Nanook of the North - live soundtrack performances.
In collaboration with the Pitt Rivers Museum and Oxford Contemporary Music, DRO undertook a live soundtrack performance in 2015 accompanying Robert Flaherty’s 1922 “documentary” Nanook of the North. Having previously worked with the film in 2004, creating a semi-improvised soundtrack, they were able to revisit elements to inform the new score. The performance in Oxford was followed by a discussion led by Professor Marcus Banks (University of Oxford), alongside Dr Charlotte Gleghorn (University of Edinburgh) and DRO, into the film’s complexity, examining Flaherty’s romanticised construction of a pre-industrialised Inuit family, and other ethical issues of representation and identity.
DRO’s interests lay in shifting through the infinite stratum of the film’s interpretation. By researching the film’s biography; the controversies, praise and criticisms, they uncover new ways of reading the images. They use their soundtrack as a way to liberally, yet sensitively, explore, contrast and emphasis the viewer’s understanding of the film.
“Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) is widely considered the first feature-length documentary film ever made. From an early stage in the history of documentary film, we can see how the purported authenticity of the genre was to a large extent invented, as the reconstruction of Inuit reality in Nanook attests. The film participates in an erasure of Inuit modernity in an effort to represent the lead character (played by Allakariallak) as a technologically primitive and naive human being. Yet the film continues to hold an ambivalent place among Indigenous communities in the Arctic region, symbolising a key reference point for their own photographic and film practice. This reinvention, and reinterpretation, of ethnographic and imperialist representational forms in contemporary Inuit artistic practice is a fascinating aspect of Nanook’s continuing circulation.” Dr Charlotte Gleghorn
A review of the performance by the Oxford Culture Review can be found here.