Ostensibly the story of a great hunter, Nanuk, the brave leader of the Inuit. But to a large extent, Nanook is also a "creation" of Flaherty. Nanook's nuclear family is more in line with the European and American family structure than the Inuit extended family structure. His method of hunting belongs to an era thirty or forty years before the film was made. Nanook, as a character or character, recreates a way of life from a long past in the story, rather than presenting everyday life itself when filming. The film can be called either a documentary or a feature film.
It is classified as a documentary and usually depends on two things: (1) the degree to which the stories Flaherty tells are true to the Inuit way of life, even if those ways belong to the past. (2) The spirit and feeling embodied by Alacaria Lak, who plays Nanuk, are very in line with the unique way of life of the Inuit and the understanding of it in the Western world.
The film is both a faithful presentation of Inuit life and Flaherty's unique vision of that life.
Grierson said Nanook of the North had "documentary value," which is why the term "documentary" was widely used.
Although many films, like Nanook of the North, rely on a single narrative structure to organize events, setting typical, representative characters, discarding cheap romanticism, emphasizing the challenges of the natural environment the characters face, implying We need to understand the wider cultural connotation by understanding the behavior of the individual, and sometimes even imitate Flaherty's occasional affection for Nanok, but none of them have the original quality of "Nanuk of the North" .
--Bill Nichols, "Introduction to Documentary"
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