Wondered into being by: Roger Flaherty, Allakariallak, Nuvalinga and others
Wonderspan: 8 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on 'full screen' and this time turn off the sound.
If for the past few searing days you have craved ice cubes - in the middle of your back, for example - then today's Monday wonder might be just what you need.
One day I came home from little school and mum asked what I'd learnt. 'How to build an igloo,' was the truth of it. Our Picture Box treat that day had been a 1949 Canadian Film Board short called exactly that. It's a magical film but I've since found an even more wonderful one on the same theme: an excerpt from the 1922 Roger Flaherty film, Nanook of the North.
Nanook was the first ever full anthropological documentary film based on a year or so its maker spent with an Inuit group in the Hudson Bay area of Canada. It is a sentimental take on the 'noble savage' - the idea that older ways of life and ordering society are better than the apparently civilised ones we have now. Historically, we have fallen in love with the noble savage when modern society has hit crisis times, and it's not surprising that shortly before Flaherty made his film, the apparently civilised world had been at war with itself for four years.
The film has been criticised for staging scenes and fabricating an unrealistically rustic picture of life in the Arctic. In the 1920s the Inuit were already mostly hunting with guns, for example, but Flaherty asked Nanook to use the traditional methods. Nanook is not the protagonist's real name either; it's the much more wonderful Allakariallak. All the same, the film was made by the standards of a different era almost a century ago. It remains an astonishing portrait of people living in the harshest environment on Earth possessing next to nothing and being pretty happy with it -- there may be something true in the noble savage after all. Rousseau said:
'Nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance between the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man.'*It's rather a romantic thing to say (ever had a tooth pulled out with pliers?) but perhaps not entirely wrong either.
If you have an hour spare, the full Nanook film is an amazing watch. Nanook and his family use ancient Inuit hunting methods to catch seal, walrus and snow fox. He also tends the huskies, builds a kayak from seal skin and trades with the white man.
Today we're just going to watch Allakariallak use nothing other than a snow knife of walrus ivory to build a home on the ice for his family, complete with its incredible ice window. The snow walls of the igloo, which just means 'a home', would have kept the temperature around freezing or just above, while outside it could get to -45 degrees. The clip is better with the sound turned off, I reckon:
Extra...
Here's the Picture Box film, which provides you with instructions for making your own 'large, comfortable dwelling':
And here are all 80 minutes of the full Nanook film in complete silence:
* Rousseau quote from On the Origin of Inequality.
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www.waysofloving.com
I loved that! What a wonderful wonder.
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