Adamie Inukpuk

Adamie and Tiivi Uqittuq take some time off during the Great North shoot. Photo©Martin J. Dignard

Like so many Inuit of his generation, Adamie Inukpuk lives a life that combines the modern and the traditional. Only a couple of generations back, most Inuit were nomadic, living largely as their ancestors had lived for thousands of years.

All that has changed now. But for people like Adamie, the ways of the past have not disappeared. They are to be cherished and respected. traditions that continue to live alongside conveniences like snowmobiles and regular flights to southern Canada.

Adamie features in many of the Great North sequences shot in northern Quebec. In the film, he often appears alongside footage of his famous grandfather, Nanook of the North. Adamie is proud of his past, and his living room features a portrait of Nanook.

Though he lives in Montreal now, where he works for an Inuit-run school board, Adamie makes frequent trips back to his native Inukjuak. Here, he visits family and hunts.

Like his grandfather, Adamie is a superb hunter, with encyclopedic knowledge of the Arctic and of traditional Inuit ways. We see him in Great North hunting seal . an activity carried out today much the same way as it has been for years, with harpoon. When it comes to seal hunting, a gun isn't much use; once shot, the animal is likely to simply slip back under the ice and be lost.

In the film Nanook of the North, filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty says that the Inuit live in one of the world's harshest climates, yet are happy. Despite the upheavals of the last few generations, that happiness has not disappeared. Adamie is a powerful, serene, on-screen presence: whether gazing off into the distance after caribou, dipping his hand into an icy stream, or waiting patiently by a seal hole, harpoon poised.

The history of Nanook of the North

The connection between Great North and Nanook of the North is thicker than the Arctic ice in mid-winter: it’s a blood connection. Adamie Inukpuk, who shows us the ways of the Inuit, is a grandson of Nanook himself.

In 1922, cinema audiences around the globe got their first taste of life in the far North. It was a world few had ever dreamed about, and it was brought to them through the lens of filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty.

The film was Nanook of the North. And its eponymous star, Nanook ("The Bear"), became a bona fide celebrity. At first, few theatres were interested in showing the film, but then it took off: six months in London, six months in Paris, extended runs throughout Germany and the USA.

For decades, Nanook was to remain synonymous with the North. Only three years after the film’s release, a book on Inuit life was published under the title Nanook of the North — to the general public, the name Nanook already meant North.

Before Nanook there were two kinds of silent film — drama and travelogue. But with Nanook, Flaherty revolutionized filmmaking by combining a narrative with a documentary: this wasn’t just a film showing the wonders of some far-off land; it was the gripping story of one family. Flaherty had spent years in the North. He had lived with the Inuit, and he wanted to show the world what their lives were like. And he succeeded.

"You ask me what I think the film can do to make large audiences feel intimate with distant peoples?" Flaherty wrote. "Well, Nanook is an instance of this…Millions of people have seen this film... It has gone round the world. And what they have seen is not a freak, but a real person after all, facing the perils of a desperate life and yet always happy."

From the profound to the trivial, the film’s influence was truly global. One of French documentary great Jean Rouch’s first memories is being taken to see Nanook when he was five — after which he would always curl up like a husky when he went to bed. When Frances Flaherty, wife of Nanook’s director, bought an ice cream sandwich in Berlin, Nanook’s smiling face looked up at her from the wrapper. When rocker Frank Zappa wrote a song with an Inuit character, he named him Nanook of the North.

Tragically, Nanook himself died of starvation a scant two years after Flaherty shot the film. The news came out of the North with the once-a-year mail delivery, and was carried around the world. As far away as China, newspapers reported that the great Nanook had died.

What Flaherty did with Nanook, we strive to do on a grander scale with Great North: provide understanding of the magnificent North and its animal and human inhabitants.

The making of Nanook of the North

Nanook of the North was not Robert J. Flaherty’s first attempt at making a film about the North. Flaherty, who was born in 1884, had spent years traipsing around northern Canada from age 12 on. In 1913, he was inspired to take along a camera and lots of film stock. He shot a film, but nobody ever saw it. All 70,000 feet of footage went up in flames when Flaherty accidentally set fire to it with ash from his cigarette.

In 1920, Flaherty decided to head north to make a film again. His financial backers were French fur magnates Revillon Frčres, who ran a string of trading posts in the North. He set up his living quarters and lab at the company’s Cape Dufferin post.

Flaherty started a tradition of using indigenous crew members. For the Inuit were not only the subjects of Nanook of the North — they were also the film’s crew and its first audience. Nanook would provide Flaherty with ideas for scenes (an island with lots of walrus, for instance). Then they would set off to film.

Back at Cape Dufferin, Flaherty and the Inuit would develop the film (no mean feat considering the lack of running water), then screen the rushes. Flaherty wrote that after screening the first footage — the walrus hunt — the local Inuit were enthusiastic about the results: "After this it did not take my Eskimo long to see the practical side of films and they soon abandoned their former attitude of laughter and good-natured ridicule toward the Angercak, i.e., the White Master who wanted pictures of them."

Because he had lived and worked with the Inuit, Flaherty’s film treated them as equals. In his own words: "In so many travelogues you see, the filmmaker looks down on and never up to his subject. He is always the big man from New York or from London. But I had been dependent on these people, alone with them for months at a time…I couldn’t have done anything without them."

Nanook in Great North

A scene from Nanook of the North, Robert J. Flaherty, 1922

Great North is rich in footage from Nanook of the North. While the North has changed dramatically over the last few decades (nobody dies of starvation anymore, and airplanes connect northern settlements with urban centres), there is continuity in the rhythms of Arctic life.

Brilliantly edited, Great North seamlessly moves between past and present, grandfather and grandson, black-and-white and colour, old and new. In one striking scene, the two seem to build an igloo together: Adamie pulls up on snowmobile. Nanook is already licking his snow knife in preparation for the job. Then it's on to work. Nanook's hands move with blinding speed, while Adamie works more deliberately. Quickly, the igloo is completed.

Nanook introduced millions to the nomadic life of the Inuit. Great North takes things a step farther. There's the giant screen, of course - a far cry from Flaherty's silent, black-and-white images. And there's the broader horizon: Great North is a film, not only about the Inuit, but also about the Saami of northern Sweden, and the wondrous reindeer and caribou.

Still, nearly 80 years after its release, Nanook of the North retains its magic - indeed, it is enhanced in IMAX® format.

The image of Nanook, staring intensely into the camera at the beginning of Great North, is as powerful today as the day it was shot, all those years ago.

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