Nanook of the North is known to be the first documentary film, the first ethnographic film and also the first art film. It was released on the 11th of June 1922. It was a silent film directed and produced by Robert J. Flaherty. The filming of this documentary started in August 1920 and ended a year after, August 1921. This documentary had a huge impact also because the director, Flaherty took his camera into spaces that nobody had thought of. He bought a new sense of style of film making that people still use till today.
Flaherty who was born in Michigan, traveled in northern Canada with his father when he was young, then came back as a scout looking for iron ore. He took a camera with himself and shot some footage of Eskimos. That footage…show more content… It basically focuses on the life of Nanook, who’s an eskimo, his wife Nyla, his eldest son Ollie and the youngest child Rainbow and their daily lifestyle. The living conditions in the documentary look really bad and severe but this small family learned how to persist. They had to hunt animals or do fishing so that they could eat and survive, needed moss for fuel, they also needed bartered skins of polar bear and fox for other things and hunting seals and walruses with a spear, rope, and other handmade hunting weapons.
One of the most fascinating scenes of the film shows the building of an igloo. Nanook along with his fellows slice big blocks of snow and pile them in a circle, carving new ones from the ground so that it goes down as the walls rise and curve inward to make a dome. He then finds sheets of ice, cuts holes in the igloo walls, and then puts the ice to make windows. He makes another small igloo, for the dogs. And he makes the tiniest igloo of all for the puppies inside the big igloo, which the big dogs would hurriedly…show more content… It’s not technically sophisticated because they used only one camera, cold weather and no lights. In that era of film making the equipment and everything was obviously not so easy to handle as it is today. But this however doesn’t really seem to bother Flaherty.
The opening sequence of the film contains an amazing deep-focus shot of the icebergs floating around in the sea, and as we can see the sun is high above the water. Everything seems to be in place in the shot and a type of peace is established before you are familiarized with the film’s main character, Nanook. Later in the film a few similar shots are shown using the barren landscape behind the action to supplementary show the misery of the Eskimo people. So all you can see for miles and miles is snow and ice as the subjects occupy in their activity. He shows that civilization has not yet touched these people, and even though the Eskimo people are repetitively struggling and stressed with their natural environment still the landscape is peaceful behind the