ABSTRACT
Robert Flaherty, a man born into indubitably patriarchal times, and history’s most legitimate claimant to the nowadays rather odious but
unavoidable designation ‘Father of Documentary’, grew up on the Canadian border, becoming both a successful mineral prospector and a keen explorer of foreign lands – especially the vast, barren plains lying due north. In his late 30s, he took to combining his interest in travel
with a burgeoning desire to record these lengthy expeditions and communicate a mutual affection for the indigenous people he had met and befriended. On the suggestion of Sir William Mackenzie, Flaherty took a motion-picture camera to the Arctic, thereupon enthusiastically
shooting 70,000 feet of film; however, these efforts would go up in flames in the relative safety of a Toronto editing facility, as the result of a dropped cigarette. ‘I wasn’t sorry’, he recalled: ‘It was a bad film; it was dull – it was little more than a travelogue. I had learned to explore,
I had not learned to reveal’ (in Flaherty 1972: 13). Flaherty’s carelessness was propitious; the cigarette sparked not only the destruction of mediocre footage, but also by extension a determination that would see
Flaherty, this time amply funded by French fur company Revillon Frères, return to the Inuit of Hudson Bay and bring back a work of
engaging dramatic impetus – a contrived, composed and compromised tale of a family’s struggle against the elements – whose arrangement borrowed ingeniously from contemporaneous fiction cinema.
