The Creative Treatment of Alterity: Nanook as the North

• Main Author: MacKenzie, Scott
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Edinburgh University Press 2015
• Subjects: Arctic; Netsilik; sami
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694174.003.0015

This chapter examines the many re-iterations of Robert Flaherty’s influential film Nanook of the North (1922) to show how this key documentary film has been re-imagined and re-articulated in documentaries such as Claude Massot’s Nanook Revisited (1990), feature length fictional accounts of Flaherty’s journey north such as Massot’s Kabloonak (1994), indigenous media such as the National Film Board of Canada’s Netsilik series (1967), IMAX films like To the Arctic (2012) and experimental cinema such as Philip Hoffman and Sami van Ingen’s Sweep (1995). Through the analysis of these varied works, MacKenzie delineates how the continual re-iterations of Nanook of the North play and complex and conflicted role in the popular imagination of the Arctic.