Nanook of the North (1922) on Netflix
NR19221h 18mDocumentary
Nanook, an Itivimuit hunter, lives with his wife Nyla and their children on the shore of Hudson's Bay in Quebec. Seal, walrus and salmon must be hunted through ice and open water.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb7.6/1014,544 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Nanook and his family belong to the Itivimuit, among roughly three hundred nomadic Inuit who live in the Ungava region along the eastern shore of Hudson's Bay, an area about the size of England. Salmon, seal and walrus are their main foods, and other animals of the north also supply meat, hides and fur. The family travels by kayak in summer and by dog sled in winter, and at set trading posts they barter their furs with white traders. In winter, ice along the shore makes the water and the food under it harder to reach, while snow and ice give the people material for igloos and help the men find seals. Traveling to the trading post in spring, Nanook brings the furs he has collected through the winter, and there he encounters a gramophone.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Nanook of the North (1922)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While shooting Arctic footage, Robert J. Flaherty dropped a cigarette onto his original camera negative, highly flammable nitrate stock, and lost 30,000 feet of film. He went back north to start over, refocusing on a single Inuit family.
- The film's famous igloo interiors could not be shot in a real igloo: a dome big enough for the camera collapsed, and one that held up was too dark, so Flaherty shot inside a special three-walled igloo built for his bulky camera.
- The hunter the film calls Nanook was really named Allakariallak; Flaherty chose "Nanook", meaning "polar bear" in Inuktitut mythology, because its seeming genuineness made it more marketable. The woman presented as Nanook's wife was not his wife.
- The trading-post scene in which Nanook bites a gramophone record was entirely scripted, and Allakariallak knew perfectly well what a gramophone was; the joke was played at his supposed naivete.
- Nanook of the North was the first feature-length documentary to achieve commercial success, proving the genre could be financially viable and inspiring many later films.
- In 1989 the film was among the first group of 25 films picked by the Library of Congress for the United States National Film Registry, cited as culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.
