'Nanook of the North' set for Jakarta

By Gotot Prakosa

JAKARTA (JP): Local moviegoers will have the chance to enjoy ethnographic film week from April 27 to April 29 at Lingkar Budaya on Jl. Tanjung, Central Jakarta.

The cultural center screens selected films every month. This week, documentary films such as Nanook of the North, Spirit of Zen, Tana Toraja and The Slope of Tambora will be featured.

Ethnographic films are about the life and culture of an ethnic group. Watching these films is like reading a science book about an ethnic group living in an isolated place. They show you how the people deal with nature to survive.

Particularly fascinating is Nanook of the North made by Robert J. Flaherty in 1922. About the life of Inuit living at the North Pole, the film was the first highly popular ethnographic film. It is considered a pioneer of documentary films.

Over the course of time, documentary films have become specialized in subjects such as ethnography, anthropology, propaganda, wildlife, community leaders, etc.

The story behind the making of Nanook of the North, which will be screened on April 29 at 7 p.m., is itself a sensation. In 1910, at the age of 26, Flaherty followed in his father's footsteps to become an explorer.

He obtained the funding from Sir William Mackenzie, who built railway tracks that connected western Canada and Hudson Bay, a seaport and a gate to Europe. The railway project would allow faster transportation of goods from Europe to Canada.

In 1913, as he prepared for his third trip to northern Canada, Mackenzie told Flaherty, "You are going into interesting country, strange people, animals and all that? Why don't you include in your outfit a camera for making films?"

Flaherty loved the idea. He bought a light Bell & Howell camera and lighting and film processing equipment. He also took a three-week cinematography course in New York.

He shot the life of the Inuit during his expedition from 1914 to 1915. It turned out that the filmmaking fascinated him more than the expedition.

The results and responses were just as remarkable. The director of the Ontario Museum of Archeology, CT Currelly, described the work as the most interesting recorded story about the Inuit.

Despite all the favorable comments, Flaherty did not intend to release the film to the public before he further edited it.

As he was preparing to send his film to New York in 1916, he accidentally dropped his cigarette and set the film on fire. The 30,000 feet of film was destroyed. The incident caused a large fire accompanied by huge explosions. At the time, highly inflammable nitrate was used in films. Flaherty was badly injured and hospitalized for several weeks.

The accident did not deter him. He decided to make another film about the Inuit which was different from the lost one. So he approached sponsors showing the remaining printouts of the previous film.

But finding sponsorship was not easy as World War I was still raging. After the war was over, he eventually got financial assistance from a company called Revillon Freres. Flaherty obtained US$500 in monthly salary, $13,000 for equipment and a loan of $3,000 from Port Harrison for six months of shooting.

For this film, he knew what he wanted to do and how to do it. He confined his filming to the Itivmuit tribe. He chose a man named Nanook to become the central figure in his film. Nanook was portrayed doing various activities: building an igloo, playing the gramophone and hunting for polar bears on his dog-drawn cart.

Nanook of the North was ready for distribution in 1922. Paramount, the largest American film company at that time, refused it on the grounds that people were not interested in the Inuit and they would not go to the North Pole to see the Inuit because the strange people wore overly thick coats.

Pathe, a French film company, accepted the film for worldwide distribution. The premier at New York's Capitol Theater on June 11, 1922, was a success.

The New York Times gave the film a positive review and so did Robert E. Sherwood, who wrote that Nanook of the North was the pioneer of ethnographic films.

The film became a blockbuster in the U.S. and enjoyed popularity elsewhere in the world. The film that cost $53,000 to make became a huge moneymaker.

Stunned by the success, Jesse Lasky of Paramount asked Flaherty to make another ethnographic film like Nanook. Then the company made films about the lives of tribespeople in the Pacific.

When world filmmakers were gathered at an international film festival in Mannheim in 1964, they voted Nanook one of the best films of all time. It deserved the honor.