Nanook and His Contemporaries: Imagining Eskimos in American Culture, 1897-1922

Huhndorf, Shari M.

doi:10.1086/449001

Cited by 31 publications

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“…Made before the coming of sound in cinema, Flaherty’s unusually intimate portrayal of an Inuit man, ‘Nanook’ (played by Allakariallak, a long‐term collaborator of the filmmaker), comprised extended observational scenes and textual interventions in the form of intertitles. According to some commentators (Huhndorf ), Flaherty’s depiction of Nanook ’s central character is narrow and stereotypical. For these critics, the filmmaker presents his subject as simple, childlike and primitive and, as such, consistent with an established history of western images of the Eskimo.…”

Section: Ethnographic Film and Individual Livesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Telling stories, screening lives: notes towards an anthropological biography

Grimshaw

2020

Soc Anthropol

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Anthropological work that focuses on individual lives, what Zeitlyn calls a ‘sample of one’ (Zeitlyn, 2008, Social Anthropology, 16, 154), has long hovered on the edge of disciplinary respectability. At best it is viewed as a fieldwork methodology, a way of collecting data; at worst, a kind of popularisation. This essay is a response to an emerging interest in anthropological biography. Drawing on the rich history of innovative work with individuals, it presents an argument for taking seriously ‘person‐centered ethnography’ (Langness and Frank 1981). Through a juxtaposition of classic texts and films, the paper articulates a case for recognising person‐centred ethnography as an unusually generative anthropological form, offering a critical context for the development of contemporary practice. Finally, in seeking to distinguish what might constitute anthropological biography as a particular mode of inquiry, I propose a realignment of the life‐writing project with humanistically oriented work in biographical studies.

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Section: Ethnographic Film and Individual Livesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Telling stories, screening lives: notes towards an anthropological biography

Grimshaw

2020

Soc Anthropol

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“…O sorriso de Nanook foi objeto de pelo menos duas interpretações propostas por Huhndorf (2000) e Raheja (2007). A argumentação central de Raheja é uma crítica geral à política representacional imagética sobre os índios norte-americanos, tomando o sorriso de Nanook como um claro excesso de ocidentalismo/ eurocentrismo de Flaherty.…”

Section: O Sorriso O Rir E a Imagem Relacionalunclassified

O Sorriso De Nanook E O Cinema Documental E Etnográfico De Robert Flaherty

Gonçalves

2019

Sociol. Antropol.

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Resumo A partir de uma leitura renovada do filme Nanook of the North (1922), de Robert Flaherty, tomamos o sorriso de Nanook como guia para rediscutir questões cruciais, que estão na base das discussões epistemológicas tanto do cinema quanto da antropologia: o problema da verdade/falsidade e ficção/realidade, o modo de produzir o conhecimento, a encenação da vida social, o ilusionismo e o anti-ilusionismo das representações sociais, os modos de representação do outro, o problema da indexicalidade das imagens como marcas de suas vinculações com o mundo.

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“…Parental worry about the possibly detrimental effects of a modern pastime is here coupled with a specific reference to the Inuit context: becoming "a flat image on the wall" echoes the colonial history of image-production in the Arctic, where Indigenous people were reduced to stereotypes of an exotic wilderness, a medial practice that Shari Huhndorf traces to Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922). 28 In engaging with film, the mother seems to say, her daughter risks surrendering herself as the object of Southern projections. However, the eye of the opening scene already puts this comment into perspective: it is the protagonist's -and, by extension, the filmmakers'eyes that are doing the looking here and the gaze that she exercises on herself is more complex than simply one of subjugation.…”

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“…While Nanook of the North could be seen as an unintentional portrayal of Allakariallak's amusement at the expectations of Southern audiences, Restless River determinedly turns the camera around and places the American colonial presence as the object of the gaze. 29 In this self-reflexive move where the filmmakers place their work alongside earlier images of the Arctic, river water is employed as a metaphor of mediation. Immediately before the scene with the imagined cinema on the ceiling, a sequence interweaves the movements of river water, wind, and cinematic images.…”

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Towards a Hydropoetics of the Arctic: Watery Connections in Restless River (Arnait Video Productions, 2019)

Niska

2022

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Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu's film Restless River (Nunavut/Canada, 2019) begins and ends with a superimposition of two bodies of water. 1 After a close-up shot of a pair of eyes opens the scene in the film's first seconds (Figure 1), the image fades into a forward-moving drone shot of a snow-covered tundra landscape. The camera traverses the tundra, moves gradually upwards and finally reaches the river of the film's setting. A portion of the Kuujjuaq river of Nunavik in the Canadian Arctic stretches across the screen in a decelerating drone shot, flowing in icy blue shades through the white landscape. The film cuts back to the pair of eyes, this time superimposed on an image of rippling water that fills the entire screen. While the eyes remain in place, the film cuts from the waterscape in the background to a view across the fast-flowing whitecapped river. This opening introduces the viewers to a powerful double image: two overlapping bodies of water, one of an Inuk woman and the other that of the Kuujjuaq river. This scene returns as a mirror image at the end of the film, closing the narrative bracket by inverting the sequence: the same pair of eyes is superimposed on a more peaceful view of the river and remains in view as the riverscape dissolves before the credits appear (Figure 2).

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Nanook and His Contemporaries: Imagining Eskimos in American Culture, 1897-1922

Cited by 31 publications

References 0 publications

Telling stories, screening lives: notes towards an anthropological biography

Telling stories, screening lives: notes towards an anthropological biography

O Sorriso De Nanook E O Cinema Documental E Etnográfico De Robert Flaherty

Towards a Hydropoetics of the Arctic: Watery Connections in Restless River (Arnait Video Productions, 2019)

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