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Nanook Revisited
Cover of the videocassette released by Films for the Humanities & Sciences (1990)[1]
Saumialuk "le grand gaucher"
Directed byClaude Massot[2]
Written by
  • Claude Massot
  • Sébastien Régnier
Based onNanook of the North
Produced by
Edited by
  • Brigitte Massot
  • Josiane Zardoya
Production
companies
Distributed by
Release dates
    • 1988 (1988) (France)
    • 1990 (1990) (Canada)
Running time
64 minutes 54[2] – 55 minutes[4]
Countries
  • France
  • Canada
LanguageEnglish

Nanook Revisited (French: Saumialuk "Le Grand Gaucher"[5]) is a French–Canadian film directed by Claude Massot and written by Massot and Sébastien Régnier. This ethnographic documentary[6] was made in 1988 and filmed in Inukjuak, Quebec, and Sanikiluaq, Nunavut. It's about Robert J. Flaherty's 1922 film Nanook of the North, film about an Inuk man in the Ungava Peninsula, with discussion as to how it was made and how contemporary Inuit view the film. The film also portrays how modern Inuit live.

Background[edit]

Nanook (Allakariallak) was dressed in pants made from polar bear skins for the film.

The American filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty traveled to Port Harrison (now known as Inukjuak), Quebec in 1920 to make a film about the Inuit. This film, Nanook of the North, was released in 1922 to much commercial success, and has been called one of the first documentaries. The titular role in the film, given the name Nanook, was portrayed by an Inuk named Allakariallak.[a]

(Lefebvre 2000)

(Alia 1999)

(Marcus 1995, pp. 3, 11–16, 21, 36, 43, 45–46, 67, 114, 127, 142, 214–215, 226)

(Murphy 1978)


There's been a long history of accusing Flaherty of falsification in his filmmaking process for Nanook of the North.[11] Vilhjalmur Stefansson described it as "a most inexact picture of Eskimo life" in Iris Barry's 1926 book Let's Go to the Pictures, [12] and Stefansson further talked about how TKTKKT Campbell Dixon

Vancouver Art Gallery show

Flaherty had shown his film to the residents of Port Flaherty, they found it funny.[13] citing RUBY.

Synopsis[edit]

class=notpageimage|
Filming locations for Nanook Revisited

In Spring 1988, a French film crew flies to Inukjuak, on the northeastern coast of Hudson Bay, Canada. Sixty-eight years after Flaherty first arrived there to make his film, this new film crew brings Nanook of the North and a collection of Flaherty's photographs from the Revillon Frères archives.

Local villagers watch a screening Nanook of the North; they laugh and giggle. They also look at the archival photographs and Inuit identify people in these portraits including themselves and their family.(DeWeese 1991, p. 26-24)

Moses Nowkawalk also provides commentary on Nanook of the North in the offices of the local television station he runs. He points out filming locations. He notes Nanook's polar bear skin pants would be inaccurate for this area, (DeWeese 1991, p. 26-24) and surmises Flaherty put Allakariallak in this costume to better fit Southern audiences of what an Inuk's clothing would look like. He also says the scene where Nanook is befuddled by a phonograph record was staged, noting phonographs were in use in the area when Flaherty arrived. He also discusses the construction of a fake igloo set, and the staging of a seal hunting scene. (DeWeese 1991, p. 26-24) Inaccurat that they'd sleep half-naked (dbl-check!) (DeWeese 1991, p. 26-24) Nowkawalk notes that despite the film's inaccuracies, it's important because it's the only videographic documentation of this region from the time.

They show an interview they conducted in 1987 with Charles Nayoumealuk, whose father was a friend of Allakariallak. He notes that Nanook was not Allakariallak's real name, and that Allakariallak laughed a lot during the filming process despite Flaherty's instructions to be serious. He also notes the two women who play Nanook's wives in the film were in fact Flaherty's wives. He explains that the Inuit called Flaherty Saumialuk, Inuktitut for "the tall left-handed man". Nayoumealuk explains Flaherty made them all wear reindeer skin and forbade them from using rifles during the hunting scene or metal tools for the igloo-constructing scene.

The second half of the film takes place on Flaherty Island, in the Belcher Islands south of Inukjuak. Flaherty had done mining prospecting here in 1915. The filmmakers go to see how modern Inuit live. They meet Mary at the Anglican church in Sanikiluaq. Her husband was Allie, whom Flaherty had fathered, although she notes Allie considered the Inuk man who raised him to be his "real" father.

Most of the inhabitants were out on a hunt when the film crew arrived. John Johnson,[b] the local school director, invites the film crew to go seal fishing with him and his friends. They catch a seal and butcher it out on the ice, eating some of it. Johnson notes he wasn't familiar with Nanook of the North before moving to the area, but that the local school has a reel to reel copy but that the version they put on videocassette had gone missing because it's very popular. Johnson discusses the influence the film has had on the south including Nanuk [cs] ice cream in Czechoslovakia. Johnson notes he enjoys the film, and appreciates the humor in it such as in the kayak scene. Through a rifle scope they see caribou but note hunting quotas prevent them from killing any.

Johnson introduces the filmmakers to his classroom, in a $4.7 million dollar school. He notes the film they are shooting will be a record of these Inuit schoolchildren's lives in the 1980s. Children play around and the film shows the kids learning. An Inuk woman explains a traditional method for hunting ducks. We see a lesson in Inuktitut. Later in the gymnasium, students participate in a goose calling competition.

Johnson and some Inuit go ice-fishing, they fillet and eat their catch on the ice.

Back in the school, children are shown how to skin, clean, and butcher a seal. One kid inflates the seal's lungs. One child writes Inuktitut syllabics into the blood in the floor. (DeWeese 1991, p. 26-24) Children eat seal meat; Johnson explains it's a "southern" idea to think of it as being "raw". In a later scene children learn on computers, read National Geographic, and develop film in a dark room. Nanook of the North is shown to the Sanikiluaq community at the school in the final scene of the film.


refs[edit]

The film opens In 1988, a French film crew flies into Inukjuak in northern Quebec. The opening shots of the film

The film can be divided into two halves

They also display an exhibition of Flaherty's photographs from the Revillon Frères archives.[14]


They also quote from Flaherty's diary to discuss the making-of of Nanook of the North.[15]

Both Massot & Régnier provide voiceover.[15]

Polar bear pants were inaccurate for this region, one Inuk suggests Nanook wore them to fit the Southern expectation.[16]

Charles Nayoumealuk, whose father knew Allakariallak, says "[Nanook of the North] was a film for white people".[17]

Nayoumealuk also mentions Inuit were familiar with Western technology, mentions "actors' contrived ignorance"(Huhndorf 2001, p. 144)


  • Moses Nowkawalk

polar bear pants, no modern tools, phonograph scene, seal scene, igloo set Colleyn (2005), p. 158. fake name, fake wives.Colleyn (2005), p. 159

Knopf (2009), p. 212 -- "manager of the local TV station", "comments on serious flaws and misrepresentations", polar bear pants; igloo.

The second half of the film takes place on Flaherty Island, in the Belcher Islands.[18] They meet Mary, a widow of Flaherty's son Allie, who was left behind in Canada; she emphasizes that another man was her husband's father figure when Flaherty left Canada.[18] Much of the second half of the film follows John Johnson, a school teacher who moved north six

There's also a scene where an Itivimuit woman butchers a seal in a classroom for the schoolchildren to eat.[19]

Themes[edit]

Shari M. Huhndorf writes that Massot's "primary goal seems to have been to celebrate Flaherty and the presence of other white men in the Arctic".[20]

Massot defends Flaherty. (Folléa)

Voiceover calls "father of documentary".[15]


Modern Inuit life[edit]

Nanook Revisited highlights how the Inuit lived in the 1980s, comparing and contrasting it to the version of Inuit life depicted in Nanook of the North sixty eight years earlier.

"desire of Massot and Regnier to represent the authentic, modern Inuit of Ungava Peninsula"[18]

Smith writes, "Immediately the comparisons between this site in 1922 and 1988 begin. Viewers are encouraged to compare Flaherty's description of 'five desolate and melancholy huts' with what they see: an extensive collection of multicolor prefab homes linked by roads cleared of snow".[21]

Huhndorf writes that the documentary "presents contemporary Inuit life as a degenerate version of the pristine existence portrayed in Nanook of the North".[20]


"The film presents a picture of modern life complete with supermarkets, guns, and snowmobiles."[15] The mayor uses radio to advertise the screening of Nanook of the North.[21] "The filmmakers show the local grocery store where video surveillance and disposable products are part and parcel of Inuit daily life."[21] "Nanook's grave is close to this dump, and nearby satellite dish and power station." "Massot and Regnier reference Flaherty's representation of this landscape as frozen in time so they can illustrate the difference time ahs made in this cinematic site."[21]

A scene of modern Inuit eating seal is juxtaposed with the seal hunt from Nanook of the North "indicat[ing] the relationship between past and present".[15]

School, Inuit elders teaching also discussed in (Smith 2002, p. 111)

Environmental issues[edit]

Huhndorf writes that Massot "present[s] contemporary Inuit life as a degenerate version of the pristine existence portrayed in Nanook of the North".[20] Smith writes Massot and Régnier "challenge the myth of a pristine Arctic occupied by people living in igloos and hunting with harpoons".[22]

Nanook Revisited includes shots depicting garbage and dead animals, which allude to environmental issues affecting the modern Inuit.[15]

Laurel C. Smith writes, "A long sweeping shot of the local dump works to startle any viewers clinging to notions of an unsullied landscape".[21]

Production[edit]

Massot and Régnier spent three weeks in Inukjuak and three weeks on Flaherty island for filming.[23] Massot was doing research for his movie Kabloonak, a fictional retelling of the making of Nanook of the North a the time.[24] He said "I wanted to understand the physical resistance in the Great North so I'd be more prepared for my fiction shoot. I also wanted to tell the story of the relationship that developed between Flaherty and Nanook. So doing the documentary gave me the chance to document how the Inuit people felt about Flaherty" and "The testimonials from the Inuit people provided me with some of the best details in Kabloonak. It was a great resource."[25]

The camera operator was Lionel Cousin.[26]

The film was edited by Brigitte Massot and Josiane Zardoya.[26]

Sound engineer Claude Beauchemin and sound mixer Henri-Claude Mariani

The film's producers were Georges Benayoun [fr] and Paul Rozenberg.[26]

Reception[edit]

Release and home media[edit]

The documentary first appeared under the title Saumialuk, le grand gaucher.[c] It premiered on the French television channel FR3 on December 7, 1989,[28] as part of the program Océaniques [fr].[23]

This version of the films was 65[28] or 70[29][30] minutes, and had French subtitles.[30] Saumialuk aired as


In 1990, Saumialuk was screened at the 19th Festival international du nouveau cinéma et de la vidéo de Montréal.[31][32] It opened a film series at the festival called "Et nous... premières nations" ("And Us ... the First Nations").[33]

It also was screened at the 1991 Étonnants Voyageurs [fr]'s film festival in Saint-Malo. [1]


Films For the Humanities & Sciences released Nanook Revisited on videocassette in 1990;[2] they subsequently made the film available on DVD as well.[1] Nanook Revisited was one of six bonus films on Flicker Alley's 2013 Blu-ray release of Nanook of the North/The Wedding of Palo.[34]

Critical response[edit]

Keith Patrick DeWeese gave a four-star rating for his 1991 review in Video Rating Guide for Libraries, writing that the film was "[h]ighly recommended". He called it "timely and tasteful", and praised its "straightforward, uncluttered, focused" look at the Itivimuit. He also described the film's soundtrack as "clean and unobtrusive".[19] A 2005 article by Gary Handman for American Libraries included Nanook Revisited as one of three "excellent videos [...] used to provide historical context" for an Introduction to Documentary class at the University of California, Berkeley.[1]

The American Film and Video Association's review said it provides "interesting details" about Nanook of the North and the Inuit's reaction to that film, but found a lack of cohesion between the two halves of the documentary, finding a lot of material to be off topic.[2] Laurence Folléa, reviewing Saumialuk for Le Monde in 1989, wrote that the subjects covered in the second part of the documentary "would have benefited from being isolated and highlighted elsewhere".[35]

MacKenzie criticizes the film for centering the White schoolteacher. Rony notes Johnson, who is white, is "eager to explain Inuit culture" and notes his Inuit hunting partner and an Inuit schoolteacher are not named or interviewed in the documentary and concludes: "Nanook Revisited is aptly titled: it becomes a film dominated by a white point of view".[36]

(Marsolais 1991, p. 46)

MacKenzie also notes that Nanook Revisited uncritically repeats the myth that Allakariallak died of starvation during a hunt, an unsubstantiated idea which originates from Flaherty;[37] evidence suggests Allakariallak died in bed of illness, likely tuberculosis.[38][39][40]

Jay Ruby criticizes the film for "rehash[ing] knowledge that was readily available in print and try[ing] to pass it off as their discovery".[41]

Legacy[edit]

Title card of Kunuk Uncovered, a 2015 spoof of Nanook Revisited

The mockumentary anthology television show Documentary Now!'s episode "Kunuk Uncovered" parodies both Nanook of the North and Nanook Revisited.[42] This episode was written by Seth Meyers and directed by Rhys Thomas and Alex Buono. Meyers had watched watching Nanook Revisited for school.[43] "Kunuk Uncoved" aired August 27, 2015, on the American television channel IFC.[44] Within the fiction of this episode, Kunuk Uncovered: The Real Story Behind "Kunuk the Hunter" is a 1985 making-of documentary about William H. Sebastian's 1922 film Kunuk the Hunter: A Story of Truth & Beauty in the Actual Tundra.[45] Kunuk Uncovered depicts how many scenes in Kunuk the Hunter were faked,[46] and describes how Sebastian passed off Pipilok as the courageous and resourceful leader Nanook.[47] One scene explains how Nanook's boots were nailed to his dogsled so that the clumsy Pipilok would not fall off.[48] The American anthropologist Faye Ginsburg called this episode "clever and entertaining, especially for those who know both Flaherty's and Massot's documentaries and the considerable scholarship around this work".[49] Time magazine included this episode as one of Documentary Now!'s five "must-watch" epiodes.[50]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Sometimes seen spelled as Alakarialak (Inuktitut: ᐊᓚᑲᕆᐊᒃ),[7] Alakkariallak (Inuktitut: ᐊᓚᒃᑲᕆᐊᓪᓚᒃ),[8] Allakarialuk,[9] or Allakarallouk.[10]
  2. ^ Transcribed by some sources as "Joe Johnson".[14]
  3. ^ "The Big Left-Handed Man",[27] the Inuktitut name given to Flaherty

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c Handman (2005), p. 89.
  2. ^ a b c d e f AFVA (1992), p. 176.
  3. ^ Turner (2022), p. 201.
  4. ^ DeWeese (1991).
  5. ^ Colleyn (2005), p. 159.
  6. ^ MacKenzie (2015), p. 201.
  7. ^ Inuktitut (1984), p. 11.
  8. ^ Qumaq (1995), p. 49.
  9. ^ Lourcelles (1992), p. 1011.
  10. ^ Heller (1928), p. 464.
  11. ^ Rotha (1983), pp. 139–142.
  12. ^ Barry (1926), p. 185.
  13. ^ MacKenzie (2015), p. 204.
  14. ^ a b MacKenzie (2015), p. 205.
  15. ^ a b c d e f Skare (2016), p. 135.
  16. ^ Huhndorf (2001), p. 122.
  17. ^ Huhndorf (2001), p. 123.
  18. ^ a b c Smith (2002), p. 110.
  19. ^ a b DeWeese (1991), p. 26-24.
  20. ^ a b c Huhndorf (2001), p. 123 n.67.
  21. ^ a b c d e Smith (2002), p. 109.
  22. ^ Smith (2002), p. 108.
  23. ^ a b Folléa (1989), p. 13.
  24. ^ Ruby (2000), p. 284 n.2.
  25. ^ Ashton (1996), p. 31.
  26. ^ a b c "Saumialuk: Le grand gaucher". Academy Collections. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Retrieved May 19, 2023.
  27. ^ Province (1990).
  28. ^ a b Lourcelles (1992), p. 1012.
  29. ^ Roberge (1990).
  30. ^ a b Muller (1992), p. 80.
  31. ^ Marsolais (1991); Roberge (1990).
  32. ^ Chaput, Luc (Mar–Apr 1995). "Salut l'artiste!". Actualités. Séquences. No. 177. p. 4.
  33. ^ Roberge (1990); Province (1990).
  34. ^ Latchem (2013), p. 10; Dick (2013), p. 42.
  35. ^ Folléa (1989), p. 13: "Le sujet aurait gagné à être isolé et mis en valeur, ailleurs."
  36. ^ Rony (1996), p. 249.
  37. ^ MacKenzie (2015), p. 2007.
  38. ^ Christopher (2005), pp. 387–388.
  39. ^ Marcus (1995), p. 226.
  40. ^ Demerath (1981), p. 75.
  41. ^ Ruby (2000), pp. 283–284 n.2.
  42. ^ Lidz (2015), p. 34; Skare (2016), p. 136.
  43. ^ Meyers, Seth [@sethmeyers] (Feb 22, 2019). "We DID need to sign up for an academic site to watch it! I had remembered it from school and it was exactly as dry as I remembered" (Tweet). Archived from the original on May 22, 2023 – via Twitter.
  44. ^ Ginsburg (2019), p. 254.
  45. ^ Meyers, Seth (Aug 27, 2015). "Kunuk Uncovered". Documentary Now!. Season 1. Episode 2. Event occurs at 1:08–2:39. IFC.
  46. ^ Skare (2016), p. 136.
  47. ^ Ginsburg (2019), p. 255.
  48. ^ Lidz (2015), p. 34.
  49. ^ Ginsburg (2019), pp. 255–256.
  50. ^ Berman, Judy (Mar 25, 2019). "5 Best Episodes of TV's Best Parody Show, 'Documentary Now!'". Time.

Works cited[edit]

External links[edit]

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