The Long Exile (25 page)

The women learned how to flense and scrape polar bear skins and picked up from some visiting Greenlanders the technique required to sew the thick pelts and make trousers with them. They also learned how to set their
qulliqs
with heather wicks and which kind of blubber to use for warmth and which for light or cooking. In their searches for freshwater they developed such a keen sense that they could often smell it out. They became more active in the hunt. Even the children mucked in, tending the fox trap lines and hauling buckets of freshwater ice.

Though life was still tremendously hard, the Inuit survived. But they never forgot Ross Gibson's promise that they were going to a better life, nor lost the dream that one day they would find themselves on their way back to Inukjuak.

A
T THE TIME
of Paddy Aqiatusuk's death, in 1954,
Nanook of the North
had been playing in one cinema or another continuously for thirty-two years. The man who had made the picture, Robert Flaherty, had never contacted any of the principals since leaving the Arctic, nor had he ever returned, though from time to time he had been sent news from Inukjuak and had a good idea of what was going on there. He knew, for example, that Alakariallak, the hunter who had played Nanook, had died of starvation. He had mentioned Alakariallak's death in interviews and always said he felt “bad about it.” At some point, he had also discovered that Maggie Nujarluktuk had given birth to his son, Josephie, though on this topic he had remained resolutely silent. He never wrote to the boy, or, so far as we know, sent him any money or other token of affection.

Language experts describe Inuktitut, the Inuit language, as highly contextual and so structurally complex and minutely interleaved that nouns and verbs are formed as they are spoken, according to the current state of the thing or action they are describing. This feature of the language has made it very difficult to produce an Inuktitut dictionary. I mention it here because, in this regard at least, Inuktitut has parallels with Robert Flaherty's own life. As a film-maker and as a man, Flaherty lived for his next self-created instant. Once that instant had passed, another seamlessly took its place, and then another after that. He was not a man for ruminating
on his past. He once told an interviewer that he found horizons poignant. What he meant by this, presumably, was that horizons fenced him in while at the same time hinting at the possibilities that lay beyond. He lived his life in a state of perpetual motion, his sights set on whatever was there on the other side of the next experience.

In Robert Flaherty's eyes,
Nanook
was the culmination of his love affair with the north, just as Josephie Flaherty was the culmination of his love affair with Maggie Nujarluktuk.

Inuktitut brings the things it speaks about into being, and in the same way the Inuit brought Robert Flaherty the film-maker into being. The people of the Barrenlands had taught him how to see. In a manner of speaking, he had returned the favour in
Nanook.
For a worldwide audience of
Nanook
fans Robert Flaherty would always be the man who first threw light on the Barrenlanders. It was his vision that became the accepted view of the Inuit and their lives.

Nanook of the North
contrived to tail the film-maker. More and more it became an unwanted offspring, one that its creator was unable to shrug off. After
Nanook
, Robert would go on to make other moving pictures, take stills photographs, write books, but whatever he created would always invite comparison to that first, monumental effort. His fans, his backers and his audience never ceased to hope for another
Nanook.

Not long after the premiere of
Nanook of the North
, Flaherty took a call from lesse L. Lasky, the production head of Paramount. The mogul was an adventure fanatic. For years he had spent his vacations tramping the wildernesses of the Canadian northwest and Alaska, he had been camping with Zane Grey, the western writer, out in New Mexico, and the whole frontier myth fascinated him. In Flaherty, Lasky reckoned he had found a man on the same frequency as himself, someone whose adventures he might vicariously share. He told Flaherty to make him another
Nanook.
Flaherty could go where he wanted, do what he liked and Lasky would foot the bill. The call came at just the right time. Flaherty already had a plan for a follow-up to
Nanook.
Sometime before, he had been introduced to
Frederick O'Brien whose travelogue of his year in the remote Marquesas Islands,
White Shadows in the South Seas
, had been a big hit. During their conversation, Flaherty mentioned he was looking for a new project and O'Brien had suggested he might get on well in another part of Polynesia with which O'Brien was familiar, Samoa. There, O'Brien told Flaherty, he would find a kind of paradise of plenty. The breeze was always balmy, fish flopped into the nets and fruit fell off the trees, and the untroubled ease of Samoan life was reflected in its permissive, happy-go-lucky people. O'Brien observed that he had never been anywhere where human life was more natural and human beings were more free. The Arctic had been one kind of Eden. Samoa would be another.

By now Flaherty had a wife and three daughters and Polynesia was then still extremely remote and inaccessible. But the more he thought about it, the more determined he became to do it. And now he had a backer in Paramount. The Flaherty family, Robert, Frances, the three girls, and Robert's younger brother, David, boarded a steamer heading west out of San Francisco. A long voyage later, they landed at Safune, a small settlement on the island of Savaii in Samoa.

O'Brien had given them a letter of introduction to a German trader called Felix David. He lived just outside Safune in a two-storey building with a first-floor veranda overlooking a landscape of palms and sky-blue sea. Felix David was an old-school eccentric. He had roamed round the Pacific for years, hooking up with the local women, trading in whatever was tradeable and treating the islanders on whichever remote paradise he found himself to improvised amateur operatic performances. He and Robert Flaherty formed an instant bond and with Felix David's help the Flaherty family found a house to rent nearby. There, in the grounds, they built an open-air theatre where they showed movies they had brought over from New York. Within weeks, the Savaiians had forgotten all about Felix David's operatic performances.

Though conditions were a good deal more pleasant on Savaii
than they had been in the Arctic, Flaherty found it proved much harder to settle on a theme for the Samoan film. Life was so easy and the Samoans so peaceable that there was no real drama. Robert, Frances and David had to spend a good many weeks drifting about with the locals before they landed on a topic that might make an intriguing film. Before any Samoan boy could pass into manhood, he had to undergo a series of agonising tattoo rituals. Beautiful and elaborate patterns would be imprinted all over his body using plant dyes and hot shark bones. Flaherty had first become interested in tattooing in the Arctic. Although the practice was much frowned upon by missionaries there, many older Inuit women still bore tattoos in the form of seal or walrus whiskers on their faces. But the Samoan tattoos were much more elaborate, often taking years to complete and the results transformed Samoan men into living story books. From the tattoos, other Samoans could tell which family the young man belonged to and where he fitted into the family hierarchy. The skill and intricacy of the tattoos determined his status among his peers, his future prospects and his marriageability. The Flaherty brothers began filming. They spent two years making their Samoan movie and the result was
Moana of the South Seas
which remained, until his death, Robert Flaherty's favourite film.

The studio heads at Paramount were underwhelmed with
Moana.
They had been expecting another
Nanook.
“Where's the blizzards?” asked one Paramount executive. They found other reasons to nitpick, too. Having cheerfully waved off scenes of speared walruses and disembowelled seals in the Arctic picture, they now wondered if the tattooing sequences were not just a little distasteful. The Paramount booker scheduled
Moana
for a limited release in Lincoln, Nebraska; Pueblo, Colorado; Austin, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; Asheville, North Carolina; and Poughkeepsie, New York, expecting it quietly to die, but it received enthusiastic audiences. The critics liked it, too. Surprised, and rather caught out, Paramount took another look at the film with a view to a national release. But the marketing department met with considerable resistanee
from Flaherty himself. He reasoned that
Nanook
had flourished on word of mouth and he wanted the same for
Moana.
Director and studio were gridlocked. Paramount did not want to leave the movie's success to chance; Flaherty did not want it aggressively marketed. In the impasse,
Moana
was shelved. It came out a while later in a few more towns around the U.S.A., but did not, in studio speak, “do business.” Its moment had passed.

Hollywood had not quite given up on Robert Flaherty though. Sometime after
Moana
, Irving Thalberg, head at MGM, got in touch. Thalberg had optioned O'Brien's book,
White Shadows in the South Seas
, and it was about to go into production in Tahiti with W. S. Van Dyke as director. Thalberg wanted Flaherty to lend his expertise in the area and co-direct. Seeing no objection to this, Flaherty set out eagerly for Tahiti, but it was clear from the start that the relationship between Flaherty and Van Dyke was doomed. Flaherty was a miniaturist who dealt in epic ideas and, for all his liberal stretching of the truth, his instincts lay always in the direction of documentation. Van Dyke wanted a garden-variety Hollywood blockbuster in an exotic setting. Before long, Flaherty took himself off the picture and returned home to New Canaan, Connecticut.

He was to go back to Tahiti a couple of years later through a connection with the German director, Frederick Murnau, who was then working in Hollywood. Murnau had financial backing for a Flaherty-style observational film set in the South Seas and he wanted Flaherty to make it. For Robert, this meant leaving his family behind, because the girls were by now all at school, but he was not a man to be boxed in by his domestic circumstances, and he and his brother, David, took passage on a ship out of California, arriving in Tahiti on 7 luly 1929.

The two men immediately set about finding a story and quickly settled on a seventeen-year-old beauty by the name of Reri to front the picture. Reri was a smiling, round-faced young woman with a thick mass of tarry hair, who might well have reminded Robert of Maggie Nujarluktuk.
Tabu
hung on a simple love story between a
girl, played by Reri, forced to leave her island after a taboo is put on her, and a young pearl diver. Completed in eighteen months, the picture caused a sensation among critics.
Film News
called it “one of the most visually lovely films ever made.” Reri was picked up, brought over to New York and put in the Ziegfeld Follies. From there she went on to Europe and danced hula to titillated urban audiences, before marrying a Polish actor. The couple lived the high life for a couple of years, then separated. Reri's work dried up and she eventually returned to Tahiti a broken woman. “I feel bad about it,” Flaherty said later. “I guess in a way I'm partly responsible.”

For all
Tabu's
critical success, though, the picture failed to please its backers. Flaherty was completely undisciplined about money. Every film he made went over budget and he got into endless jams with financiers, but the overruns on
Tabu
really finished him so far as Hollywood was concerned. His next job came to him through the British office of the French film studio, Gaumont, which wanted Flaherty to take himself to the tiny island of Aran, off the west coast of Ireland, and make a film about traditional life among the fishermen there.

Around the same time a
Nanook
backlash began, kicked off by a woman called Iris Barry, who had once been secretary to the Arctic explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Barry was now working as the film critic of the
Daily Mail
in London. Writing on the tenth anniversary of
Nanook's
premiere, Barry questioned the film's authenticity, calling it “an enchanting romance, which convinced us it was fact though it wasn't at all,” and claimed that her erstwhile boss, Stefansson, had always considered it a set-up. The
Daily Telegraph
followed up with an article headlined “Is
Nanook
a Fake?” For a while the picture lost its respectability and it looked as though its creator might lose something of his reputation. Flaherty was baffled by the accusations. In
Nanook
he had wanted to capture the struggle for survival, because, for him, it was at the heart of Inuit life. How he achieved this was of less concern. “Sometimes you have to lie,” he said. “One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.” It had never been
his role, as he saw it, to depict actuality, only to relay its essence. He took it as a given that he had augmented reality. His responsibility as he saw it, began and ended at the lens. One of the first film-makers to wade in on Flaherty's side during the backlash was the radical leftist Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein had famously elaborated on historical events while filming both
Battleship Potemkin
, his rendition of the mutiny at Odessa during 1905, and
October
, a highly embellished account of the uprising of 1917, and he wrote that “we Russians learned more from
Nanook of the North
than from any other foreign film. We wore it out studying it. That was, in a way, our beginning.” In the end,
Nanook
was too popular to be shouted down and to most of its global audience the arguments against it seemed rather academic.