Public Opinions

In 1951 an interview was conducted by a professor of Harvard University with the widow of Robert Flaherty. In the interview the man asks the widow questions about Flaherty and his work. The woman responds always in kind and how she must have thought her late husband would have responded. She talks about how Robert developed through his years of film-making his skill with the camera and what he called capturing the true essence of a person. But the question I ask during all of this is, how can a man hope to capture the “true essence� of a person and present it to us if his definition of truth is what you might say up for interpretation? When Flaherty was filming his second film, his first success, Nanook of the North he wanted to capture moments that would be able to bring the audience closer to the heart of the story. He wanted us to be captured by these moments and to see these people, Eskimos, that were trying to survive in conditions that appeared dire in the simplest of explanations. Flaherty lived among these people for almost two years and had what I supposed he felt to be a connection that he made him accountable to show the rest of the world who these people were. In his own earnest to produce a film that would bring empathy to a reachable height for the audience Flaherty “staged� certain events during the film to add to the experience (Wikipedia: Nanook of the North,2004). He had the man Nanook hunt with a spear like his ancestors instead of the gun he usually used when hunting walruses and seals that were usually the target of these peoples. Nanook’s wife in the film also wasn’t his wife at all. The result of Flaherty’s work was a groundbreaking film that is considered the first documentary film. The film was seen and praised all over the world. People found empathy for the struggle between man and his environment, so much so even that when Nanook died two years after the film’s airing the news aired all over the world and felt.
Documentary films have changed over the times, but still hold to trying to relate real facts using real life events. The films still try to inform you on a subject and rid you of any ignorance about the topic. One major thing that does separate the then and now is the how the filmmakers accomplish this. Flaherty used facts but also his own twists on the story were made to draw the audience to heart of the subject to the essence of it. Flaherty set out for people to achieve a complete understanding of the people in his films. The true direction of documentary isn’t to relate facts about a topic, but to convince the audience in a way that drives them to act. His films were powerful and dug at people to do something about what they saw or at least think about it. The truths of facts were not important or even a consideration. What Flaherty found important was essence of people. By that I think he meant the thing that binds us all. Documentary films were made to connect us all together and to give us evidence of these connections through the emotions we felt from watching films like Flaherty’s. Flaherty staged events because they were necessary to give us a more vivid connection to those people. The events were there to absorb us into the subject and mold us to become part of the topic. Documentaries are just like anything else we use to bend people to our own convictions. We use information and our imagination to show people that our views are the ones they want to hold as well.