(Don’t) Look at the Camera - Text 4
The writer and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat,[9] however, offers a different interpretation of Flaherty’s teamwork and the Inuit who worked on the shooting of Nanook of the North as Akeley camera operators, consultants, production personnel, etc. NoiseCat believes, because these people truly had worked on the film’s creation, that it was inevitably also stamped with their artistic vision and their wish to be represented.[10] He hypothesizes that the pride in this film on the part of many Inuit may have to do with seeing the culture of their ancestors depicted and celebrated even though it was abused by colonization. NoiseCat thus sees in the film a more promising ambiguity which writes history in a different manner. What if these staged scenes for the camera (and in particular those conceived in front of an Akeley, as the camera is specialized for field and long-distance filming of the subject) were the way for depicting past traditions through the image, not entirely as a kind of romantic anthropological objectification, but also as the material of memory?:
After watching and researching the film, I started to wonder if the paradigm of salvage anthropology was actually an appropriation of the deeply Indigenous desire to preserve and remember the beauty of Native life before the cataclysm of colonization.[11]
Whatever the interpretative paths of Nanook of the North taken today, Flaherty alone won legitimacy as a filmmaker-anthropologist showing what was deemed to be true life when the film was first shown in the West more than one century ago. Like Osa and Martin Johnson and many others, he was able to assert the authentic representation of a people (through the image: those in front of the camera; through words: those behind the camera) thanks to the Akeley camera’s innovative technology, without any comparison being able to negotiate this authenticity. The project consisted in preserving through moving images what had never been preserved before. It consisted also in showing what had never been seen, ready from then to be displayed behind plate glass in a museum: these animals, these people and these practices far from the white male West, such as a seal hunt with a harpoon on the ice, or lion cubs playing with their mother in the shade of a baobab tree. As for what and who remains beyond the Akeley camera’s vision, bringing attention to this makes it possible to interrogate the whys and wherefores, the prejudices and blind spots of the discourses which accompany the history of this camera, from colonialism to the domination of nature, from the hagiography of the conqueror to the construction of a teleological history.
As an audiovisual example, a throwback to the interactions behind the camera's uses was undertaken by filmmaker Claude Massot in 1994. In the film Kabloonak, he stages the romanticized story of the relationship between Allakariallak – Nanook's actor – and Flaherty, representing the Akeley camera as the latter's fetish object. The following clip offers a vision quite distinct from the film's other scenes, seeming to recall by imitation the singular moving images that the camera made it possible to produce in the 1920s. Thus, although not shot with an Akeley camera, the scene filmed “in the style of” recalls the specificity of the shots Flaherty was able to capture through this sudden injection of flexibility into the cinematic gaze. But the panoramic shot, from the dogs leashed by Allakariallak playing Nanook to the horizon he observes, is interrupted by a sudden reminder of the laws governing daily life in and around Inukjuak: bears are roaming. Allakariallak, now Nanook, becomes Allakariallak again, which is to say that Massot represents the man as he navigates his hybrid roles, both actor and connoisseur of the place, both shown and followed by Flaherty. A guiding role that falls to the native – at home – documented by the non-native – in the elsewhere to be explored.
