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Who Has the Last Laugh? Nanook of the North and

Some New Thoughts on an Old Classic

Anna Grimshaw

To cite this article: Anna Grimshaw (2014) Who Has the Last Laugh? Nanook�of�the�North
and Some New Thoughts on an Old Classic, Visual Anthropology, 27:5, 421-435, DOI:
10.1080/08949468.2014.950088

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Visual Anthropology, 27: 421–435, 2014
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online
DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2014.950088

Who Has the Last Laugh? Nanook of the

North and Some New Thoughts on an
Old Classic
Anna Grimshaw

Since its release in 1922 Nanook of the North has remained at the heart of debates in
documentary and ethnographic cinema. Long considered a foundational work,
Flaherty’s film has been hailed and disparaged in equal measure. After an absence
of several years, I returned to a viewing of Nanook and found myself surprised by
what I saw. Drawing on the work of early cinema historians, I seek here to challenge
contemporary critiques and articulate a case for a new reading of the film.

Is it possible to say anything new about Flaherty’s classic film, Nanook of the
North? Long considered a foundational work in the histories of documentary
and ethnographic cinema, it has for almost a century endured as a focus of much
critical attention. Since its release in 1922, the film has been hailed and dispar-
aged in equal measure. After a lapse of several years I returned to a viewing
of the film and found myself surprised by what I saw. I experienced the curious
sense of seeing the work as if for the first time. This discovery was heightened by
reading commentaries on Nanook published in the past two decades, since it
seemed difficult to reconcile what I noticed in my re-viewing with the critical
responses to Flaherty’s film.
In this essay, I am interested in looking more closely at the features of this film
that appeared most striking to me in my latest encounter with it. Drawing on
work in early cinema history, I explore here the interpretive disjunction between
the techniques that I now see at the heart of the work and the different ways that
writers on Flaherty have understood them. I am interested in particular in new
insights that might follow from considering Nanook of the North as an example
of what Gunning [1986] has called ‘‘a cinema of attractions.’’ How might this
designation serve as a basis for re-evaluating the film’s significance in the
histories of documentary and ethnographic cinema?

ANNA GRIMSHAW is an anthropologist and filmmaker who teaches at Emory University. She
is the author of The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology [2001]
and co-author (with Amanda Ravetz) of Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film
and the Exploration of Social Life [2009]. She recently completed a four-part film series,
Mr. Coperthwaite: A Life in the Maine Woods [2012], distributed by Berkeley Media and
reviewed in this issue of Visual Anthropology. E-mail: agrimsh@emory.edu

421
422 A. Grimshaw

After a gap of several years, I decided to return to familiar teaching ground

and offer a graduate course in the history of ethnographic cinema. Not surpris-
ingly, one of the key works in my syllabus was Flaherty’s classic. I assigned
the film along with a number of commentaries—most notably those by Winston
[1995], Rothman [1996], Rony [1996], Huhndorf [2000], Ruby [2000] and Marcus
[2006]. When I first met the class, I reminded the students that they should
always watch the assigned film and make detailed notes on its distinctive fea-
tures and techniques before they engaged with the critical literature associated
with it. In this way, they should make their own discoveries in the film rather
than have their interpretation of it shaped and prematurely foreclosed by the
established commentary. I gave myself the same advice.
When I watched the film again for the first time in almost three years, I was
taken aback. There were a number of aspects to the work that I was surprised
to discover—though they had of course been there all along. Although I had pre-
viously written about Flaherty and his approach in the context of 1920s anthro-
pology [Grimshaw 2001] and, during the course of that work, read countless
critical essays, I had, it seemed, overlooked what now stared me in the face.
But I quickly realized I was not alone in my failure to actually see the film, since
once I moved to consider the selected commentaries I had assigned to the class I
found that here too there was often a lack of careful critical engagement with
the work itself. All too often it seemed to be folded into analytical frameworks
that sacrificed particular details in favor of using the film to support a general
argument.
In the narrative that follows, I begin by reviewing a number of essays pub-
lished since the mid-1990s on this film. I trace the different ways it has been
employed in debates about Flaherty, and the complex politics associated with
images of Arctic peoples in the Western imagination. In examining this commen-
tary my intention is to provide a context for my own revised reading of Nanook of
the North. This reading is built around a renewed attention to the film’s distinc-
tive cinematic features. Paying close attention to Flaherty’s camera style, his use
of intertitles, scene construction and narrative structure, I explore the kind of
engagement that such techniques foster between subjects, filmmaker and audi-
ence. These details are intended to serve as a point of departure in rethinking
some aspects of Flaherty’s approach as a filmmaker and its significance for
contemporary debates in documentary and ethnographic cinema.

FLAHERTY AND THE POLITICS OF THE ARCTIC

For close to a century, Nanook of the North has been an important focus of atten-
tion for filmmakers and critics alike. At first, Flaherty was celebrated for his role
in the generation of a new cinematic form, the documentary. Although John
Grierson coined the term ‘‘documentary’’ in relation to Flaherty’s 1926 film,
Moana, it was Nanook of the North that is most often understood to represent
the significant breakthrough, offering audiences in Europe and North America
a feature-length representation of ‘‘real life’’ on screen. In place of a studio-based
drama, Flaherty took his camera out into the world and discovered a novel
 Who Has the Last Laugh? 423

subject matter—the struggle of man against nature—in a series of far-flung exotic

landscapes. If critics first celebrated the humanism of Flaherty’s cinema, its
patient and careful exploration of Inuit (and later, Samoan) culture, they subse-
quently expressed dissatisfaction with his idealization and elaborate staging of
native life, and his apparent flight from the complexities of the times in which
he worked. Increasingly, as expectations with respect to documentary practice
changed, Flaherty’s approach seemed archaic. It came to be seen as an evasion,
or worse a deceptive representation, of cultural worlds that no longer existed
or indeed had ever existed.1
Despite—or rather because of—a long history of critical ambivalence,
Flaherty’s work has remained central to debates in documentary and ethno-
graphic cinema. With each successive generation of scholars and filmmakers a
different interpretive framework has been brought to bear on his classic films,
especially this one. Over the last couple of decades, a postcolonial perspective
has emerged in response to Flaherty’s work. First articulated by Winston [1995],
it found expression in different ways and with different emphases through the
writings of Rothman [1996] and Rony [1996], and more recently Huhndorf
[2000] and Marcus [2006]. This body of critical work has shaped contemporary
understandings of Flaherty and it functions as an important context for my
own renewed engagement with Nanook.
Winston’s scathing critique of Flaherty was part of a broader investigation of
the problematic status of documentary cinema. Characterizing Flaherty as an
‘‘imperial filmmaker’’ who, unlike Kipling, got away with it, Winston sought
to counter the earlier critical silence surrounding this work. If, as he suggested,
previous commentators tended to avoid the political implications of Flaherty’s
practice, Winston by contrast made these issues central to his reading of Nanook.
In particular, he interpreted the film as expressive of an ‘‘explorer stance,’’
noting: ‘‘Flaherty was a child of the last age of imperial expansion, and beneath
the veneer of sympathy and understanding for the people he filmed there is
nothing but the strong whiff of paternalism and prejudice’’ [1995: 20]. Winston
continued, ‘‘The major thrust of his films lies in the universalization of capitalist
relations to other cultures. That is the essence of their imperialism’’ [ibid.: 21].
Publishing a year later, Rothman also took up the question of how Flaherty’s
relationship with his film subjects was shaped by the specific historical moment
of the encounter—one deeply marked by the increasing encroachment of
Western culture on the cultures and peoples of the Arctic. His essay on Nanook
of the North appeared in his book Documentary Film Classics [1996]. As that title
suggests, Rothman’s primary interest was not in a general history of documen-
tary or in questions about the problematic status of the genre’s truth claims.
Instead he pursued a different approach, selecting a handful of key films so as
to look closely at the distinctive ways particular filmmakers engaged the
world—namely, how the world was confronted and refracted through the cam-
era. In the case of Nanook, Rothman was especially intrigued by the shifting
dynamic between Flaherty and his Inuit collaborators. Through the selection of
contrasting scenes, the film’s opening, the visit to the trading post and the walrus
hunt, Rothman tracked the ambivalence of Flaherty toward his central character,
Nanook (not his real name). In particular, Rothman drew attention to the
424 A. Grimshaw

contradictory nature of Flaherty’s filmmaking practice as he oscillated between

using his camera to acknowledge and to disavow a shared humanism with his
subjects.
The centrality of history and politics to any understanding of this film was
decisively underscored by the critical writing that followed Winston’s and
Rothman’s commentaries. Most prominent, and frequently cited, is Fatimah
Rony’s The Third Eye [1996], a wide-ranging study of the intersections of anthro-
pology, race, film and popular culture at the turn of the 20th century. Lambasting
what she saw as a refusal by academic anthropologists and ethnographic film-
makers to move away from discourses of ‘‘authenticity’’ in their evaluation of
Flaherty, Rony proposed ‘‘taxidermy’’ as a key concept in understanding the
exploitative and predatory nature of Flaherty’s project. By this term she referred
to the filmmaker’s attempt ‘‘to make that which is dead look as if it were still
living’’ [ibid.: 101]—an impulse, she suggested, that was characteristic of late
19th- and early 20th-century representations of native people and expressed
paradoxically both the timelessness of traditional cultures and their inexorable
decay. According to Rony, Flaherty’s Inuit world was one predicated on the
construction of an ‘‘ethnographic present’’ in which its subjects were presented
without artifice—as people of nature, authentic, primitive, resourceful, inde-
pendent. In all their nakedness and lack of guile, they were ready to be
‘‘scopically possessed’’ by the camera [ibid.: 102]. She noted that such images
of Arctic people were widely propagated by white explorers of the time. But
Flaherty’s creation of the character, Nanook, formed what was a stock image,
endlessly reproduced in museums, world fairs and other forms of late 19th-
century visual culture, to new heights of popularity and commercial success.
This theoretical framework provides the foundation for Rony’s subsequent
discussion of Nanook. Her interpretation of the film is built around what she
understands to be a belittling of Nanook—Flaherty’s emphasis on the body
and gestures of his subjects and their presentation as childlike, comic figures.
From the film’s opening through to the much-discussed encounter with the white
trader and subsequent scenes of hunting and the struggle for survival in a harsh,
forbidding landscape, Rony points to the voyeurism of Flaherty’s camera and his
creation of an ahistorical world from which all contentious political issues have
been successfully banished.
Specifically, Rony takes issue with the much-vaunted collaborative nature of
Flaherty’s filming endeavor. Here she draws a parallel with the rhetoric of partici-
pant observation that authenticated the new fieldwork-based ethnographies of
Malinowski and his contemporaries and quickly became enshrined at the heart
of modern anthropology. But Rony is skeptical of these sorts of rhetorical claim
and expressed doubt about the participatory nature of Flaherty’s filmmaking
practice. In the absence of indigenous evidence we have, she insisted, only his
word for it [ibid.: 118]. For Rony, the film has very different resonances for Inuit
and Western audiences. But more than this, for the histories of documentary and
ethnographic cinema its symbolic weight can hardly be over-estimated. She writes:
‘‘it represents the Garden of Eden, the perfect relationship between filmmaker and
subject, the ‘‘innocent eye,’’ a search for realism that was not just inscription, but
which made the dead look alive and the living look dead’’ [ibid.: 126].
 Who Has the Last Laugh? 425

Huhndorf’s essay, published a few years later [2000], also locates Nanook of the
North within the broader history of engagement between white explorers and
Arctic peoples. In a lengthy introduction to the film, Huhndorf draws attention
to the scientific and popular fascination with Arctic Natives at the end of the
19th century and charts the tragic consequences that characterized many of these
encounters—in particular, she considers the fate of Minik and a group of
‘‘Eskimo’’ subjects brought to New York in 1897 for public display by Robert
Peary and Franz Boas. For Huhndorf, Flaherty’s film represented a highpoint
in this cultural moment—its runaway commercial success and the resulting
‘‘Nanookamania,’’ an expression of complex ideas about race, gender and col-
onial power. The film embodied the dominant and yet contradictory impulses
of the interwar era—namely, a rapacious colonial appropriation of the Arctic
and a celebration of an imaginative, pristine wilderness inhabited by simple,
cheerful, ‘‘happy-go-lucky Eskimos.’’
Although Flaherty has often been viewed as the more acceptable face of Arctic
exploration, Huhndorf argues differently, suggesting that commentators have too
often overlooked or accepted at face value the ‘‘innocence’’ of his work [ibid.: 133].
Although Nanook might not overtly denigrate its subjects, Huhndorf claims that
Flaherty’s film nevertheless re-inscribed prevailing notions relating to the ‘‘primi-
tive’’—specifically Native peoples’ proximity to nature and their occupation of a
timeless present-becoming-past from which all history and evidence of Western
contact have been erased. But, like Rony, Huhndorf is especially interested in
charting the gendered and racialized dimensions of Flaherty’s representation.
Her analysis of Nanook is built around what she sees as an objectifying approach
that foregrounds the gestures, behavior, bodies of Arctic subjects and, along
with the landscape, renders them in such a way as to implicate the viewer in
the filmmaker’s appropriating gaze.
A more recent critical reading of Nanook by Marcus [2006] utilizes ‘‘primal
drama’’ as a key interpretive frame for the film. In this way, Marcus seeks to link
Flaherty’s work to a broader literary and cinematic genre concerned with funda-
mental and universal questions—specifically, the relationship of man and nature,
and the struggle for survival. Marcus explains: ‘‘Primal narratives are necessarily
reductive to permit the viewer to confront issues of survival, sexuality, self-
sufficiency, exotic environments, and both the appeal and threat of the Other’’
[ibid.: 202]. In his discussion of the film he highlights the different ways that
Flaherty creates appealing characters and scenarios that allow Western audiences
to engage difference and yet acknowledge a shared humanity.
Crucial to Marcus’s reading of the film as ‘‘primal drama’’ is, of course, the
gender performances that Flaherty presents through the characters of Nanook
and Nyla. The film celebrates male dominance—Nanook is ‘‘man the hunter’’
whose creative ingenuity is able to protect and secure the well-being of the family
group. But significantly the film’s display of male prowess is devoid of
aggression: Nanook is never predatory or threatening but instead emerges
through the film as a strong, heroic figure able to inspire both admiration and
affection from his audiences.
The hybrid nature of the work, its combination of theater and documentary,
drama and everyday activities, performance and ‘‘real’’ lives, is understood by
426 A. Grimshaw

Marcus to be expressive of Flaherty’s ‘‘social activism,’’ his commitment to

presenting Inuit subjects not as specimens or oddities but rather as people with
personalities and humor. The remarkable success of this film was not perhaps
surprising, as Marcus points out, given its release in the aftermath of the Great
War. In the face of terrible violence, conflict and untold destruction, Flaherty
allowed his audiences to imagine a different future for humanity. He offered
them an image of a peaceful, integrated society distinguished by collaboration,
resourcefulness and good cheer. Survival in this world, as Marcus notes [ibid.:
210], depended not on force but on adaptability and improvisation.

RE-READING NANOOK OF THE NORTH

I have suggested that recent approaches toward the film have focused on the
political complexities of the moment in which Flaherty was creating his portrait
of Arctic people. If earlier commentators scanted some of the more contentious
aspects of the historical context that shaped this work, the later generation of wri-
ters (notably Winston, Rothman, Rony, Huhndorf and Marcus) made questions
of race, gender and power central to their interpretation of the film and to their
evaluation of Flaherty himself. But while important insights have, of course,
followed from the use of more contemporary analytical tools, I have found
Flaherty’s film to be much harder to read—indeed deceptively ambiguous—than
these commentators are willing to acknowledge.
All too often Nanook is used to support pre-existing positions rather than to
challenge them. The condemnation of Rony’s critique by Ruby [2000: 69] as
‘‘politically correct and superficial Flaherty bashing’’ is characteristically blunt
and perhaps overstates the problem, but he highlights an unease I had in my
own recent viewing of Nanook—the sense of a certain predictability in responses
to Flaherty’s work and a tendency to overlook or render unproblematic different
kinds of evidence offered within the work itself. Moreover Nanook tends to be
viewed through an interpretive lens that foregrounds narrative and evolutionary
progression in the evaluation of early forms. What is especially surprising among
the current generation of writers on Flaherty is their lack of engagement with
debates in film studies that have challenged many of these assumptions. These
debates about the nature of early cinema offer a new way of thinking about
Nanook—not least because they remind us of the importance of resisting easy
generalization in favor of a renewed focus on the details of the film itself. What
are these details? How might they form the basis for a fresh evaluation of
Flaherty’s techniques and the cinematic aesthetic of Nanook? How might they
complicate existing assumptions about the politics of Flaherty’s practice?
In the narrative that follows, I begin by looking carefully at the opening of the
film, since it is here that many of its essential features are established—
specifically Flaherty’s distinctive camera style, the interplay of image and text,
the construction of scenes, and the framing of a particular relationship between
Arctic subjects, filmmaker and audience. But, having highlighted some of the
broad contours of the work, I will look more closely at a handful of key
scenes—ones that have been much discussed over the years and yet whose
 Who Has the Last Laugh? 427

meaning is perhaps more open than many commentators have been willing to
acknowledge.
The film begins with a text: ‘‘The mysterious Barren lands—desolate,
boulder-strewn, wind-swept—illimitable spaces which top the world.’’ It is
followed by a long shot at eye level taken from a boat that moves slowly from
right to left across an Arctic landscape of ice, water and land. The slight
swell of the water disturbs the stillness of the camera and gives a lyrical
inflection to the image. Two pieces of text follow: the first describes the harshness
of a landscape in which lives ‘‘the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo’’; the
second offers a specific introduction to the subjects of the film—Nanook, his
family and a small community—and acknowledges their assistance in the
making of the film.2
Flaherty provides maps of the film’s location, and then one by one the main
characters of the film are presented. Nanook, ‘‘Chief of the Itivimuiks’’ known
‘‘as a great hunter through all Ungava,’’ is announced first. He appears in a
close-up shot, and although he is clearly aware of the camera, he does not directly
acknowledge it. Nyla, the Smiling One, comes next. She too is shown in close-up.
The shot encourages us to scrutinize her but she refuses engagement and instead
animatedly directs her attention toward something off-camera.
Through another short text Flaherty explains that Nanook and his family are
preparing for a summer journey and will travel downriver to the trading post
and fishing grounds. A kayak comes into view, paddled by Nanook. A wide shot
brings both background and foreground into play and, as Nanook approaches,
Flaherty tilts his camera to draw our attention to the disembarkation of his pas-
sengers. One by one they emerge, and continue to emerge, defying our belief that
a kayak can hold so many people—and a dog. Two more scenes follow: Nanook
shows us how he uses moss for fuel, and we watch sealskin being sewn onto the
kayak in preparation for the journey.
Within these initial ten minutes of the film we can identify characteristics that
mark the work as a whole. From the beginning we see Flaherty’s strategic use of
text. The intertitles are interspersed with carefully chosen scenes and serve to
introduce, rather than explain, what the viewer will see in the sequence that
ensues. This makes for a much more exploratory engagement by the viewer,
one that mirrors that of the filmmaker himself, whose camera is at all times
patient, interested and involved with what is unfolding before it. The text is mod-
est, often poetic, and it serves to set the stage for the presentation itself—one that
is highly theatrical.
The first images of Nanook and Nyla are exquisitely crafted. Flaherty’s camera
offers a close-up of his two primary subjects and, in this deliberate framing, they
appear as ‘‘characters.’’ Removed from any context or background, their faces are
the focus of our attention, holding our gaze while at the same time refusing to
directly acknowledge it. In this way Nanook and Nyla appear as both present
and absent, recognizably human and yet mysterious. Moreover there is a tangible
sense of the subjects’ pleasure in this presentation to, and by, the camera. There is
an element of flirtation with the camera and, by extension, the audience—a
playful self-consciousness that draws attention to itself. Nanook and Nyla are
knowingly on view.
428 A. Grimshaw

The sense of carefully crafted self-presentations continues to mark the

subsequent scenes that constitute the film’s opening—the arrival of the kayak,
the burning of moss and the sewing of sealskin. Here Flaherty underlines his
approach by working consistently with the distinctive techniques of text and
image that he established at the outset. It is an approach that explicitly stages—
the text sets the scene, the scene presents something (character and=or an activity),
and the individual scenes are self-contained, akin to short films in which a parti-
cular narrative is proposed and completed. But, above all, the characters and
activities are presented to the viewer in a theatrical manner—that is, their actions
and expressions are clearly directed toward the camera and, by extension, the
viewer. Flaherty’s camera is always positioned front and center, and it frames
whatever is unfolding as if it were a theatrical stage. People move in and out of
the frame, or move from background to foreground, and the action is carefully
positioned in full view of the audience. In the way Flaherty positions his camera
and how subjects engage it as they go about their tasks, it is clear that Arctic life is
being created for the purpose of filming.
If we examine three of Nanook’s later scenes—the visit to the trading post,
walrus hunting, and the building of the igloo—we find the same combination
of cinematic techniques. It serves to underscore a distinctive consistency and
coherence in Flaherty’s filmmaking approach. The visit to the trading post, the
scene most frequently highlighted by critics of Flaherty’s work, begins with the
arrival of Nanook and a small band of about twenty people at the white trader’s
post. Nanook’s prowess as a hunter is announced through text and the viewer is
told that, using only a harpoon, he has successfully killed fox, seal, walrus and
seven polar bears. One by one the skins are laid out to be bartered for beads
and candy. As with the previous scenes Flaherty’s camera is positioned in such
a way that people move in and out of the frame and are embedded within the
landscape. The image is dense with detail. Flaherty cuts to a closer medium shot
as attention shifts from the broader group of Inuit to the particular encounter
between Nanook and the trader. Nanook displays his dogs for the camera,
followed by Nyla who presents her baby to the viewer as though they are posing
for a formal studio portrait. But what is particularly notable about the develop-
ment of this scene is its tactility or haptic qualities—the human subjects are envel-
oped in fur, the baby’s naked body nestling among the skins, the small puppies
comfortably bedded down, even the trader strokes the huskie’s fur. This becomes
the context for Nanook’s examination of the gramophone.
This device stands clearly in the center of the shot, with Nyla, her baby,
Nanook and the trader carefully placed around it. Nyla and her baby are in
the background, Nanook is to the left of the machine, the trader to the right.
Nanook leans over to inspect the gramophone, talks with the trader, and turns
toward the camera while putting his ear to the machine. He laughs and looks
directly at Flaherty several times. Nanook and the trader shift positions, moving
closer to the gramophone but all the while ensuring that their interaction and the
machine itself remain visible to the camera. Nanook now inspects the record and
tentatively tests its surface with his teeth, turning a number of times toward the
camera as he does this. The scene ends with the banqueting of the children, both
of whom sit together facing the camera. Over-indulgence by Allegoo calls for
 Who Has the Last Laugh? 429

castor oil, and the trader dispenses it to the bemused satisfaction of the child.
Allegoo licks his lips, turns and leans over toward camera smiling.
A second emblematic scene, the seal hunting, comes much later in the film. It
too has many of the same cinematic qualities as can be found in the trading-post
encounter. It begins with a long, deep focus shot of Nanook walking from a
distant horizon toward the camera. A series of close medium shots follow as
he prepares to pierce a hole in the ice and wait for his prey. Almost immediately,
he begins to wrestle with his harpoon line, pulling here and there, struggling to
stand upright, falling down in a series of humorous clownish gags all unfolding
before the camera. Gradually other Inuit appear in the background and we watch
them slowly move forward until they surround Nanook and help him haul the
seal from the water. Again the subjects are positioned to face the camera and
the actions of Nanook and his fellow Inuit take place in the center of the frame.
The dismembering and eating of the seal are similarly filmed, though as the scene
unfolds Flaherty introduces a new drama through the use of an intercutting tech-
nique that juxtaposes images of Nanook and his fellow Inuit with hungry dogs
and children playing tug-of-war. The camera position however remains consist-
ent across these different shots. It is at the center of the action and with attention
explicitly directed toward it.
Finally the much-loved building of the igloo scene underscores the cinematic
approach that characterizes the work as a whole. Here too from the outset we
are aware that actions are being staged for the purpose of the film itself—both
by the positioning of the camera and the lively and explicit engagement with it
by the Inuit collaborators. The scene comprises a series of witty and clever the-
atrical flourishes by Nanook that not only draw attention to the camera but also
to what it can do. Beginning with his good-humored glances at Flaherty as he
licks the knife to be used for cutting snow blocks, to his humorous appearance
from within the igloo, to his polishing of the window, this scene is marked by
Nanook’s playful relationship with filmmaker and audience alike. Again,
through a series of very carefully framed medium shots, Flaherty’s camera pre-
serves what the critic André Bazin [1967: 50] subsequently hailed as ‘‘the spatial
unity of an event’’—that is, there is a refusal to fragment, to break up the scene
into separate elements that are then recombined to create dramatic tension
through editing. Instead Flaherty works with long, unbroken shots that generate
webs of connection between characters, their actions and context.

NANOOK OF THE NORTH AND THE CINEMA OF ATTRACTIONS

Although I have focused on a handful of scenes my purpose in highlighting their
key cinematic features is to suggest that they are emblematic of the work as a
whole. If we look at other parts of the film we can see that there is a remarkable
consistency in Flaherty’s approach. Crucial to it is his careful positioning of the
camera. The camera is placed front and center and, aside from simple pans
and tilts, it remains motionless while action unfolds around it. But despite the
fixity of the camera there is nothing anonymous or disengaged about it; indeed,
quite the reverse. There is a high level of lively interaction between the subjects
430 A. Grimshaw

and the filmmaker. Flaherty’s self-conscious framing and his interest in holding
together background and foreground, context and action, yields complex, den-
sely constructed images that have some of the characteristics of still photography.
His classic long shots are an expression of an unusually patient and curious
camera. Along with the judicious use of close-ups, all of these techniques work
together to enhance what, following the work of early cinema historians, we
can call the film’s pronounced ‘‘exhibitionist’’ character—that is, the notion of life
being staged and shown off for and by the camera.
Nanook of the North comprises a succession of discrete scenes, and the transition
between them is effected through the movement of Nanook and his family from
one stage of their journey to another. Although this kind of narrative structure
can be interpreted as simple and rather under-developed, I suggest that we think
of it not as evidence of Flaherty’s inability to grasp more advanced cinematic
forms but a deliberate choice by the filmmaker, one that is consistent with the
aesthetic character of the work as a whole. For, as a strategy, it emphasizes the
internal dynamic of individual scenes over the movement between them and,
in this way, it serves to underline issues of performance and display that are
central to Flaherty’s endeavor.
Debates among film historians about different forms of early cinema offer valu-
able insight into the kinds of technique that I have highlighted in my discussion of
this film. In particular, Gunning’s notion [1986] of a ‘‘cinema of attractions’’ brought
into sharp focus issues about different narrative techniques, camera styles and
modes of audience engagement during the first decades of the 20th century.3
Gunning’s intervention served to challenge the dominance in film studies of evol-
utionary models that foregrounded editing and narrative as crucial to the develop-
ment of cinematic language. In using the term ‘‘primitive’’ cinema, historians such
as Noel Burch [1986] had contrasted theatrical or tableau models of cinema with
what were considered more advanced narrative-based forms. It was argued that
the shift from ‘‘primitive’’ to narrative or classic cinema found expression in new
camera and editing styles, the development of ‘‘interiority’’ in film characters,
the centrality of storytelling, and crucially the displacement of the spectator from
a place front and center to a position of voyeurism on the margins.
Critics like Gunning however adopted a different approach toward under-
standing the diversity of early film forms. Drawing on Eisenstein’s notion of
‘‘attraction,’’ he sought to question both assumptions of a linear development
in cinematic language and the centrality of narrative or storytelling to the estab-
lished history of cinema. As Gunning pointed out, many early films were not
primarily organized around narrative but involved, as he put it, ‘‘presenting a
view’’—that is, displaying to audiences scenes whose purpose was designed to
arouse curiosity or astonishment [1993: 4]. The coining of the term ‘‘cinema of
attractions’’ by Gunning (and others) was intended to capture the distinctive
spontaneous or direct form of audience engagement that was a pronounced fea-
ture of many films produced at the beginning of the 20th century. Cutting across
the taken-for-granted division between reality-based Lumière and fantasy-based
Méliès films, film historians have increasingly been drawn not to what marked
them off as different but what fundamentally they shared: namely, their
pronounced exhibitionist qualities.
 Who Has the Last Laugh? 431

If film historians initially considered ‘‘primitive’’ cinema as a step on the way

to a more evolved narrative-based cinema, more recent scholarship following
Gunning has eschewed this sort of progressive narrative. In its place, there is
an increasing acknowledgment of a diversity of forms within early cinema—
forms understood to be reflective of parallel, rather than successive, approaches.
Indeed, as a number of critics have pointed out—not least Gunning [ibid.]—many
films were neither exclusively one kind of cinema nor the other but instead com-
bined aesthetic features associated with both ‘‘exhibitionist’’ and ‘‘narrative’’
modes. The balance between the two, however, shifts in significant ways once
documentary and ethnographic cinema, as ‘‘discourses of sobriety’’ [Nichols
1992], begin to take definitive shape. For the pronounced sensory and embodied
qualities, along with the direct address of exhibitionist cinema, were dislodged or
folded into an encompassing narrative that served to control and discipline its
affective excess.
Flaherty’s work is interesting to consider in the light of these ongoing debates
about early cinema and its different forms. One of Flaherty’s harshest critics,
Brian Winston, argues for the narrative innovations of Nanook of the North as
one of the few aspects of Flaherty’s legacy worth celebrating [1995: 99–100]. He
compares favorably Flaherty’s ability to craft a story from the materials of
observed reality with Edward Curtis’s clumsy imposition of an external narrative
in his 1914 film, In the Land of the War Canoes. But in his emphasis on the devel-
opment of storytelling, Winston overlooks those other features of Nanook that, in
significant ways, run counter to its narrative organization—namely its exhibition-
ist qualities. If, as I have suggested, we take the latter seriously and work more
carefully with the evidence of the film itself, it is possible to come to different
conclusions about Flaherty’s classic or, at least, reconsider taken-for-granted
assumptions about the politics and complex inter-subjectivities at the heart of
the film.
The exhibitionism of Nanook of the North was one of the aspects of the film that
struck me most forcefully in my recent viewing of the work. At every turn, it
seemed a classic example of ‘‘a cinema of attractions. ’’ Nanook manifested many
of the aesthetic features that Gunning [1986, 1989, 1993] and others have high-
lighted in their questioning of evolutionary or narrative-dominated interpreta-
tions of early forms. From the arrival scene of Nanook and his fellow Inuit, the
film comprises a succession of self-conscious presentations for the camera.
Following Gunning’s characterization [1989: 5] we can recognize that Flaherty’s
camera, in its stable and consistent placement, offers ‘‘a single point of view.’’
It is related to a particular kind of audience address, one that is predicated on
display or showing. Central to Nanook’s aesthetic is ‘‘direct address’’: the camera
is explicitly and repeatedly addressed by actions and gestures of the film’s
subjects. The viewer is openly acknowledged and engaged, indeed ‘‘attracted,’’
through a series of curiosity-arousing devices and surprises.
The emphasis in Nanook on scenes rather than shots is also a classic feature of a
cinema of attractions. Instead of interpreting it as a sign of Flaherty’s regression
as a filmmaker, his inability to embrace new editing and narrative techniques
associated with Griffith, Eisenstein and others, we can understand it as congruent
with, and crucial to, a different kind of cinematic aesthetic. Flaherty works with
432 A. Grimshaw

what Gunning [idem] calls ‘‘the space within the frame’’ as an integral part of the
film’s mode of address.
But in highlighting these different features, ones that are oriented toward
‘‘display’’ or ‘‘showing,’’ it may appear that I am merely confirming what several
of the contemporary critics such as Rony or Huhndorf have already pointed out:
namely, that Nanook is objectified and put on display by Flaherty to perform the
well-worn role of the ‘‘happy-go-lucky Eskimo.’’ I think the situation is more
ambiguous, however. In my own re-viewing of the film I was especially struck
by the way that Nanook engaged me as the viewer. As I watched, not only did
I feel that Allakariallak was deliberately performing the role of ‘‘the happy-go-
lucky Eskimo’’ but he was doing so knowingly—with a great deal of humor
and irony on his part. I began to feel that he was laughing at us laughing at
him. Perhaps it was our own foolishness or gullibility that was on display?

WHO HAS THE LAST LAUGH?

It may appear that I have belabored the details of this film—indeed I have. But
this has been an intentional manoeuver on my part, a response to the lack of sus-
tained critical engagement with the work itself. Even where commentators have
engaged the film’s details, there has been a tendency to place them in the service
of a pre-existing critical perspective rather than to question it. Given the amount
of attention paid to Nanook over the decades, I found this rather surprising. But
what happens if we put aside, at least temporarily, the historical and political
readings of the film that are predicated on the use of external frameworks and
re-focus attention on what happens within the film itself? To take this position
might seem naı̈ve, perverse even, but a shift of perspective away from the larger
questions to a more careful evaluation of the film itself has the potential to open
different insights—not least into the complex inter-subjective relationships at the
heart of the work. Moreover, it lays the foundation for a new understanding of
ethnographic cinema and its history.
At the end of her essay on Nanook, Huhndorf returns to that pivotal scene in
the film, the visit to the white trader. Finally she allows a small glimmer of doubt
to enter into what has hitherto been a negative portrayal of Flaherty and his place
within the troubled history of Western exploitation of the Arctic and its peoples.
Departing from the familiar critique that views the film’s Inuit subjects as
deliberately set up for ridicule by Flaherty, Huhndorf [2000: 148] suggests that
perhaps the last word, indeed the last laugh, belongs to Nanook. To allow for
such a possibility is, crucially, to acknowledge his agency, something that, ironi-
cally, is precluded in many of the political readings of the film. But as I have
endeavored to show in this essay, the agency of Nanook is not only discernible
in the scene at the trading post. It is manifest in every scene of the film, a work
comprised of a series of displays by Nanook for the camera and embodied in the
wit and humor with which he performs his different roles. By utilizing Gunning’s
notion of a cinema of attractions, we can recognize the centrality of direct address
or display to Nanook and the playful engagement between the film’s subjects and
audience. Far from being duped or coerced by Flaherty, the evidence of the film
 Who Has the Last Laugh? 433

suggests otherwise—namely, that Nanook and his fellow actors knowingly craft
themselves into the kind of stock characters characteristic of turn of the 20th
century popular culture. In so doing, they can barely contain their hilarity as they
perform the ‘‘happy-go-lucky Eskimo,’’ a satire on the Western fantasy of Arctic
peoples.
One of the reasons for the endless fascination of Nanook of the North is its lack of
critical resolution. However hard we try as commentators to have the final word,
the film’s subjects continue to elude us. In this way, Flaherty’s classic work serves
as an important reminder to contemporary viewers of the complex question of
agency and where it lies in the space between subjects, audiences and filmmaker.
But it also reminds us of the inability of discursive frameworks to encompass
cinematic modes of representation.
Understood as an example of a cinema of attractions, Nanook opens up a new
interpretive perspective on the history of ethnographic cinema. If we no longer
approach the latter according to an evolutionary or progressive framework, we
can see Flaherty’s film as less about a breakthrough—the beginnings of story-
telling or narrative in the depiction of ‘‘real lives’’ on film—and more as a con-
tinuation of Haddon’s Torres Strait enterprise [Henley 2013]. For here in the
four short pieces that have survived from the 1898 Cambridge Expedition,
Haddon hints at a different kind of inquiry that the camera makes possible. As
Griffiths [2002: 141–142] has pointed out, the Torres Strait films, largely ignored
in histories of ethnographic cinema, are notable for their lyrical, performative and
haptic qualities. Moreover, she suggests that their distinctive address—a direct,
embodied and sensory engagement of the viewer—raises problems for emerging
conceptions of anthropological knowledge and scientific inquiry in the early
decades of the 20th century.
If we now view the work of Haddon and Flaherty as constituting what
we might call ‘‘an ethnographic cinema of attractions,’’ it can be seen not as
‘‘primitive’’ or a nascent form. Instead it represents an alternative to narrative-
based approaches toward the exploration of social life and, as such, it is con-
cerned with different ways of being and knowing the world. The embodied
and sensory dimensions of the cinematic encounter, along with the ‘‘exhibition-
ist’’ aesthetic, were largely suppressed in the subsequent history of ethnographic
cinema. Storytelling became consolidated as the genre’s dominant paradigm.
Today, however, there is new interest in precisely those very qualities of the
medium that were hitherto considered ‘‘primitive’’ or simply embarrassing.
The sensory turn in anthropology and film studies has brought questions con-
cerning alternative or non-narrative forms of early cinema into new focus. Nanook
of the North is a key work in this regard.

NOTES
1. See, in particular, Barsam [1988], Calder-Marshall et al. [1963], and Vaughan [1960].
2. In the discussion that follows, I use the film’s character names to suggest the theatrical,
as opposed to the ‘‘real,’’ nature of this cinematic enterprise.
3. The key writings, debates and more recent commentaries connected with ‘‘cinema of
attractions’’ can be found in Elsaesser [1990] and, more recently, Strauven [2006].
434 A. Grimshaw

Gunning sets out his position in a series of essays beginning [1986], and developed
further in [1989, 1993].

REFERENCES
Barsam, Richard
1988 The Vision of Robert Flaherty: The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Bazin, André
1967 What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Selected and translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Burch, Noël
1986 Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach. In Narrative-Apparatus-Ideology.
Phil Rosen, ed. Pp. 483–506. New York: Columbia University Press.
Calder-Marshall, Arthur, et al.
1963 The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert Flaherty. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Elsaesser, Thomas (ed.)
1990 Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative. London: British Film Institute.
Griffiths, Alison
2002 Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology and Turn of the Century Visual Culture. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Grimshaw, Anna
2001 The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gunning, Tom
1986 The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde. Wide Angle,
8(3–4): 63–70.
1989 ‘‘Primitive’’ Cinema—A Frame-up? or The Trick’s on Us. Cinema Journal, 28(2): 3–12.
1993 ‘‘Now You See It, Now You Don’t’’: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions. The
Velvet Light Trap, 32: 3–12.
Henley, Paul
2013 Thick Inscription and the Unwitting Witness: Reading the Films of Arthur Haddon and
Baldwin Spencer. Visual Anthropology, 26(5): 383–429.
Huhndorf, Shari
2000 Nanook and His Contemporaries: Imagining Eskimos in American Culture, 1897–1922.
Critical Inquiry, 27: 122–148.
Marcus, Alan
2006 Nanook of the North as Primal Drama. Visual Anthropology, 19(3–4): 201–222.
Nichols, Bill
1992 Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Rony, Fatimah Tobing
1996 The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC, and London: Duke
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Rothman, William
1996 Documentary Film Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ruby, Jay
2000 Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago and London: University of
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Strauven, Wanda (ed.)
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 Who Has the Last Laugh? 435

Winston, Brian
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Institute.

FILMOGRAPHY
Curtis, Edward
1914 In the Land of the War Canoes. San Francisco: Edward S. Curtis; silent film, English intertitles;
b & w, 47 mins.
Flaherty, Robert J.
1922 Nanook of the North: A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic. Montreal: Révillon Frères;
silent film, English intertitles; b & w, 79 mins.; budget $53,000.
1926 Moana, a Romance of the Golden Age. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures; silent film, b & w,
85 mins.