I can't see how else this could have been done.

The viewer really identifies with the people and their daily struggle and I was saddened to learn that two years after the film was produced, Nanook died of starvation during a deer hunt.

In spite of the limited amount of technology available to Flaherty, he did a spectacular job, and the film stands today as an important historical document. Absolutely one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. Highly recommended.

I always thought "Nanook of the North" was just a metaphor for an overly bundled-up person -- until I came across his eponymous movie! I was dumbfounded and mesmerized by this <remarkable> 1-hour documentary. It was filmed in frozen northern Canada in the early 1900's, silent and in black-and-white, of course.

Nanook is patriarch of a native Hudson Bay family (think "Eskimos") who live on the pitiless edge of survival. Yet these are sweet, sweet people. The camera follows mainly Nanook through days of daunting challenges centered on food and shelter from the cold. In one astonishing scene after another, Nanook:

1.) sneaks up on and harpooons a huge walrus, 2.) has a titanic struggle with a seal through an ice hole, and 3.) carves and assembles in less than one hour a large igloo, which includes an a-m-a-z-i-n-g feature that will have you talking to yourself.

What comes out of his kayak will have you gasping.

This is great film-making, notable all the more due to severity of conditions, remoteness of location and unsophisticated technology of the period. I don't expect to ever see anything quite like this again.

Nanook irrestibly earns your respect and affection. The movie brought him international attention. News of his death two years later elicited condolences from around the world.

Unforgettable. A singular experience.

I saw this movie on TCM and was transfixed. The documentary is a masterpiece of minimalism. In particular, I was impressed by the eerie, brooding score that accompanied the film, with it's haunting contrabass subtly reinforcing the film's icy, desert-like barrenness. It conveyed beautifully the quiet desperation of Nanook and his family as they courageously - and against all odds - eked out a meager existence against the backdrop of the unrelenting inhospitability of the Arctic. It was a magnificent merger of story, cinematography and score. Truly an achievement.

I can't begin to say how disappointed I was when I played the DVD. The original score had been replaced by a New Age ensemble accompaniment that completely altered the tenor of the movie. The evocative ambience of the original was lost. The new score is a completely incongruous loop of mediocre New Age ensemble music that occasionally mounts to inexplicable crescendos hopelessly unrelated to the action of the film; it is totally devoid of and in fact defies any empathic sensibility. I finally muted the sound and watched the movie in silence. It was a vast improvement, but still nowhere near the impact of the original. What were the producers of this re-release thinking?

For this reason alone, I cannot recommend buying this bastardized version. What a pity.

I saw this movie during a documentary class and my whole class enjoyed watching this movie. However there are many who refer to this movie as a view of "eskimo" life, which it is not. We learned in class that this movie was actually representing a time about 10-15 years prior to the filming. Many of the things in this movie were contrived for the making of the film. Some examples of this were Nanook's name (and family) and the walrus hunt (they no longer used harpoons to get walrus', instead they used guns).

However, that said, this WAS one of the best fictional accounts of inuit life I have ever seen. It truely had the flavor of reality and I found myself numourous time pulling for the people in the film. It also had an essence of comedy that I had not expected. I found my self very satisfied with the movie in general.

This film through the years improves progressively and his cult status has been deserved to it all the honors and thinkable acknowledgements. Not only constitutes an admirable epic effort and artistic portrait but besides it's an artwork never equaled previous or lately. This gem of 1922 deals with the hard conditions of Eskimo life: the walrus hunt sequence or the ice bath still remain in my memory.
One of the sublime milestones in the whole Cinema Story, and obviously Flaherty's glorious masterpiece!

Sometimes you think you've got a pretty good handle on world cultures; but Robert Flaherty's stunningly insightful docu-drama of the Eskimo lifestyle turns that handle inside out and upside down. If only high school cultural anthropology had been so fun and entertaining.

Although some of the scenes are planned and come off as corny, for the most part, the film offers a real look at some of the hardships of Eskimo life. Watch for the igloo building chapter. This is flat out the most incredible, jaw-dropping "betcha-didn't-know how we do this" sequences I've ever witnessed.

An amazing depiction of survival in an almost unimaginably harsh environment. The consummate hunter, Nanook sustains his small faily in a land almost entirely devoid of vegetation, builds fires without wood and catches fish without bait. (Despite his prowess, Nanook died of starvation a year after this film was made, a sad postscript to this life-affirming documentary about an impossibly fragile mode of existence.)