Nanook of the North

The prospector with a camera and the beaming huntsman, just working things out in the "illimitable spaces" of the edge of the world. Robert J. Flaherty introduces the arctic Quebecoise peninsula with a bobbing view of an ice-encrusted panorama nearly as inhospitable as the moon, Nanook "the chief of the Itivimuits" in a rare close-up reveals a weathered-impish visage haloed by a fur hood. (A marvelous little gag turns the kayak into a miniature submarine, one family member after another spill out of it.) Living by the edge of his harpoon, the Eskimo protagonist saunters deftly from floe to floe until he spots a herd of walruses resting by the shore. "The suspense begins," the hunt unfolds with man and mammoth sharing the frame like Chaplin and lion (The Circus) and culminates with the bullish hulk pulled arduously out of the water, a central Flaherty image. The peril of starvation is never far off, "the brass ball of sun a mockery in the sky," yet the natives exude gentleness and humor: Survival is the most basic of arts, nature is their breathing canvas. The great achievement is not documentary objectivity but something else, a sort of reconstructed rawness that illuminates the human struggles and explorations on both sides of the lenses. Wordsworth's indefatigable leech-gatherer, phonographs and castor oil at the trading post, "l'ombre dolenti nella ghiaccia" (Dante). The tussle with the speared seal is an indelible literalization of the primordial push-pull with meat, a heaving set-piece featuring unseen forces below the ice and the cavalry in the deep-focus distance. Herzog and Warhol are born here, The Southerner and Stromboli both carry its DNA. The closing vision of huddled naked skin while the wind outside howls pitilessly embodies not only "the melancholy spirit of the North," but also the timeless need for human warmth in the face of the void. In black and white.