ABSTRACT
Robert Flaherty, a prospector filming in the Canadian Arctic, failed in his earliest attempts to move beyond what he described as “a scene of this and a scene of that . . . no story” (Christopher, 2005, p. 322); but Headhunters showed him how. In 1920-1, with specialized technology (hand-cranked Akeley cameras specially designed for use in the wild), Flaherty filmed a dramatic 20-yearold true Inuit story of survival. He cast a trapper, Allakarialuk, renamed for the film “Nanook,” as the hero of his reconstruction of this tale. Leaving Curtis’s
fictional storytelling behind, Flaherty’s breakthrough was to realize that footage of “real” people in real (even reconstructed “real”) situations could be edited into an exciting narrative, essentially through intertitles. The film, which Flaherty not only shot but also, with the help of the Inuit, developed in the Arctic, was Nanook of the North. It is, conventionally, considered as the first documentary and it was an amazing commercial success. A brief vogue for dramatized features “of the travelogue type” followed (e.g. Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, 1926, shot in Persia by Ernest Schoedsack and Merian Cooper).
