"Nanook of the North"

"Nanook of the North" was directed by Robert Flaherty in 1922. The film is remarkable because it is the first of its kind. Many consider this film to be the first documentary ever made. Nanook chronicles the often-brutal relationship between humans and nature's unforgiving elements. Over the course of a year, the movie's subjects--Inuit Nanook and his family--must hunt, fish, and build an igloo to survive in the pristine but inhospitable environs of Canada's frozen Hudson …

…into their lives. Flaherty describes his intentions with the film as trying to capture and document a vanishing way of life before it was too late. What do you think of all this? Do all of Flaherty's creative choices undermine the authenticity of the film? Do they make it less true? Or, perhaps, do they work to preserve the truth of a vanishing time, as Flaherty describes, before it is gone altogether? Truth or fiction?