Where the Blizzard is Born: Limits and Resources to Represent Polar Reality in Two Documentaries from the Silent Era

Abstract

This paper analyzes the ways in which two documentary features from the silent era—Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922) and The Great White Silence (Ponting, 1924)—maintain a sense of authenticity within their discourse even though certain parts of their composition may be constructed as fake or fabricated according to the positivist criteria which have plagued photography and cinema from their start. Due to the limitations of early cinema, as well as the particular difficulties of shooting in the Arctic and Antarctica, both filmmakers had to make use of a wide range of discursive and material resources (such as intertitles, built sets and rehearsed scenes) in order to represent what they perceived as true about polar regions; these resources will be analyzed with reference to Michael Renov’s four discursive functions, as described in “Towards a Poetics of Documentary”, with particular emphasis on the first one, that of registration/preservation. Since the concept of documentary film as a genre was conceived in 1926, a consideration of the resources employed for the construction of truth in these earlier films may be useful to rethink—from a practical standpoint—the relationship of all documentary art to fiction, representation, and the ontological reality of filmed objects, thus transcending positivist values and permitting a more flexible understanding of the cinematographic techniques which allow the filmic registration of something perceived as truthful, but which cannot be represented without artistic artifice.