“Nanook of the North” and the Colonial Big Screen

Exactly one hundred years ago, a film shot in Quebec marked the world history of cinema. The premiere of Nanook of the North (Nanookthe Eskimo) took place at the Capitol Theater in New York on June 11, 1922. The film was screened in Montreal, then in Paris a few weeks later. Within months, the broadcast on both sides of the North Atlantic brought in over $250,000.

This is arguably the most influential inauthentic documentary in the history of the seventh art. The masterpiece was one of the first 25 included in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, created in 1989. Nanook of the North represents one of the most significant American films: it operates like a Rosetta stone for debates on documentary ethics, representation, ethnography, Orientalism”, summarizes a text published a few weeks ago by the institution of Washington on the occasion of the centenary of the first projection.

In any case, this recipe for telling “real life” by staging emblematic and endearing real characters is still extremely effective. The hero Nanook has become something of a cultural icon, quoted in songs, novels, comics, children’s books. He gave his name to stuffed animals, clothing and polar camping accessories.

Spectacular colonialism

There is obviously no lack of debate on the cultural appropriation and the colonial gaze conveyed by this work. The trick of the mockumentary has contributed to freezing the image of a people stuck in its primitive traditions. Director Robert Flaherty, for example, distorted reality by asking his main actor not to use a gun. The director would even have put his performers in danger in at least one scene.

It is also possible to see in the pioneering work of the Western filmmaker an honest effort to understand and even love each other during an eminently racist period which organized human zoos to exhibit “primitives” from all over the world. There are also, perhaps, traces of an early artistic collaboration between a white man and the Inuit with references in the filmed images to drawings and sculptures from the North. In addition, The Flaherty Film Seminar, set up in Vermont in 1954 by Frances Hubbard Flaherty, the filmmaker’s widow and early collaborator, continues to question cinematic ethics and innovation.

“There is a whole spectrum of positions critical of this film in the academic world and in the Aboriginal world”, continues Nicolas Renaud, filmmaker and professor at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, a specialist in Aboriginal cultures from Quebec. He himself is a member of the Huron-Wendat nation. “Some see it as a totally colonial, irrecoverable enterprise, which we should no longer talk about. Me, I see the reflection of an old classic colonialism fueled by the exoticism of the other, but in control of the representation. »

But in the Arctic, the erasure of culture came later, when a few years of priests and TV destroyed two thousand years of history.

He points out that in this work and his subsequent documentaries on other cultures of the world, despite undeniable aesthetic and poetic qualities, the documentary filmmaker Flaherty exposes a sort of traditional purity threatened with disappearance in the face of which the European still feels superior with its modern technology. In a famous scene from Nanook the EskimoInuit marvel at a gramophone and end up biting its record.

“It’s typical Flaherty: colonial, staged,” says the professor. But in the Arctic, the erasure of culture came later [après le tournage de Nanook l’Esquimau], when a few years of priests and TV have destroyed two thousand years of history. »

Indigenous presences

Nicolas Renaud will take part next Monday and Tuesday in the eighth international symposium Indigenous Perspectives on the Americas presented as part of the international festival Présence indigenous. Scholars and filmmakers from Baffin Island to Tierra del Fuego will discuss in Kahnawake and Montreal. A special issue of the journal Panorama-cinema will be launched at the same time.

“We started this symposium in 2009 to show what Aboriginal cinema can bring to understanding the world,” explains the organizer of the event, Isabelle St-Amand, professor of cinema at Queen’s University in Ontario. “This year, the focus is on connecting and helping Indigenous filmmakers around the world. These links make it possible to get through social or political crises like the one we have just experienced with the pandemic. »

This cinema by Aboriginals contrasts with Flaherty’s pioneering work of a century ago. Professor St-Amand cites as an example the work of director Kim O’Bomsawin, behind the documentary my name is human about the poet Joséphine Bacon and the TV series let us tell she is preparing for Radio-Canada on the eleven First Nations of Quebec and Labrador.

“Cultural reconnection is one of the major themes of current Aboriginal cinema,” explains Professor Renaud. It’s loaded with implication because in Canada, residential schools and other policies created a cultural break. »

The Inuit view

He himself, his parents and his grandparents from the Huron-Wendat nation did not suffer residential schools, but other means resulted in the cultural assimilation of his family and major ruptures among his people which made them losing a perspective on the world, a way of thinking about politics or social relations, traditional governance structures, etc. “The new generations are looking for all of this at the same time, says the educational artist, a way of projecting ourselves through the imagination out of the ecological crisis or which renews the principles of equality, for example. »

Twists and turns of a masterpiece

Professor St-Amand quotes her Seneca colleague Michelle Raheja from the University of California, who came to her Montreal colloquium a few years ago and who has written extensively on Nanook the Eskimo. Both to expose and critique the colonial vision of the film as much as to watch it from an Indigenous perspective.

“When the Inuit watch this film, they don’t necessarily see the same thing as us,” says Isabelle St-Amand. Even the gramophone record scene, they apparently find very funny. It is therefore important to consider how the Inuit themselves read this work. »

The grandson of Allakariallak (who plays Nanook), Charlie Nowkawalk, testifies in the documentary A Century After Nanook. He says he was “stunned” when he discovered the century-old film showing how his ancestors lived and the changes since in the North, despite the “dramatization” and exaggerations present in it. Nanook the Eskimo. The former mayor of Inukjuak, Simeonie Nalukturuk, born in an igloo almost 70 years ago, adds that the work allows us to take the measure of the effects of climate change on the land of Nanook the Eskimo.

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