Podcasts TV Spine 33: Nanook of the North

Spine 33: Nanook of the North

Published: Aug. 16, 2013, 2 a.m.

Oh man, if Oliver Twist was problematic then Robert J. Flaherty's 1922 "documentary" is the pure problem to which problematic things aspire. It's not just staged, it's purposefully primitivized, Falherty taking away an modernity his Inuit subjects had allowed into their lives, from guns to to jeans to houses. Still as the world's first full-length documentary, it proved that such a thing was possible and marketable, so it sits on its throne of lies.