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Robert J. Flaherty was born in 1884. His father worked in mining, and Flaherty spent his childhood in the wilderness of Michigan and Canada. As a young man, he worked for a Canadian railroad tycoon named William Mackenzie. Mackenzie hired him to search for minerals and suggested he bring a camera to document his travels. Flaherty took this advice. He bought a Bell & Howell camera, taught himself how to make movies, and began filming Inuit life during trips in 1914 and 1915. A major accident happened in 1916. A cigarette accidentally started a fire in his studio in Toronto. The fire burned more than 30,000 feet of his film and badly injured Flaherty. This disaster forced him to restart his entire project from the beginning.
After World War I, Flaherty tried to find money for a new film about the Arctic. He showed a short piece of surviving film to possible investors, but they did not offer funding. Finally, in 1920, a fur trading company called Revillon Frères agreed to pay for his project. Inspired by travel films of the time, Flaherty wanted to capture the far north in a special way. He received a monthly salary, money for equipment, and funds to pay the people he filmed. He brought 75,000 feet of new film and a projection screen so he could show rough versions to his actors. He traveled by canoe and ship, arriving at Inukjuak in August 1920. There, he chose a man named Allakariallak from the Itivimuit tribe to be his main actor. For the film, Flaherty renamed him Nanook.
The film is called Nanook of the North: A Story of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic. It starts by explaining Flaherty's background. His goal was to use one person to represent all Inuit people. The film begins with an explorer on a ship looking at ice. Words on the screen introduce Nanook as a man not touched by modern life. He is described as part of "the most cheerful people in all the world." What follows is not a single story, but a collection of scenes from daily life. Nanook makes fire, hunts walrus, visits a trading post, builds an igloo, and travels across the tundra. Signs of the modern world are rare. In one famous scene, a trader shows Nanook a gramophone. The trader says the white man "cans" his voice. Nanook happily tries to bite the record. For audiences then and now, this moment shows a layered irony. Nanook tries to physically eat a recorded voice, while the audience visually consumes his image on the screen. Both actions involve interacting with media to create a sense of a reality that is not really there.
The film was not a true documentary record. When Flaherty made it, the Inuit he filmed used rifles, knew about gramophones, and often wore Western clothes. This was because fur prices were high at the time. Scholar Fatimah Toby Rony notes they "certainly were not vanishing." But Flaherty believed a crafted idea of authenticity was more truthful than complex reality. He asked his actors to wear old-style traditional clothing. Nanook's on-screen wife and children were not Allakariallak's real family. They were chosen for how they looked. Most scenes were carefully planned. Flaherty told Allakariallak that he wanted "the picture of you hunting the iviuk [walrus] that I want, and not their meat." Allakariallak agreed, saying, "the aggie [film] will come first." The igloo scene needed special construction. Flaherty's camera could not fit inside a normal igloo. After several failed attempts, they built a large, half-circle igloo. It was like a three-wall movie set to allow space for filming.
Some parts of making the film were very dangerous. Flaherty and his assistant joined Allakariallak on an eight-week trip to hunt a polar bear. They traveled six hundred miles. They never found a bear. They ran out of food and nearly froze to death. The days had sundogs—bright spots of light beside the sun. Nights could be forty degrees below zero. Flaherty's diary entries got very short, often just writing "no seals." In desperation, they burned eight hundred feet of film to boil water for tea. The men survived, but a sled dog named Tooktoo did not.
When filming was done, Flaherty sailed south. He watched as Allakariallak, who had followed him in a kayak, turned back toward the shore of his home. By the time the film came out, a text card reported that "Nanook" had starved to death two years later while hunting deer. (Scholars think he likely died from an illness brought by outsiders.) This ending strengthens the film's complex subtitle. It is a story of life and love, but the "actual arctic" it shows was a carefully built fantasy of a past way of life. By mourning Allakariallak this way, Flaherty breaks the link between the film and the still-living community. What remains is only a preserved image on the screen.
The influence of Nanook of the North is huge. Fatimah Toby Rony writes it has been called "the first documentary film, the first ethnographic film, as well as the first art film." It started Flaherty's career, leading to films like Moana (1926) and Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931). It became a big cultural phenomenon. Flaherty once found an "Eskimo Pie" ice cream in Berlin called a 'Nanuk' with Nanook's picture on the wrapper.
This legacy also includes significant controversy. Kiowa/Mohawk filmmaker Adam Piron thinks about the harm caused by government policies built on visual misrepresentation and "salvage ethnography." This is the practice of recording cultures people think are disappearing. "For Indigenous artists," Piron writes, "there’s an added weight to engaging with the moving image because we know the cost of carelessness." Nanook of the North remains a foundational yet deeply problematic work. It is a testament to both the power of cinema and the dangers of its illusions.