To me there is vastly more thrill in the lonely Nanook... than in the whole kit and boiling of most so-called "great moments" in the cinema drama.

This remains a remarkable piece of film-making and humanist anthropology.

Flaherty wasn't much of an ethnologist -- he routinely staged scenes for his camera and insisted that his subjects return to traditions they'd abandoned generations before -- yet he was a master dramatist.

This is a western filmmaker’s eye on an indigenous culture and he freely blurs the line between documentary and docudrama (there was no documentary tradition to draw upon), but his intentions and efforts were honorable.