The Long Exile (4 page)

Flaherty constantly finds himself having to charge after hunters too excited by the prospect of a kill to stop and remember to pose for the camera. He spends a good deal of time trying to persuade the Inuit to repeat their actions or simply stand where they are told. Maggie and Cunayou fall out. There are disputes over pay.

But none of these setbacks seems to discourage the film-maker for long. He bounces from day to day in a kind of ecstatic trance. In his spare time he fiddles for the locals, or sets up impromptu screenings of his rushes. In all the excitement, the contradictions of his ambition pass him by. Here he is, a white man banked by a fur trader, making a film about an idealised kind of Inuit life which, if it
ever existed, has long since been turned upside down by, among others, white men and fur traders.

By November the sea around Inukjuak is frozen firm and by December it is stable enough to travel on long distance. At Christmas, Flaherty throws his customary party for the Inuit, serving up sardines and sweet tea, and making a space in the fur store to dance square reels and Irish jigs. When the New Year arrives he decides that what his film needs is a polar bear hunt. The bears are rarely seen around Inukjuak but Alakariallak says that female bears often pass the winter with their cubs in dens at Cape Sir Thomas Smith, two hundred miles north along the Ungava coastline, and so, on 17 lanuary 1921, Flaherty sets off with Alakariallak and another man he has nicknamed Harry Lauder after the singer and the party turns north. They reckon on being away a month, allowing ten days each for the journey there and back and another ten for bad weather, stopping to film wherever they find polar bear. But the going proves difficult, the ice near to the coast pushed into mountainous pressure ridges and the dogs hard-pressed to pull the sleds over broken ice fields and knife-sharp candle ice, and when eventually they reach Cape Sir Thomas Smith there are no polar bears. For a few days they meander across the cape, one time travelling all day and night only to find themselves within two miles of their starting point. No bears. The dogs become more and more desperate from cold and hunger until they eventually stage a rebellion, making a dash for the shelter of the hunters' snowhouse and refusing to allow themselves to be harnessed, and Alakariallak has to carry the lead dog to the sled whimpering with misery and cold. Still, they see no bears. One by one the dogs begin to starve. The men are so cold now and so low on fuel, they are reduced one night to burning the cross bars from the
komatik
to keep them warm. The following night they have nothing left for a fire but film. Four two-hundred-foot rolls are sacrificed to boil water for their tea. They lose two dogs to starvation before Flaherty finally makes the decision to turn back for home. In eight weeks away they have not run into a single bear. They begin
the return journey by day, travelling in small bursts, walking beside the sleds whose dogs are by now too weak to pull them. The sea ice pours on either side, as flat and formless as a newly ironed sheet. As they walk, Alakariallak keeps them cheerful with stories of the bears he has killed the year before. At night they build a makeshift snow-house and he sings them versions of the songs he has heard on Flaherty's gramophone. The following day they stumble into Inukjuak, dark with snow blindness, their hearts like old stones, their noses half eaten by frostbite, their feet frozen into their boots, hardly able to believe they are alive still.

The Rvillon Frres post manager, Stewart, comes out to meet them, brings them back to the cabin, unwraps their feet and sets them up with mugs of hot, sweet tea. Only the week before, he reports, two huskies dug a female bear and her two cubs from their den a couple of hours' travel away from the settlement. The bear and her cubs battled it out against the dogs and sent them spinning into the air and sliding back on their bellies. There was no need to have gone all the way to Cape Sir Thomas Smith. For a moment silence falls. Then Alakariallak grabs his sides with both hands and laughs and laughs so hard that tears leak from his eyes.

Perhaps it is this brush with mortality which draws Robert Flaherty closer to Maggie Nujarluktuk. In any case, he begins to spend more time with her. Everything about Maggie must seem so fresh, so unpolished and innocent, as different from the huddle of sophisticates Flaherty knows in New York as snow is from Shinola. Of course, he knows nothing about what she is thinking or feeling; neither, really, can he imagine it. She is unexplorable, a terrain that even he cannot reach nor will ever fully know. This, precisely, is her charm. Who knows why she goes to him? Ambition, curiosity, love even? He cannot tell, and it does not matter.

As winter deepens, Robert Flaherty and Maggie Nujarluktuk become lovers. They conduct their affair in the clapboard cabin, overlooked by Frances Flaherty and the boy with the mandolin and a pile of cameras. After a while she moves from her family snow
house to live with him. No one expects it to last and this, too, is part of the beauty of it.

All through the winter, Robert Flaherty continues filming, developing the film as he goes along and staging little shows of the rushes in his cabin with hot tea and sea biscuits and, often, music and even dancing. As winter gives way to the spring, bringing long, clear days of brilliant sunshine, Flaherty films Alakariallak cutting snowblocks with a walrus tusk snowknife, heaving them one on top of another to form a dome, while Maggie goes in after to caulk the joints between the blocks with dry snow, packing the surface smooth, the baby tucked safely in her
amiut.
When it proves too dark to film inside the snowhouse, Flaherty has Alakariallak and his friends build a half-dome exposed to the daylight as a prop. For two days they labour but each time the structure proves unstable and collapses and Flaherty stands by while the Inuit laugh out loud at their mistake and set themselves to the task once more. At the end of the second day, a stable half-dome stands on the sea ice. They build a sleeping platform of snow inside and line it with skins and Maggie sets a
qulliq
, or blubber stove, burning with seal fat. While Robert Flaherty winds his camera this made-up family goes through the routine of turning in for the night, Alakariallak sliding under the sleeping skins while Maggie and Cunayou undress the children and slot them in their places, before pulling off their own sealskin parkas and slipping naked between the children and their man.

Spring gives way eventually to summer and finds Robert and Maggie still together, communicating, now, in a mix of Inuktitut, English and sign language. The tundra, too, ends its silence. By late June, the snow is melting on the tops of eskers and hills, then later on the lower ground. The sun warms the black soil and speeds up the process. Where the tuff gives out to lake water or streams, seams of ice-free water appear. The night shrinks into a thin, blue glimmer. Heather begins to uncurl and grow buds. Summer birds appear from the south, rustling among the willow collecting twigs for their nests and, later, insects for their young. The air whines with bees and mosquitoes,
pink saxifrage bursts from the willow bed, the grasses grow cotton tops and, when the
Annie
drops anchor at the mouth of the Innuksuak River in August 1921, the lovers already know that Robert Flaherty will be heading south alone. He will leave Maggie Nujarluk-tuk there, on the shores of Hudson Bay, with their baby swelling in her belly.

T
HE INUIT SETTLED BACK
into their habitual routines and the events of the previous year faded to the stuff of campfire stories. In New York City, Robert and Frances Flaherty shut themselves in a room in a walk-up apartment and edited seventy-five thousand feet of film. By November they had a rough cut and were touting around town looking for a distributor. Just before Christmas, the Flahertys managed to persuade Charlie Gelb at Paramount to screen a version of the movie, now being called
Nanook of the North
, before an invited audience at Paramount's screening rooms. It had taken Flaherty a decade to get this far and he knew that
Nanook
was his last chance. If it failed, he would have a hard time finding another backer. But his movie-making career was not the only thing on the line. Flaherty had poured his passion into
Nanook.
For ten years, he had brooded over the Arctic and its people. Up in Inukjuak, he felt he had witnessed something great and timeless about the human spirit which it was his duty, even his destiny, to pass on. At the time, he had written in his diary that he wanted to capture “the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possible, before the white man has destroyed not only their character but the people as well.” He still felt that way. He had documented a disappearing world. He had to hope that
Nanook
would go down better in New York than his first effort in Toronto. If it did not, it would be too late to make another.

The hour or so that followed would be one of the most agonising, and most important, of Robert Flaherty's life. As the opening image of ice and rock and dark water flooded the room, Flaherty felt the audience tense. The intertitle appeared. “No other race could survive,” it read, “yet here live the most cheerful people in all the worldthe fearless, loveable, happy-go-lucky Eskimos.” Alakarial-lak's image faded up and cut, eventually, to Maggie pulling the baby from her
amiut
, the faces so familiar to Flaherty but so distant now. The audience went quiet. He saw one or two of them straining for a better look at the screen. Maggie and the rest spilled from the
kayak.
A few people laughed. The film segued from one sequence to another until, in the final moments, they were witnessing Alakarial-lak and his family going to bed in anticipation of another day. The end credits appeared, the lights went up and the audience began streaming out but Robert Flaherty was left with no clue. Some were smiling, others looking dazed, even grim, a few wearing no expression at all. He waited with Frances. When the room had finally been cleared, the screening room manager sidled over to him. Well, he said,
Nanook of the North
was a brave film all right, and he could see that Flaherty had put a great deal of time and effort into making it. The manager knew what he was about to say would not sit easily but the plain fact of the matter was that the movie was unwatchable. A bunch of strange-looking people dressed like animals eating walrus meat. Who in their right mind would pay to see such a thing?

Robert and Frances Flaherty spent the holiday season licking their wounds. Twelve hundred and fifty miles away in Inukjuak, the Rvillon Frres factor gave a Christmas party for the Inuit, with ship's biscuit, tinned sardines and bannock bread. People sledged in from all over Cape Dufferin, danced a few Scots reels and some American square dances and staged sled races. When the light failed they bundled inside the fur post, drank sweet tea and sang songs about the old ways.

One of the few who did not join in the festivities that year was
Maggie Nujarluktuk, who spent Christmas Day in her family's snow-house, giving birth to a baby boy, Robert Flaherty's son.

Early in the New Year, Robert and Frances began once more to look for a distributor for
Nanook of the North.
Flaherty showed the picture to First-National, who turned it down, then to Path in New York, who agreed in principle to distribute it. Some time in early spring, Path struck a deal with the owner of the Capitol Theatre in New York City to show the picture on condition that Path package it with something more commercial. Path had just taken on a distribution contract for Harold Lloyd's first big feature,
Grandma's Boy
, and this they decided would be just the thing to tin can with
Nanook:
Capitol okayed the package, sight unseen. When the manager of the Capitol Theatre actually
saw
the Arctic picture he tried desperately to backpedal, but by then he was locked in, and so, on 11 June 1922, Alakariallak and Harold Lloyd burst on to the New York scene together. Even by New York standards, it was an eccentric coupling. About the only thing Alakariallak and Harold Lloyd had in common was that they both smiled a lot.
Grandma's Boy
went down tremendously well, but not half as well as Nanook. The audience took to the Inuk man in an instant. Here he was, a decent, hardworking, good-natured individual, hemmed in on all sides by natural terrors, cheerfully carving out a life for himself, for Nyla, his sweet-faced wife, and their romping children, with no sense of how much easier and more comfortable were other lives being lived by men and women only a few hundred miles to the south. Sure, the movie was disjointed and rough in places, but it was filled with bright, unforgettable moments; Nanook struggling to extract a seal from its breathing hole, Nyla pulling a boy from her
amiut
, the family diving under their sleeping skins at the end of another frozen day. To this audience, still reeling from the trenches and the mustard gas of the First World War, Nanook and Nyla were innocent wanderers in an as-yet unblemished world. They saw in
Nanook of the North
a story of love and through love, survival. What they were
watching was not simply some performance put on for their entertainment. At some level, at least, it was the truth.
Grandmas Boy
could wait. What New Yorkers wanted was
Nanook.