1922
directed by Robert J. Flaherty
English inter-titles
79 minutes
The second earliest film in the Criterion Collection is Robert
J. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. It
dates from a time when motion pictures had hardly drawn clear lines about what
documentary filmmaking was. In the early days, every film was a document and
then storytellers got involved. Certainly the Eskimo Nanook and his family are
real people who lived in Canada on Hudson Bay, and it was understood at the
time that Flaherty had captured actual moments from their life (although we
know now that some scenes were staged). In that respect, Nanook of the North is widely viewed as birthing the documentary genre,
setting the groundwork for other filmmakers who wished to tell the stories of
actual people.
