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Quoi donc? Faut-il détruire les sociétés, anéantir le tien et le mien, et retourner vivre dans les forêts avec les ours?
-Rousseau1
L'homme ordinaire est déjà dédoublé et se sent une âme; mais il n'est pas maitre de lui-même.
-Marcel Mauss2
The origin of the documentary genre is an accursed question of film theory. Insofar as the answer exists, it usually involves a reference to Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North.3 It is easy enough to undermine this response on historical grounds: after all, was not the entirety of early cinema documentary in its approach? Wasn't regular or fictional film, built as it was out of vaudeville, sideshows and theater, a later phenomenon? True as these objections may be, they still do not warrant dismissing Nanook as an arbitrary fabrication. On the contrary, they raise an additional question: why, out of the tremendous range of documentary material accumulated over the first three decades of cinema, was it Nanook, a primal drama about an Inuit hunter that came to define the genre of the documentary? What expectations did Flaherty's Nanook fulfill that other films did not? What imaginary satisfactions did it discover? What desires did it capture or conjure for cinematic use? And what reasons, if any, may one still have for continuing to refer to Nanook as a definitive documentary in the face of all the evidence to the contrary? The key to answering these questions, I believe, lies in recognizing Flaherty's choice of the pastoral as his fundamental convention.
Robert Flaherty was not a filmmaker by trade but a prospector for Sir William Mackenzie, a Canadian railroad baron. It was Mackenzie who suggested that Flaherty take a camera on his third expedition in 1913, thereby changing Flaherty's life and, eventually, the course of world cinema. Flaherty made no secret of the fact that his film had undergone long gestation before its triumphant release in 1922. On the contrary, he was proud of the artistic choices he made over the nine years he spent working on the Nanook idea. From the standpoint of documentary representation, these choices are consequential: the early version of Nanook was a travelogue replicating a newsreel structure conventional to the films distributed by the Lumière company. The 30,000 feet of original...