“Nanook of the North” & How Documentaries and Reality TV Lie to Us.

The idea that it’s necessary to “lie” or recreate in order to tell a “higher truth” in documentary filmmaking, is one that I believe will only become more and more inevitable in a highly sensationalized media landscape. Do I personally think that it’s ethical or justifiable? The majority of the time no, but sometimes it can be. In the case of Nanook of the North, however, I feel like the consequences could outweigh the benefits from a moralistic standpoint. Flaherty admitting that he had to lie or recreate to tell a story with a fully fleshed arc that entertains an audience, is noble enough at least in his eventual honesty, but perhaps this manipulation of what is meant to be purely a documentation of real life events makes this action one that I think is an improper use of the documentary genre and what it entails.

I, for one am not against a filmmaker using elements of documentary and cinematic manipulation to create a docudrama, or a hybrid between the two, as long as it is explicitly mentioned as often as possible and perhaps even in the opening credits that the documenting of the experience was altered in a significant way. An example in the film that seems to be a reconstruction would definitely be the scene where Nanook tries to bite the phonograph record inside of the igloo with the trader. In the case of Flaherty being more outright before the film was screened that a lot of it was acted and directed, then perhaps the negative consequences that come out of this type of scene would have been minimal to non-existent.

At this time in the 1920’s, film was still such a new medium for the general audience of mainstream society, making anything added into a major motion picture highly influential and an easy way to convince and persuade its viewers. This is why propaganda films were so effective in the early part of the 20th Century, causing prejudice to flare, class structures to be cemented and racist and stereotypical depictions of certain communities to act as significant portrayals for some to point fingers to and to attempt to justify a range of conflicts and wars. Flaherty did not follow moral ethics in producing Nanook of the North despite the film being groundbreaking and incredibly impressive for the time of its release.

Overall, it did not set a great standard for many filmmakers who followed him, as many would continue to disregard the ethics behind documentary filmmaking and filmmaking in general, which is still a problem even in the 21st Century. Today reality TV shows with murky agendas are able to convince even the most media literate of the population to believe the situations on screen and forget about the strings being pulled above just out of frame. It goes to show that ultimately, entertainment will trump moral and ethical filmmaking as producers want to maximize profits and can sidestep integrity if it means that they can produce massively successful pictures without the same level of patience and honesty as those who want to avoid recreations and dramatizing of supposed “documentary” films.

There is nothing inherently wrong with recreating some scenes in a documentary if it really happened, and you are simply recreating it in order to capture it properly on camera. However, the genre description of documentary brings with it certain expectations and standards that must be followed in order to be accurately assigned to that genre, and I believe if films are first analyzed with some fair level of scrutiny in order to properly assign it a genre, whether docudrama, film or documentary, it may benefit society in the end.