Robert Flaherty

Robert Joseph Flaherty is considered the "father" of both the documentary and the ethnographic film. He was born on February 16, 1884. He is an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature-length documentary film, Nanook of the North (1922). The film made his reputation and nothing in his later life fully equalled its success. 

His early life

Being the eldest of seven children, Flaherty received little schooling and met his wife Frances Hubbard during his education. Flaherty is credited with eight films, all distinguished by an instinct for finding lyrical images.

He spent the years between 1910 and 1920 prospecting for iron ore in north Canada, where he gathered material for his first film, he developed a natural curiosity for people of other cultures. Flaherty was an acclaimed still-photographer in Toronto. His portraits of American Indians and wildlife during his travels are what led to the creation of his critically acclaimed Nanook of the North.

Nanook of the North (1922)

Nanook of the North is a 1922 American silent documentary film, with elements of docudrama, at a time when the concept of separating films into documentary and drama did not yet exist.

In the tradition of what would later be called salvage ethnography, Flaherty captured the struggles of the man named Nanook and his family in the Canadian Arctic. The film has been incorrectly considered the first feature-length documentary. Some have criticized Flaherty for staging several sequences, but the film is generally viewed as standing "alone in its stark regard for the courage and ingenuity of its heroes."

In 1989, this film was one of the first 25 films to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

The film made his reputation and nothing in his later life fully equalled its success, although he continued the development of this new genre of narrative documentary with Moana (1926) and Man of Aran (1934).