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Robert J. Flaherty (1884–1951) grew up in the wilderness of Michigan and Canada as the son of a mining engineer. In his mid-twenties, he was hired by Canadian railway tycoon William Mackenzie to prospect for ore. Mackenzie suggested Flaherty bring a camera to record his travels. Taking this advice, Flaherty acquired a Bell & Howell camera, learned cinematography, and filmed Inuit life during expeditions in 1914 and 1915. A devastating fire in his Toronto studio in 1916, caused by a dropped cigarette, destroyed over 30,000 feet of this film and severely burned Flaherty, forcing him to start over.
After World War I, Flaherty struggled to find funding for a new Arctic film. He showed a surviving rough print to potential backers without success. Finally, in 1920, the fur company Revillon Frères agreed to finance him. Inspired by travel films like Martin and Osa Johnson’s Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Seas, Flaherty aimed to capture the North uniquely. He received a monthly stipend, funds for equipment, and money for the "remuneration of natives." He packed 75,000 feet of film and a projection screen to show his actors rough cuts. Traveling by canoe and schooner, he reached Inukjuak in Nunavik in August 1920. There, he auditioned and selected a man named Allakariallak from the Itivimuit tribe to be his star, whom he renamed Nanook.
Nanook of the North: A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic opens by explaining Flaherty's past and his ambition to use a single character to typify the Inuit. The film begins with the perspective of an explorer on a ship, viewing ice floes. Intertitles introduce Nanook as a man untouched by civilization, part of "the most cheerful people in all the world." The subsequent scenes are less a strict narrative and more a series of life moments: Nanook makes fire, hunts walrus, visits a trading post, builds an igloo, and travels the tundra. Modernity rarely appears. In one famous scene, a trader shows Nanook a gramophone. When told the white man "cans" his voice, Nanook joyfully tries to bite the record. For contemporary audiences, this moment highlights a complex irony. Nanook tries to physically consume a recorded voice, while the audience visually consumes his image on screen. Both acts involve interacting with media traces—film emulsion or record grooves—to reconstruct an absent reality.
This was not authentic ethnographic recording. When Flaherty made his film, fur prices were high, and the Inuit he filmed used guns, knew about gramophones, and wore Western clothing. Scholar Fatimah Toby Rony notes they "certainly were not vanishing." Yet Flaherty believed fantasies of authenticity were more truthful than messy reality. He asked his actors to wear outdated traditional clothing. Nanook's on-screen wife and children were not related to Allakariallak but were cast for their looks. Most scenes were scripted. Flaherty told Allakariallak, "the picture of you hunting the iviuk [walrus] that I want, and not their meat." Allakariallak agreed, saying, "the aggie [film] will come first." The igloo scene required special construction because Flaherty's camera could not fit inside a standard one. After several collapsed attempts, they built a large, open, semicircular igloo—essentially a three-wall set—to allow filming.
Some production challenges were life-threatening. Flaherty and his assistant joined Allakariallak on an eight-week, six-hundred-mile trip to hunt a polar bear. They never found a bear, ran out of food, and nearly froze. Days featured sundogs—bright spots flanking the sun—and nights could reach forty degrees below zero. Flaherty's diary entries grew sparse, repeating "no seals." Desperate, they burned eight hundred feet of film to boil water for tea. The men survived, though a husky named Tooktoo did not.
When filming ended, Flaherty sailed south. He watched as Allakariallak, having kayaked after him, turned back toward his home shore. By the film's release, Flaherty reported via an intertitle that "Nanook" had starved to death two years later while hunting deer (scholars suspect he died from an introduced illness). This ending reinforces the film's complicated subtitle. It is a story of life and love, but the "actual arctic" it portrays was a crafted fantasy of the past. In eulogizing Allakariallak, Flaherty severs the connection between the documentary and the still-living community, leaving only a preserved image on screen.
The influence of Nanook of the North is immense. Fatimah Toby Rony writes it has been called "the first documentary film, the first ethnographic film, as well as the first art film." It launched Flaherty's career, leading to films like Moana (1926) and Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931). It became a cultural phenomenon; Flaherty once found an "Eskimo Pie" in Berlin called a 'Nanuk' with Nanook's face on the wrapper.
This legacy is not without controversy. Kiowa/Mohawk filmmaker Adam Piron reflects on the damage caused by policies built on visual misrepresentation and "salvage ethnography"—the practice of recording cultures presumed to be vanishing. "For Indigenous artists," Piron writes, "there’s an added weight to engaging with the moving image because we know the cost of carelessness." Nanook of the North remains a foundational yet deeply problematic work, a testament to both the power of cinema and the perils of its illusions.