Nanook of the North et le Cinéma Ethnographique: Cinédoc ou Synecdoque?

Abstract

Robert Flaherty produced the first documentary with a view to exalting the survival of the fittest among the Inuit. Like many discourses on the other, this film is at once celebratory and condescending. The director worked within a socio-historical context that had faith in the ability of anthropology and cinema to document the other in an objective fashion. But his perspective is romanticized through the lens of preestablished ideologies. This tension between reality and fiction generates both admiration for the film and denunciation of its preconceptions, of documentary practices in general and of ethnographic discourse as a whole. However, to appreciate the scope of Flaherty’s work, one must take into consideration his aesthetic intentions and the limitations of the medium. Because of its inherently fragmentary character, the cinematic apparatus always substitutes the part for the whole: the synecdoche is integral to the “cine-doc”. Having carefully chosen to suspend a postcolonial critique, the author considers the narrative forms of myth and allegory as a means not to apologize for the film, but rather to acknowledge its transcultural potential.