Nanook of the North/The Wedding of Palo (and other Films of Arctic Life)

2-DISC BLU-RAY EDITION

Nanook of the North (1922):

Robert Flaherty made this wonderful film of Eskimo (Inuit) life following six years as an Arctic explorer for the Canadian Northern Railway. Flaherty seized upon the idea of structuring his movie around characters who reenacted episodes of their lives and participated in the shaping of the film. He was not trained as an anthropologist, but Flaherty wisely guides our discovery of the people and their activities, and ninety years later, Nanook of the North remains as completely engaging as it was in 1922, a huge influence on many ethnographic films that followed. This edition is mastered in high definition at the visually correct speed from the painstaking 35mm restoration of 1972, with a lovely orchestral score composed, compiled and conducted by Timothy Brock. Selected for the National Film Registry, 1989.

The Wedding of Palo (Palos Brudefaerd) (1934):

Nanook’s obvious successor, Palo the last beautiful work of the famed Danish polar explorer and anthropologist Dr. Knud Rasmussen. Filmed in sound with an Inuit cast from the Angmagssalik district of east Greenland, Palo, like Nanook, documents a vanishing lifestyle and uses Flaherty’s device of an appealing narrative; in this case, a story of two men who desire the same woman as a wife. It is mastered in high definition and digitally restored from an original 35mm nitrate print in the collection of George Eastman House.

STREAM DIGITAL VERSION

BONUS MATERIALS INCLUDE:

• Nanook Revisited (Saumialuk) (1988) - Produced for French television, this film by Claude Massot, made in the same locations used by Flaherty, shows how Inuit life changed in the intervening decades, how Flaherty consciously depicted a culture which was then already vanishing, and how Nanook is used today to teach the Inuit their heritage
• Houses of the Arctic (1928) - A version of the igloo-building sequence from Nanook, re-edited and re-titled as an educational film
• Captain Kleinschmidt's Arctic Hunt (1914) - A documentary by arctic explorer Frank E. Kleinschmidt about his expedition to Alaska in 1913
• Primitive Love (1927) - Two excepts from a 1927 feature produced and directed by Frank E. Kleinschmidt (Winter in the Arctic, Polar Bear and Seal)
• Eskimo Hunters (Northwestern Alaska) (1949) - A documentary produced by Louis de Rochemont, showcasing many activities seen in Nanook of the North
• The Face of the High Arctic (1959) - A documentary by The National Film Board of Canada, depicting the ecology of the region