Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

bscrivener-50810 Nanook of the North is a 1922 silent documentary film, directed and produced by Robert J. Flaherty. Nanook of the North depicts the life of an Inuit family living near Hudson Bay in Quebec, Canada. The documentary takes us through various events that Inuits deal with in everyday life, such as hunting, dwelling and scaling the cold, barren Arctic wasteland. Nanook of the North shows us the hardships and constant fight for survival in the wilderness and shows us a very unique society these types of people live in. Flaherty's camera-work is magnificent, even in the cold plains of the Arctic, the documentary runs smoothly and feels crisp and perfected with a beautiful composition of classic melodies to break the silence and add tension when necessary. While the film runs smooth and does its purpose from a filmmaking point of view perfectly, Nanook of the North has at times been panned for being staged and forced in its production. Many claim is portrays a false image of Inuit life during its time, as many advancements had taken place in Inuit culture at the time of filming. Even names and events were faked to seemingly add drama and suspense. This realisation has often deterred many from the film, despite Flaherty claiming his intention was to portray traditional life of the Inuit people before Western influence. Overall, Nanook of the North is a hugely influential docudrama film with an intriguing look into traditional Inuit life, with beautiful harmonious melodies and crisp, clear camera-work, a hugely interesting and enjoyable film, with a slight sense of unfortunate doubt due to the controversies surrounding its production. 9/10

pyrocitor Affectionately remembered as "the first real documentary" since the work of the Lumière brothers as well as arguably the first feature length film, Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North marks a remarkable fusion of intrepid anthropological chronicling of a way of life unknown to the general public at the time of its release, yet tweaked with shrewd cinematic manipulation. Whittling countless hours of footage into a compact 80 minutes, Flaherty cobbles together his footage (both real and staged) into a loose narrative following the hardships and rewarding moments of Inuit life, as focalized through chosen protagonist 'Nanook'. Flaherty's unobtrusive style is so engrossing and convincing that it is easy to overlook the recognition that real life would hardly 'flow' in such a conveniently paced Hollywood style narrative, thus educating mass audiences on unfamiliar material in a more familiar, palatable fashion.What is surprising is, rather than depicting Nanook and his family as savages in a spirit more keeping with his time, Flaherty goes to great pains to stress the gentleness, resourcefulness and humour of the Inuit. Introducing Nanook and his family through heroic close-ups of them beaming at the camera, Flaherty instantly commands the support and sympathies of the audience, further garnering it through subjecting them to the series of perilous natural challenges undergone regularly by Nanook and his family. Through crafty yet subtle editing, Flaherty turns potentially dreary footage into exhilarating and captivating, with particular standouts being Nanook, talked up as a singular hero, undergoing devastatingly cinematic walrus and seal hunts and the horrifyingly beautiful spectacle of ferocious winds ravaging plains of snow at dusk in an exquisite, lingering long shot, still gripping even more than eighty years after the fact. Equally, Flaherty draws particular focus on the moments of levity crystallizing across the film, his cameras drinking up Nanook's children sliding down icy hills on their bellies, a husky puppy being hidden in a parka to keep it warm and even enjoying a surrogate domestic scene while keeping warm inside an igloo. While such conventions may be increasingly commonplace in the field of contemporary documentaries and news, when even the most allegedly 'objective' footage can be assumed to have a thesis, in 1922, forging a film with humour, excitement, beauty and seeping sorrow out of an anthropological study was a work of largely unprecedented genius. Nanook of the North still brims with an unmistakable earnest energy to this day, and, unbound authenticity aside, the craftsmanship and tender affections of Flaherty's work (even ending the film in Inuit, "Tia Mak", in lieu of "The End") still cementing it as a foundational classic of the silent era. -9/10

carvalheiro "Nanook of the North" (1922) directed by Robert Flaherty, as adventurous story about the construction of an igloo on the North Pole, between magnetic and geographic points, it is still a symbol of human life concerning glacial winds and strengths to cope with such an unfortunate chance and its environment, in this specific instinct of surviving way of life. Before industrialization and the technology advantage from there, that came into this almost lost ground, getting it as a place for living, like inside a hole of ice. Like a fish out of water but protected by a ceiling, in its natural outfit made with tools from nearby, as adapted to the ground of such an adversity, smiling from local human beings in a clear way of loving a foreigner : it is well known the picture of the scene when the strong fisherman, clothed with local animals skins like a displaced Indian or Inuit people seemingly, eating the disc record of the gramophone, still in a silent movie at the brink to learn talking a new language of evidence and by this way surviving from his primitive mind of simplicity. What is important underlining in this story also, it is the manner and the way how building a roof against extreme weather and making a fire for any meals to the Esquimo family or the like : for surviving in severe conditions and without any help from outside, in the surrounding neighbors much more far away ; making also clothes for their own consumption in the clan - maybe with the skin of white bears or black seals, previously hunted with such a parsimony from an adapted inhabitant - as their campaigners did with the ice itself. So that, like boxes done at cutting measure with round shapes, like holding it as a tool from the apparently inhospitality of the glacial ground, as at the time once about the supposedly myth of reversing commodities for a new experiment of comfort. But nearby primitive peoples not so savage - as the common sense, elsewhere outside wrongly -, before perhaps was thinking about ; and all that, at the time while Flaherty put the known Nanook abroad, for the universal mind of happy few, that now are much more than from then. Nowadays, this great movie is either a subject for the study and object of knowledge, whose such an impact caught us also enough a bit as entertainment, that too it should be searching by the present viewer, curious of the strength of some of the inner aspects, from the cinema itself as a possible and necessary kind of conservationist meditation for the present, aside of its torments and permanent turmoil as educational task. It was said that the first rushes were accidentally burned and it was for a second time returning again for shooting Nanook, fishing again with the glacial wind near the ice hole with a hook, that Flaherty has finally - after an enormous effort against adverse circumstances - obtained the definitive metric duration for his movie, financed partly by the Hudson Company at the time. All this means that it was not easy documenting the first trail, by a second returning to the places already filmed before and by random in the recent old past.

MisterWhiplash Robert Flaherty is one of the more noted documentarians in the history of film. It is not without some concentration (ironically maybe) to watch his most well-known work, Nanook of North, which is as much documentary as it is almost the very first widely seen "Home movie". There's no narration aside from the several title cards listing the obvious things that Nanook and his family/tribe are doing in the arctic. Therefore this is much more of a visual kind of documentary, not as outrageous and experimental as those of Dziga Vertov of the same period (using what camera equipment available, shooting seemingly on the fly), but with a distinct view on what life is usually like for these people. We basically see them doing very elementary tasks, more based on living day-to-day in this harsh climate than anything overly dramatized. That all of the scenes are really 'staged' (and, apparently, it's not even Nanook's real wife) doesn't deter the viewer from what is being shown. It's like a mix of the objective and subjective- objective in the sense that 'this is what it is, the Eskimos hunting for food, raising their children, making their shelter in igloos, and making trips to ensure their survival'. Subjective in that Flaherty's camera is creating a specific view of these people, their faces captured memorably in the scratchy print of the film. In a way it's also like the first, and perhaps more groundbreaking, of the lot of nature documentaries to follow over the years, though to a primitive extreme.In all, Nanook of the North is meant to above all show the versatility of these people, both the physical nature (i.e. hunting the seal, which is the most exciting in the film) and the nature of the spirit of these people, living this way as a cycle over and over again.