Nanook Of The North : A story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic

Documentary Films strictly speaking, are non-fictional, “slice of life” factual works of art. The first attempts at film-making, by the Lumiere Brothers and others, were literal documentaries, e.g., a train entering a station, factory workers leaving a plant.

The first official documentary or non-fiction narrative film was Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), an ethnographic look at the harsh life of Canadian Inuit Eskimos living in the Arctic.  Flaherty is often regarded as the “Father of the Documentary Films”.

SOURCE : http://www.film.com/movies/whats-the-big-deal-nanook-of-the-north-1922

Nanook of the North was made in the days before the term “documentary” had even been coined. Filmmaker Robert Flaherty had lived among the Eskimos in Canada for many years as a prospector and explorer, and he had shot some footage of them on an informal basis before he decided to make a more formal record of their daily lives.The film’s tremendous success confirmed Flaherty’s status as a first-rate storyteller and keen observer of man’s fragile relationship with the harshest environmental conditions.

Nanook of the North is a silent documentary film. This film is considered the first feature-length documentary, though Flaherty has been criticized for staging several sequences and thereby distorting the reality of his subjects’ lives. Traditional Inuit methods of hunting, fishing, igloo-building, and other customs are shown with accuracy, and the compelling story of a man and his family struggling against nature is met with great success.

Inuit people used  guns for hunting when the film was being shoot but Flaherty encouraged Nanook to hunt using spears instead of guns because he wanted to show how the ancestors of Nanook used to hunt before the European influence. The hunting scenes actually involved wild walrus and seals. The scene in which Nanook builds an igloo had to be shot several times before he got it right. Furthermore, in order to accommodate interior shooting, he had to make it much larger than he ordinarily would, with a removable roof to admit adequate sunlight.

NANOOK OF THE NORTH remains invaluable for its depiction of the various procedures and stations of the life of an Eskimo and the beauty of the Arctic Landscape.

(In a sadly appropriate footnote, Nanook, the subject of the film, died of starvation not long after the film’s release.)  

The Lumiere brothers and the Cinematographe

The Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, with Auguste being the elder, the Lumiere family eventually settled in Lyon. Their father Antoine, opened his own photographic studio and was  intrigued by this new phenomenon of moving pictures that was slowly developing. Antoine saw to it that his sons recieved a formal education as they attended the largest technical school in Lyon.

By 1894 the Lumieres were producing around 15,000,000 plates a year. Antoine, by now a successful and well known businessman, was invited to a demonstration of Edison’s Peephole Kinetoscope in Paris. He was excited by what he saw and returned to Lyons. He presented his son Louis with a piece of Kinetoscope film, given to him by one of Edison’s concessionaires and said, “This is what you have to make, because Edison sells this at crazy prices and the concessionaires are trying to make films here in France to have them cheaper”.

The brothers worked through the Winter of 1894, Auguste making the first experiments. Their aim was to overcome the limitations and problems, as they saw them, of Edison’s peephole Kinetoscope. They identified two main problems with Edison’s device:

• firstly its bulk – the Kinetograph – the camera, was a colossal piece of machinery and its weight and size resigned it to the studio.
• Secondly – the nature of the kinetoscope – the viewer, meant that only one person could experience the films at a time.

By early 1895, the brothers had invented their own device combining camera with printer and projector and called it the Cinematographe.

SOURCE : http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T112/Cinematographe.jpg

The Lumiere brothers are credited with the world’s first public film screening on December 28, 1895. The showing of approximately ten short films lasting only twenty minutes in total was held in the basement lounge of the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris and would be the very first public demonstration of their device.

The Lumiere Brothers have been credited with over 1,425 different short films and had even filmed aerial shots years before the very first aiplane would take to the skies.

The video below further explains the  amazing journey through the birth of the motion picture.

Kinetoscope

The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device brought to practicality by Edison and his employees at Edison Laboratory. It was designed for films to be viewed individually through the peephole window of a cabinet housing its components. The Kinetoscope  creates the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source .The Kinetoscope mechanism was driven by an electric motor.   Magnifying lenses in the peephole enlarged the film – a continuous band around fifty foot long which was arranged around a series of spools.

Virtual recreation of Edison’s Kinetoscope

While Edison seems to have conceived the idea and initiated the experiments of Kinetoscope,  Dickson one of Edison’s most talented employees apparently performed the bulk of the experimentation and hence is given a major part of the credit for turning the concept into a practical reality.

SOURCE : http://www.britishmovieclassics.com/_files/Image//kinetoscope.jpg

Kinetoscope  was one of the primary inspirations to the Lumière brothers, who would go on to develop the first commercially successful movie projection system.