Nanook Of The North – Criterion OOP

Nanook Of The North is Robert J. Flaherty’s beautiful film about an Inuit man named Nanook and his family. Filmed during one year of their life in the icy desolation of Northern Canada. The film was an enormous success and is the founder of the documentary film genre.


Overview
Robert Flaherty's landmark documentary Nanook of the North comes to DVD with a standard full-frame 1.33:1 image (as it should be for any film produced before 1955). The English soundtrack is rendered in Dolby Digital Stereo. There are neither subtitles nor closed-captions on this disc. Supplemental materials include portions of a television documentary titled "Flaherty on Film" and a photo gallery of still pictures taken by the director while he was working in the Arctic. Considering the stature this film holds in the film canon, one could always wish for more information, but this package is thorough, well-rounded, and should both educate and please new generations of documentary filmmakers

All Movie Guide - Tom Wiener
Before Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, filmmakers who had recorded the daily lives of people, starting with the Lumiere Brothers and their famed glimpses of workers leaving their factory, had been casual observers. Flaherty instinctively understood that film audiences loved a good story, and he set out to marry the conventions of narrative cinema with the reality of commonplace life. By choosing a setting of extreme conditions -- the death of Nanook shortly after the film's release only underscored the treacherous conditions of his life -- Flaherty started out with an inherently dramatic foundation. He built on that by asking his subjects, whose cooperation he wooed by screening footage of their work together, to stage scenes for him. The igloo which Nanook, his family, and friends built for Flaherty was larger than normal and contained only three sides, to allow the filmmaker's cameras access to the interior. Critics have charged that this technique compromised the film's authenticity, but, as in all of his major features (Moana, Man of Aran, Louisiana Story), Flaherty was more interested in the general rather than the specific. The truth of these films lies in their faithful rendering of man's relationship to the natural world, and in that regard, Flaherty had no peer.