  "The Nanook of the North" by Robert Flaherty (1922) I want to start from saying that, to me, this film is about hunger (not only but in many ways predominantly so). Or perhaps such theme has been haunting me through the seance due to the textual introduction in which, somehow without much pause or gravity given to it, Flaherty informs the viewers that some time after completing the film he learnt of Nanook's death from starvation during the hunting expedition. It then became something I continued to see - in the repeated and strenuous food search, killing of animals, cutting meat chunks, chewing them raw, exposure of teeth, in a certain rush and urgency of consummation (I here disagree with Rothman's analysis of the eating scene when Nanook is compared by him to a cat devouring a bird, his look into the camera "threatening," what I saw rather was hunger turned into a form of spectacle enhanced by the savage-fantasy equipped with animal bone blade and with blood on his face, I think Rothman here gets deceived by Flaherty's own deminishing gaze..). In the dire environment presented by Flaherty both animals and humans are hungry. I wonder then what does the filmmaker eat? Is he invited to commune with his film's subjects or can he access food and share it as the "white man" did in one of the scenes (feeding the children, a gesture of both. hospitality (in a land colonized) and colonial benevolence reminiscent of many other representations of the "hungry/malnourished Other")? I will not dwell more on that, I might be (certainly am) biased, my seeing is affected by plethora of images, of associations from elsewhere, revealing that, even though I am learning to look otherwise (as contemporary anthropologist), I can't escape seeing what I already know. *** There is mystique to such (newly) emerging filmmaking and ethnography, and mystification of the process, of positionality. Flaherty doesn't really disclose sources of his financing (he starts his rapport with Inuits through mining-related expedition) nor does Malinowski provide a full account of his ethnographic adventure (exposed later) but rather sets his "mission" by going into the real world of the natives, away from white men settlements. In such way they acquire an ability to grasp a "native POV," to see what they see. I want to come back to this. Flaherty cannot resolve the contradictions established by his own presence in the pre-industrial worlds he seeks to evoke through his films (...) his profoundly nostalgic vision is built upon a diminishment rather than an interpretation of reality. (Grimshaw 2001, 50) *** Some notes in regards to the paradigm of Malinowskian ethnography (after Grimshaw): -first-hand experience, priority given to experiential knowledge -seeing with one's own eyes: distrust in e.g. missionaries accounts but also the emergence of the ethnographer-explorer/visonary/ a special kind of individual moving between worlds -authority and allure of having "truly been there" - to the outer edges of human world, the heart of darkness, to the childhood of mankind (but ethnographer also returning to childhood condition to re-orient themselves in the new cultural reality, to re-learn to see) -subjectivity as a distinct feature/component of the resulting ethnographic writing (?) -(but still) a vision is pure, cultivated to reveal (what?) -an important distinction is made between exploration and revelation (a missionary turned into globetrotter mystic? there not to teach but to learn) I believe all these apply to Flaherty's documentary project, which leads me to the timeless present and the affordances of film as medium The virtual lack of montage (which he apparently rejected for the sake of purity of cinematic transmission) and stillness of the camera gives the viewer (or myself at least) a sense of contemplation of the everyday life of people, whose reality, on the one hand, unfolds in front my very eyes in the now, yet who are, at the same time locked in the past as noble savages observed with the innocent eye of the visitor from the European civilization (situated here, according to Grimshaw, as corrupted, decaying in the aftermath of the First World War). But also, I emphatize with the protagonists (power of cinema! and also a result of Flaherty's methodologies), but unavoidably assume the viewing position of the filmmaker - the only one available in this case, I become a witness/observer (difference?) to their existence but (at least apparently) the documentarian, and myself, are free of struggles and urgencies of the film's subjects. The native POV is a construction of the ethnographer's mind. The reality of the Other is his field that can be exited. I am here a bit of a sceptic though the contemporary echoes of that paradox I see as a productive puzzle. Something I think about in regards to forms of looking and seeing - taken as visual perception and cognitive apprehension, an embrace of meaning, embodiment of the fragments of others lives. How this can be mediated, translated, recorded? And what is this film a document of - a life (staged/represented/approximated) of the Other but also a Western gaze, romanticizing and capturing, honoring and destroying, participating in and dominating the narrative? deception and mystification, ethnography and documentary filmmaking as art (vocational type): the worlds evoked in Flaherty's cinema and Malinowski's monographs appear to have been 'found' rather than made. For the Malinowskian ethnographers share with Flaherty the paradox of presenting ideas as if they emerge from life. (Grimshaw 2001, 55) Flaherty "comes back to civilization" but certainly transformed, gifted with that eye-opening experience. The status of Nanook remains ambiguous to me. In some ways he is immortalized, maybe even cherished, admired, yet is it, as Grimshaw remarked, a taxidermy only?  Transportation of a place & depicting/imagining the Other A short peak into Edward Curtis's legacy (TBC) Ambivalent reception of his photographic portraits of the Native Americans - precious documentation, creating of fictions (the shirt!) and misrepresentations - who has the power to capture an image of a person? How is the representation becoming a costume and/or a (genuine?) identity? What if the depiction comes alive? 1. The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis (1907-30) 2. German Indians by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher (1997/8) 3. The Maori portraits by Gottfried Lindauer (1874)      
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