Does anyone know what this movie is

English Name: Nanook of the North

Resource Type: DVDRip

Release Date: 1922

Film Director: Robert J. FlahertyRobert J. Flaherty

Region: United States

Synopsis:

Chinese Name of the Film: Nanook of the North

English Name of the Film: Nanook of the North

Length: 79 min

Country/Region: United States

Color: Black and White

Mix: Silent

Rating: Germany. 6 / Portugal:17 (director's cut) / Canada:G (Manitoba/Nova Scotia/Québec) / Canada:PG (Ontario) / UK:U (re-release) (1947)

Release Date: June 11, 1922 USA

Promo:1. A story of life and love in the actual Arctic.

2. The truest and most human story of the Great White Snows.

3. A picture with A picture with more drama, greater thrill, and stronger action than any picture you ever saw

IMDb:0013427

Directed by Robert J. FlahertyRobert J. Flaherty

Screenplay: Robert J. FlahertyRobert J. Flaherty

Cast: Nanook ..... Himself

Nyla

Cunayou ..... Herself (Nanook's wife)

Allee ..... Himself (Nanook's son)

Allegoo ..... Himself (Nanook's son)

Berry Kroeger

Synopsis:

The groundbreaking work of Flaherty, the father of the documentary. Flaherty spent 16 months traveling to the Arctic to live with the Eskimo Nannuk Ichiyo in Port Harrison, perfectly recreating with the camera the primitive scenes of life such as hunting polar bears with a pike and eating seals raw. Although there has been a debate on whether this film is a documentary, there is no doubt that this film is still a milestone in the history of documentary, which not only creates a type of anthropological documentary that uses images to record society, but is also the starting point of the world's glorious documentary.

Flaherty, the father of the documentary

In the 1920s, it was very popular to make adventure films about the Arctic or Antarctica, or even indigenous Africans. But for the first time, Flaherty shifted his wandering camera from customary hunting to following an Eskimo family over time, showing their dignity and intelligence, focusing on the characters' emotions and destinies, and honoring their cultural traditions. The mode of filmmaking pioneered by Flaherty is still honored by documentarians today.

Filming the Nanooks

Robert Flaherty was born in the foothills of Michigan's Iron Mountain on February 16, 1884, to an explorer. Flaherty recalls, "As I grew into my teens, I always looked forward to exploring with my father, and we were often gone for months at a time, paddling a small boat in the summer and wearing snowshoes in the winter." In 1896, Flaherty followed his father to the Rainy Lake region of Canada to mine for gold, and he loved the natural, pristine state of the area. Later, his parents sent him to Michigan's Mineral College, but he didn't graduate. The school is said to have deemed Flaherty unqualified to be a professional miner. The college years were not without their rewards, as he learned to play the violin - a hobby that has stayed with him all his life - and met his future wife, Frances Harbinda.

Later, Flaherty made three prospecting trips to the Arctic, and by the end of the journey Flaherty did find some iron ore, but it was of minimal mining value. The only reward he received was the naming of an island after him by the Canadian government. He wanted to edit the film taken during the prospecting into an expedition movie. Just as it was about to be finished, a cigarette falling from a table set the film on fire and Flaherty was burned. The only luck was that he survived. With the film burned, he decided to wait until spring to go north once more.

That's when World War I broke out, and the filming program wasn't carried out until 1920 under the sponsorship of French fur traders the Révillon brothers. That year, he was 36 years old.

A cabin in Port Hudson was Flaherty's home, and he found the Nanook family, excellent hunters, as his main subjects. The first shoot was a walrus hunt, and before the shoot, Flaherty told Nanook: If anything interferes with my shooting schedule while hunting walrus, be sure to give up the hunt; and remember: I want footage of you hunting elephants, not their meat.

In fact, at that time, Eskimos no longer used harpoons to hunt walrus, but rifles. It was to capture a more primitive scene that Nanuk hunted walruses the way his dad did. Flaherty repeated this style of filming again and again in his later films, letting people act out their lives the way their fathers or grandfathers did, and the intrusion of commerce and the conflicts between people were kept out of the camera lens by him. Film historians call Flaherty a romantic.

Introducing drama to documentary

Making the first films, the biggest problem Flaherty faced was developing, and his enemy was the cold weather. It was equally difficult to filter the dog hair that got mixed into the water and the deer hair on the Eskimos' clothes.

Eskimo houses are made of ice and called igloos. While igloos are usually about 12 feet wide, what Flahadi needed was 25 feet. Nanuk had never built an igloo that big and spent days experimenting with it, only to have it collapse again and again, with his companions roaring with laughter at each collapse.

Because the igloo was dark, Nanuk made windows out of ice and also borrowed lighting from the sun's reflection, an Eskimo creation in the midst of life. Nanuk teaches his son archery in simple and moving details, ancestral traditions passed on between labors, simple gestures conveying the bond between father and son.

The igloo was forced to be cut in half during filming, and because there was no lighting, filming had to be done in the open air, with Nanook's family performing get-ups in the freezing, biting wind. The result has to be real, and no expense was spared in moving the show for the sake of realism, a credo of Flaherty's, who introduced suspense and drama into the documentary.

Flahadi, who has lived in the Arctic for 16 months, has run out of film and is ready to leave for home, with Nanook perplexed and reluctant to leave. Flaherty pointed to the stones in the riverbed around him and said, "There will be as many people as there are stones watching your movie." A few years later, Flaherty wrote a series of articles on his adventure travels for a number of magazines and, with the assistance of his wife, published the book Nanook of the North in 1924. In his book, Flaherty documented the daily habits of the Eskimos in the Arctic and the anecdotes during the making of the movie. After the movie was finished, the first audience was the local Eskimos. Flaherty depicts in his book, "They [the Eskimos] kept looking back at the light source of the projector, as if they were looking at the silver screen, and I thought that the screening would not be a success. Suddenly one of them yelled, 'Catch it, catch it.' They thought the walrus was really going to run away. There was chaos in the room. The Eskimos saw themselves and their companions in the film, and they began to whisper to each other with mysterious smiles on their faces. Suddenly, it was as if they understood what I had done."

Flahadi first gave the film to Paramount, and after watching the dailies the manager came over, patted him kindly on the shoulder and said he was terribly sorry that it was reluctant to get audiences to go to see the film, and that "it's really sad that you've gone to the north through all the hard work and it's come to this end." After a few setbacks, it was finally the French company Budai that agreed to distribute it.

"Nanook of the North" opened at New York's Capitol Theatre on June 11, 1922, and was such a hit with audiences that one critic compared "Nanook of the North" to an ancient Greek tragedy. Nanook of the North, the culmination of Flaherty's three Arctic expeditions, not only pioneered the genre of anthropological documentaries that record societies in images, but also provided a mode of filming for documentary cinema that is still in use today. Nanook of the North is a glorious starting point in the history of documentary film in the world.

Listening to Inspiration, Recreating the Past

Paramount lost "Nanook of the North" and now wanted to make up for it, sending someone to Flaherty to say: go wherever you like, put up your own budget, and please bring us back another "Nanook. Flaherty thought that after many years in the north, it was now time to go in the opposite direction.In 1923, Flaherty took his wife and daughter and a red-haired Irish maid to a Polynesian village of only a hundred families on a small Pacific island. Thanks to the efforts of missionaries and businessmen, the islanders had begun to wear suits. Flaherty approached the chiefs of the village and asked them to wear their national costumes. To create a climax, one boy was specifically asked to get a tattoo - known locally as a tattoo - a rite of passage that was lost decades ago. The dance festivities and makeovers that preceded the ceremony were also lifted by Flahadi in accordance with the ancient customs of the local people.

During the making of the film, titled "Moana," Flaherty began experimenting with the use of a panning camera to follow a subject, a technique that no one else had used at the time. Not only that, but telephoto lenses and close-ups were used simultaneously in his films. In a tattoo scene, Flaherty used close-ups to record the boy's pained face as the needles poked into his body, and panned the camera to his mother next to him, bringing the bond between mother and son to life in a single image.

Flahadi has a knack for making films that don't leave out everything he feels, and by the time he made "Moana," he had 140,000 feet of footage. But he didn't care, as long as his inspiration existed then his machine wouldn't stop. From time to time the finished footage Flahadi would show it to the villagers. They tied up a screen in a coconut tree and screened the work dailies, and immediately after watching them, the islanders told him their feelings. In particular, the elders, who remembered the island's ancient rituals and habits, not only helped Flaherty recreate the past, but also came to check his film for errors.

"Moana" didn't make money for Paramount, even with the hyperbolic tagline "The Love Life of a South Sea Demon". "I shouldn't say which shots are beautiful, because all of them are so beautiful," Grisham said in a review in The Sun. Here, for the first time, he used the word documentary to refer to documentaries, which have stood on their own ever since, until today.

Grilson invited Flaherty to make a film reflecting Britain's industrialization. Before the shoot, someone high up in the British government wanted to see the script, but Flaherty had never written a script before, so he had to go back to his hotel and stay like a hermit for a few days. Finally, he gave Gleeson a dozen pages, the first of which read: A movie about craftsmen, directed by Robert Flaherty. The second page read: Screenplay - scenes from industrialized England. Nothing else.

Flahadi loved London. While making films in England, he used to go to small pubs in the evening to have a few drinks and tell stories about his early encounters in the Arctic. Though the stories were sometimes ridiculous, Flaherty's gift for storytelling was unmatched.

For "Nanook of the North," Flaherty gained a reputation for photographing marginalized people, and in 1932, Gaumont producer Baker decided to take a chance on Flaherty by investing 1 percent of the company's budget in "The Aran Islanders," which was to be made in 1932. Flaherty traveled to the largest of three islands off the west coast of Ireland, which was only a 15-hour drive from London. With an ample supply of water, they decided to use it as a filming location. The island has no motorcycles, no movie theaters, and no luxuries of any kind. But the soil is more valuable than gold to the locals.

To capture what life was like for the Aran Islanders, Flaherty brought in an expert from London to teach residents to spear sharks. Aramaic ancestors used to fish this way, but by the time Flaherty made his film, they had long since switched to steamships. Flaherty wanted to make "Aran Islanders" into another "Nanook of the North," but it didn't work out that way. Perhaps he didn't realize that "Nanook of the North" was the result of his decade-long expedition to socialize with the Eskimos, whereas "Aran Islanders" was about meeting these strangers for the sake of filming, and that in that sense, "Nanook of the North" was a peak he couldn't surpass.

The movie brought a steady stream of visitors to Aran, and the islanders made it a point to show off to tourists that they had been part of a Flaherty movie shoot.

The cinematography of Alanders won the admiration of film theorist Paul Rossa, but Rossa said the film's characters were "wax figures acting out the lives of their ancestors.

Never giving up his model

Frahadi never gave up his model, and in 1938 he and his wife returned to the U.S. for a quieter life of their own, but it wasn't to be. Soon after, documentary filmmaker Pal Lorenz, who was in charge of the American Film Service, invited Flahadi to make "The Land," a movie reflecting on the problems of American agriculture. Flaherty grew up traveling the world and exploring, and it was only at age 55 that he had his first opportunity to encounter the real lives of the American people.

The next few days were the unhappiest of Flaherty's life. Living on a farm under the cover of the Black Hills, the days were quiet but uninteresting, and the pleasant surroundings seemed to add to his frustration. Flaherty lamented, "Prestige doesn't bring anybody hamburgers and sandwiches."

Flahadi was wrong, however, and Prestige brought him a strange contract: It stipulated that Flahadi had freedom of movement, owned the rights to the movie even as the financiers demanded that his name not be attached to the film, and that the funding be very generous. This was Louisiana Story, Flaherty's last successful work.

The movie shows the joys and sorrows of a boy. It begins by placing the viewer in the middle of a magical and wonderful jungle: ponds, lotus leaves, dewdrops, water birds. The boy rows his boat slowly into the picture, accompanied by melodious music. You can see that he is at home in this forest, and that he knows the trees and grass. His closest friend is a small raccoon and they often play together. However, an alligator ate the raccoon and he was determined to avenge it. As the boy struggles with the crocodile, his father anxiously searches for him. The fight between the teenager and the crocodile is thrilling, and the scene reminds us of Nanuk's fight with the walrus, and the fight between the people of Yalan Island and the sharks, highlighting the struggle between man and nature as a consistent theme for Flaherty.

Flahadi melds his deep love of nature and memories of his teenage years into the boy's story, which can also be described as an autobiographical film.

The financier was Standard Oil of New Jersey, which wanted to use Flaherty's fame to improve the company's image, since two decades of experience working on films had made Flaherty's name a symbol of harmony between man and nature. They wanted the movie to show that oil exploration had not destroyed the ecology of the area, and that everything was still in harmony.

In 1948, the Venice Film Festival honored Flaherty for his passion and courage.

The pioneer of documentary cinema was living on a tight budget in his later years. At this time, he became interested in "restoring" paintings with the camera, and in 1949 he began making a film about Picasso's famous fresco "Guernica," but it remained unfinished until his death in 1951. It became the much-anticipated "art of regret" in Flaherty's oeuvre.

Shortly after the filming of "Nanook of the North" was completed. Nanook died of starvation after failing to store enough food for the winter.

Behind the beauty.

Always accompanied by tragedy.