Contradictions in the First Filmic Portrayal of the Inuit: A Study of Nanook of the North

Abstract

A genre that worked well to capture the Inuit life was the film, which being a medium of secondary orality, shares a complex relationship with the primary oral culture of the Inuit. The 1922 silent film Nanook of the North by Robert J. Flaherty was the first motion picture on the Inuit. It was made at a time when the motivation for the representations of the native was both economic and aesthetic. Nanook being a silent film, the filmmaker depended on intertitles to convey the message of the moving pictures to its literate audience. The article looks at how an oral community is conceived through the technologies of a chirographic and typographic culture.