Traditional Ethnocultural Communities in Ethnographic Films. Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty

The article, using the classical ethnographic film Nanook of the North (1922) by the pioneer of world visual anthropology Robert Flaherty, examines the properties and content of a film document about the culture of the Eskimos of Northern Canada at the beginning of the 20th century. Due to the specifics of silent films, Nanook of the North is a kind of a film text consisting of an approximately equal number of film frames and text captions alternating in the narrative. In this regard, an effective method the author used for the analysis of this film was its decoding: "translation" into textual format. The obtained film text allowed identifying and analysing the features of the screen image of the evolution of the traditional Inuit Eskimo lifestyle in the studied period and the foundations of the specific creative method of the director-researcher. The design of Nanook of the North is a sequence of episodes narrating about the annual economic cycle in the ethnocultural community of the Eskimos of the Hudson Bay accompanied by extensive textual comments by the author. Based on the analysis of thematic visual, textual and archival materials, the article substantiates that, for Flaherty, directing is inseparable from research, and the basic feature of his method is a long-term motion-picture observation of the life of an individual family, which gradually develops into a full-fledged screen image of the Eskimo culture in the film. As a result of the analysis of Flaherty's creative method, the following composite stages in the work of the director were revealed: a thorough anthropological study preceding the shooting; filming that covered the annual ethnocultural cycle based on a combination of motion-picture observations and forcedly reconstructed scenes; a careful selection of material that maximally revealed the "spirit" of the culture at the editing stage. This method, first tested by the director in the film Nanook of the North, consists in combining research, documentary and artistic elements in the film, thanks to which the film managed to convey not only information about the events, but also their figurative and emotional context: the so-important "sensation" of the North. Using Flaherty's work as an example, the article explores the potential of a film as a form of research and presentation of scientific knowledge and draws a conclusion about the phenomenon of an ethnographic film as a historical source. It is concluded that the film Nanook of the North became an outstanding phenomenon in the culture of its time, laid the methodological foundations of the ethnographic film field in the world, became a multilayer film document and a model of a comprehensive scientific and creative methodology that has not lost its relevance for use in the works of modern researchers.

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