Ethnography Caught on Celluloid: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922)
The cinema is a medium perfectly suited to the recording of a particular community’s beliefs, practices, and cultural milieu. Many anthropologists see films as media of representation in their own right, as opposed to seeing ethnographic film-making as merely an adjunct activity to data gathering (Homiak 185). This has been true not only in the modern landscape, but also in the early years of cinema and the anthropological medium. In fact, one of the first and most celebrated filmmakers during the 1920s essentially used his lens to document the culture and practices of a specific community. He is Robert Flaherty, and ...
