Summary
A serrated shard of ice-light cleaves the monochrome dusk as Nanook’s kayak glides into frame, the hull so slim it seems stitched from shadow. For twelve lunar turns Flaherty’s hand-cranked camera lingers on this Inuit patriarch—his name a throat-sung vibration across tundra—while igloo domes rise like breath frozen mid-air. Children, half-caribou in gait, chew sealskin boots for supper; a stone-bladed harpoon arcs, impaling not merely walrus blubber but the very myth of the noble savage. Wife Cunayou’s tattooed chin maps star-routes no colonial atlas can chart; Allegoo’s laughter detonates inside the snow-hush, revealing cinema’s first on-screen joke. When trade-post biscuits arrive, the clan’s bewildered bite becomes a prophecy of cultural erosion. Yet the final shot—Nanook’s silhouette swallowed by whiteout—reverses ethnography into ghost-story: the viewer, not the Inuit, stands exposed on thinning ice.
Synopsis
In this silent predecessor to the modern documentary, film-maker Robert J. Flaherty spends one year following the lives of Nanook and his family, Inuits living in the Arctic Circle.
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